I'm new to the game, or at least was a couple of seasons ago. I took over a team with awful contracts. I found the best method is to look for other bad contracts but that end sooner, and trade for them. Look for mutual option years too so even if your guy has 3 seasons left and you are trading for another guy with 3 left but the last is a mutual option, it's an improvement. Keep trading down until you have just 1 or 2 seasons left of bloaded contracts and take that time to rebuild. I even traded for worse $ contracts just because they were shorter time, and the other owners seemed happy to just pay be paying less on the current season. I dunno, shoot for the future. It's amazing once you've shed your dead weight, I"m at something like 45 mil in payroll and dropped like 38 mil on prospects this year. Money is needed to rebuild.