I am wondering how long this has been so obvious (it seems like it is now for me anyway), that good teams, which are perennial contenders, rarely get there by BUYING their core/superstars. A team seems to function better when you draft the right guys, develop them and take care of them in your own system. That is a bit of a sequential process in that you cannot be a true long-time contender without good drafting.
Sure a team like the Red Wings of 1995 - 2004 bought a lot of high profile guys like Hull, Robitaille, Hasek, Vernon, Schneider (and more recently, Hossa). But Detroit had an amazing core of drafted players to begin with (Yzerman, Fedorov, Lidstrom, Holmstrom, Konstantinov, Osgood, etc…). They developed their team further by adding the right pieces around them (Shanahan, Chelios, Draper, etc…) and instilled enough success and desire that they stuck around for (or close to) the end of their careers.
Teams like Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, Boston and Chicago are all in that category. They have all won cups in recent years. Their teams have been predominantly home-grown talent. Perhaps they traded or bought some of the guys like Mike Richards and Jeff Carter in LA, Hossa in Chicago, Neal in Pittsburgh, Chara in Boston… but their cores were all drafted and retained such that the team has some sort of identity. It helps to have a single coach who continues to foster this team-atmosphere.
This is not quite a revelation for me, but is something that has become very apparent in the last 5 years or so. You really have to have a bit of luck to pull it off, but more than that I think you just need savvy GMs who make the right choices on players and coaches and don’t look for the big acquisition to make an immediate difference. It is a process and impatience can be the worst killer.
Look at Vancouver… they too pretty much fit into the model of the above teams, and nearly had that success, but it all fell apart somewhere. Over the past 3 years they have nearly gutted their core (in all positions, but especially goal) and made a coaching change. I think that was due to impatience and feeling like they needed to make some change (just to look as though they were doing something), but the changes hurt more than they helped. Now they are farther behind than if they would have just held a steady course.
San Jose is also in the category of perennial contenders, because they have that constant core, but for some reason they cannot seem to finish… ever. That I think is more on the players than on management. The team has drafted well and pieced together excellent and consistent depth, but the guys just don’t close it out. The Sharks are a team that could have very easily won multiple cups in the past years. However, their success and their continual failure is due in equal measure to that team core.
The Rangers seem to be the example of that team who buys the guys but they just don’t work out as planned. They have drafted pretty well too, but when your top 3 forwards (Richards, St. Louis, Nash), and supposed superstar at that, are all huge free-agent contract or walk-away type guys… I think there is a problem.
Minnesota seems to be a minor exception in that Parise and Suter are working out very well for them. Granted, I think they went to the Wild for different reasons than guys typically go to New York, and I do think that is important. We have yet to see how that situation really ends up though.
It has also been a very short time for Edmonton, but while they have gotten great draft prospects for years, they have not been able to put anything significant together. This becomes more of a management/coaching issue, because they have all the home-grown talent they could want (or potential to have that talent)… but they seem to be squandering their golden opportunity.
Colorado is the reverse… but that too is because of a good management and coaching change in Sakic/Roy. They are developing what they have into some cohesive whole.
Calagary is just a hot mess. And always will be.
