[Cali Panthers Fan]

@ five-hole

I honestly believe that it depends on the phase of team building you are in. Even if you are recognizing that you need to trade away aging veterans and do a rebuild, you still try and get players that can contribute positively to your team in the short-term. You have to maintain some sort of competitive edge or you risk becoming one of those teams that forgets how to win and remains stuck in a perpetual rebuild. That's when franchises start losing lots of money. The Flames were lucky enough to make the playoffs 2 out of 4/5 rebuidling years to maintain fan interest, and that was largely because we had a few players that we overpaid to keep us competitive. Later we traded those players away for returning assets. In rare cases like Wideman and Raymond, they played themselves off the roster before we had a chance to trade them.

I personally believe that Vegas is doing a terrible job of franchise building, but I guess I'm in the minority on that one. You have to give paying fans a reason to show up, even if that means you're an untalented, but plucky team with some key veterans to stem the tide until the rookies are ready for a more prominent role. I don't subscribe to the idea of tanking for picks because as we saw with Buffalo in McDavid's draft year, they tanked harder than anyone for him and ended up with Eichel instead. Not a bad consolation prize, but they're further behind in their team build because they missed on him and had poor depth in the organization due to tanking.

I also don't subscribe to the idea that the only way to build a cup winning team is to have 2 or 3 exceptional players, and build around them with a bunch of lesser/cheaper players. Just because it's the way team's used to be built to win doesn't mean it will always be that way in the future. In fact, I would argue that the Kings don't have an elite player on their cup winning rosters (Doughty is arguable, as is Kopitar, but that's it).

It's a difference of opinion, but I'll be happy to eat crow if I'm wrong.