Quote:
Originally Posted by Jiri Hrdina
Fast tracking re-builds is why no Canadian team has won the cup since the Habs.
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Yeeeup.
Every single Canadian market has hyper-critical media that will not allow a team to rebuild without stirring up. Fans will usually take that bait and start to get riled up. Then either owners feel the lack of play-off revenue or feel the empty building or are just themselves giant fans and start to meddle or in some cases all three.
So suddenly a team hits on two or three players (Pettersson and Hughes. Tkachuk, Monahan and Gaudreau. McDavid and Draisatl. Laine and Scheifle. Marner, Reilly and Mathews. Tkachuk and Stutzle. Suzuki and.... well he isn't young but Price) and suddenly every owner goes "we did it, we're there! Sign all the UFAs!" and then every single Canadian team anchors themselves to just dog #### contracts. Some more than others, but they all do it. So instead of taking a few down years and filling up the prospect pool to keep filling in spots with cheap ELCs as your better players get their second contracts, you end up with giant holes because you over-paid vets in the silly season. It's hard as hell to build a cup winning team and Canadian teams make it even harder by constantly trying to compete at times where they need to take whatever core they have out back and have them shot.
I can make snide comments about the Flames needing to take their current core out and shooting them, but the realistic fact is the Canucks are only 4 years removed from finally cutting bait on the lifeless corpse of the 2011 team and only did so because the Sedins retired. If you wait long enough you're going to be able to smack each Canadian team with these jokes, like a vicious circle of suck. Ottawa is just beginning their "We're ready to compete!" When they have no business even looking at that yet. The Canucks are in the middle of it. . Jets are right on the cusp of their downswing where they'll hold on too long. Leafs are probably closer than anyone thinks to it. Oilers are just perpetually there. Who knows what Bergevin is doing in Montreal.
Being a fan of a Canadian team is rough. We will constantly suffer because as fan bases we will never actually sit through a rebuild and support a team financially. So owners will never sit through a full rebuild, they'll always look for band-aids to try and eek into a 8 - 4th spot.
TL;DR: It's all our fault!