The National Hockey League is a results-driven business amongst a hyper-competitive network of hockey lifers. These are people that came out of the womb with skates on and were always the best guy on their team until they got to the professional level, so who was ever going to tell them that they were making a mistake.
For much of the last 30 years, the Detroit Red Wings were a model franchise for all of the NHL to follow. The team made the playoffs for 25 consecutive seasons, something unfathomable in today’s salary cap league where organizations must make the decision to get worse on purpose because of the arbitrary ceiling on spending.