The Detroit Red Wings have fallen on hard times due to the past. But now we have reason to celebrate once again.
I don’t know about the rest of you, but for me this has been the most exciting several weeks I’ve had as a Red Wings fan in a long time. We’ve been forced to suffer with mediocre-to-bad teams in Detroit for quite some time now, always being sold on the idea of hope and patience.
The most uncontrollable thing in the sports world is the rebuild. Call it Retooling if you want. But the idea is the same regardless.
Salary caps are good for business. It helps keep the league stable because no team will ever be able to assemble, and/or retain a super team. When the time for roster turnover comes, hopefully your team is savvy enough to make the right moves so that, even if team performance does decline temporarily, the team is back to championship contention in short order.
Of course, the alternative is that you fall of a cliff into a deep, dark Rebuild hole.
The Red Wings had fallen off that cliff in 2019. It had been 11 long years of slow decline since the glory of the last Cup run, and they were a disaster on 3 fronts absolutely necessary to be a sustainably successful team: a high-level core group, cap flexibility to pivot when necessary, and promising prospect depth to keep it all going.