Prior to the lockout, only the rich teams had success, or so the NHL has claimed.
[We] believe we’ve had seven years of incredible competitive balance. Twenty-nine clubs have made the playoffs. We’ve have seven different Stanley Cup champions. The game on the ice has never been better. That’s a function of this system. The system, as originally negotiated, in our view, needs some adjustments.
So said Gary Bettman. Either he’s lying, fully aware that he’s lying, or he’s completely unaware of what NHL teams have been up to in the last seven seasons.
Take the Edmonton Oilers, the smallest of small markets in the early 2000s. In the seven seasons leading up to the 2004-05 lockout, the Oilers made the playoffs five times. Since, after a system was put in place that was designed to help them, the team has been terrible. As Black Dog Pat suggested of the Oilers’ playoff run in the Puck Daddy Essentials, the period between 1996 and 2006 was “a fun decade of those little teams that could that culminated in the Finals run of 2006″.
No mention of competitive balance or the lockout, just the natural progression of a team over that period of time. The Phoenix Coyotes may be a better example. They were awful, in both capped and uncapped eras, until Dave Tippett came along and suddenly turned the league’s poorest team into one of its best over the last three seasons, despite no owner, no budget, and, as Bettman has indicated, no adjustment to the collective bargaining agreement that has become a haven for rich teams to spend money.
