Agreed. Detroit in the early 2000s and TB in the early Yzerman years benefited from being ahead of the curve in terms of drafting. Yzerman put less emphasis on size than other GMs, and pretty much no emphasis whatsoever on country of origin. But other teams have caught up now, and they're all doing pretty much the same thing, including over-cooking their prospects (a trick we stole from those early 2000s Wings teams, who were no stranger to the 25 year-old rookie).
IMO the retooling started after the second cup. That was the first year we started losing players we wanted to keep, and started trying to replace them on the fly with younger options. We've been paying out the nose in draft picks in order to do that, but you have to give JBB credit for icing a contending team despite the heavy losses we've taken.
Odds are always against us to win a cup. Even in the cup years, when we had, I say again, a MUCH better team than your average cup team, the odds were always against us just like every other team that has won a cup. But we still have a Hall of Fame core in their prime, so we have to squeeze every bit of juice we can out of that. Just like Detroit did, just like Chicago did, and just the Pens are doing right now. We're gonna go through all of those stages too. But while we're on top we are gonna try to hold on as long as we can. Anything else would be a fireable offense.