You mean like the Capitals(Ovi, Backstrom, Alzner), Penguins(Crosby, Malkin, Fleury, Whitney, Staal) and Blackhawks(Barker, Skille, Towes, Kane) who combined for 7 cups did? We can all pretend none of these three teams "tanked" if it makes us feel better about ourselves but they absolutely did. Give the Blackhawks a few years and they'll be contenders again. The Oilers struck out a bunch but now have two of the best players on the planet and will continue to be a force for the foreseeable future. It's rare for a long term dynasty in the salary cap era to exist without multiple high lottery picks. Can you build a playoff team, sure. A winner... possibly but really difficult to do.
I really think it's path-dependent and the process of how you become that bad makes a big difference.
None of those four teams embarked on the years-long project of deliberately losing that modern tanking requires -- they just happened to be bad at the right time. I would look at Florida, Colorado, and Tampa as examples as well. They obviously are nowhere close to what they've become without Stamkos, Hedman, Barkov, MacKinnon, Rantanen, and to a lesser extent Ekblad. But, they drafted all of those guys in years they were trying to be at least somewhat competitive!
Of the recent examples of full on Moneyball style tanks, I would only call the Devils a "success" and they have qualified for the playoffs a grand total of twice in the last ten years.
I think there's a significant chance within the next 5 years the Caps are bad. Maybe even really bad, to the point they're picking in the top 5, and maybe more than once. I really, really, really hope they get to that point because the wheels fall off of Lindgren, or Carbery turns out to be an awful coach, or PLD and Chychrun are complete busts, or whatever other natural reason happens often in sports -- not because they purposefully iced an AHL team for multiple seasons in a row.
