Beef Invictus
Revolutionary Positivity
To the bolded: exactly what I am saying. There is no model that can account for it. It is why so many teams fail. If there was a model to follow everyone would follow it.
To the "luck" correlating with competence. Please elaborate. Let's look at the last few champs:
Vegas: This is a weird one given the way they got there and clearly is not something anyone can replicate given the circumstances but it was great management that got them there, just not something that will ever be possible again (see: Seattle)
Colorado: Three top five picks on that roster, plus a top ten pick. Curious how they got those guys? Probably wasn't because they were at the bottom of the standings, right? Probably also a good thing they got that #1 pick when it was MacKinnon and not the year before when it was Yakupov. Great management decision.
TB: This actually may be the best example of a team that is consistently well run, although they did have guys like Stammer and Hedman on the team so there was some suckiness but that was relatively short-lived compared to their success. But again...they don't to where they are without those two and in order to get those two you have to suck and suck at the right time.
STL: They had Pietrangelo as a top five pick on that team, but also looking at how the team was built it looks like they were relatively poor at drafting and traded a lot of draft picks (and had a coach that I believe everyone on here wasn't/isn't a good coach), which is something that I assume people would be pretty upset about. They also got unexpected God-level play out of Binnington that he has never been able to replicate.
After that it is all Caps, Red Wings, Pens, Kings, and Blackhawks which we don't need to get into because we know how they got there.
What do these teams have in common? They all sucked enough to get at least one top five pick (most of which had multiple and at least 1 first overall) and they sucked at the right time that the players available who were at the top of the draft weren't Nolan Patrick or Nail Yakupov or Patrik Stefan or JvR. It's almost like, you know, there's somethings that you can't account for that have a bigger impact than the things you can account for.
They all followed up their "good luck" with additional competence that created success, usually after changing how they operate. That's why they're "lucky" and teams like Buffalo and Philly aren't. And nobody would describe Edmonton as lucky.
A huge degree of "luck" is the result of a good processes.