That's if you only choose to focus on their "tanking" and their top end picks....but I promise you if you look at teams like the Bolts or Caps, they've done a bunch of other moves they did which had nothing to do with tanking or acquiring picks, which were crucial to their success.
Do the Bolts win Cups are a ton of games without Kucherov or Point or Cernak or the Caps without Carlson, Wilson, Oshie, Eller?
The generational picks like Crosby/Ovechkin, have skewed the way we look at how to build a winner, but it's really "not seeing the forest for the trees" kind of thing.
There's no set sequential order of when or how things need to happen, as I said, it's really just a series of very fortunate events coming together at the right time.
I just think it's not a good idea to take the Oilers or Sabres or Sens approach to building almost exclusively through tanking because it ignores all the other variables that actually transition you from rebuilding, to actually, building.
That's actually the "dirty middle" that you want to avoid, where you're stuck in a perpetual rebuild, while not actually building anything at all.
Pierre Dorion literally spent the last 5 years telling everyone "Hey, look at our prospects, we're loaded and it's inevitable we're going to be a powerhouse", while actually doing nothing to tangibly improve his roster.
Hope doesn't build winners.
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