That was my point. A full rebuild should only be done in extremely dire situations, with a hard cap every team should be able to compete unless grossly mismanaged into a corner, which does happen from time to time but it's not as common as people think.
The NHL has a lot of things that can really incentivize teams to basically never tank.
1) It's a hard-capped league in a depth driven sport. No special luxury tax or additional room to play with for re-signing your own guys. Good teams are always going to need to churn over their depth that they won't be able to retain because their cap gets tied up by their core players into their own UFA years. And your depth matters, a lot. You need about 10 useful forwards, 5 useful defenseman and a useful goaltender because shifts are pretty regularly rolling at even strength.
2) The loser point and how it necessarily bunches the standings together. A win is just a win, but some losses are essentially half a win, half a loss. This means that the middle of the standings are going to be really bunched together. Most teams are never that far out of it during the season, if "it" is the 2nd wildcard position. This has a double whammy effect where the NHL standings by their nature, heavily incentivize teams that go to overtimes. If every game goes to overtime, and you had a 50/50 shot to win, you'd have a point percentage of .750, which is better than the President's Trophy Winner almost every year. The way to build a team that goes to overtime is to build a team that plays low scoring games (i.e., is good defensively). Much more likely to go to OT 1-1 or 2-2 than 4-4 or 5-5. Building a team to play in low scoring games doesn't require the power of superstars to the same degree as a team that tries to outscore the opposition, so it's fairly achievable even without a lot of elite talent in place already.
3) The fact that in most American cities, Hockey is the 3rd or 4th most popular professional sport. The stomach for "let's ride this out 5 years to start showing progress and then *maybe* in another 3-5 we'll be a powerhouse" is not particularly appetizing. It's much more comfortable for an ownership group to decide that they'll just continue to draft players, sign free agents, maybe make a trade but not do anything to jeopardize the present or future too drastically, and see what happens.