There’s a multitude of reasons why we are where we are. I’ll start with drafting. Back when the Russian 5 were playing a lot of teams didn’t heavily scout Europe and wouldn’t draft Russians because the government wouldn’t let them leave. Well they started leaving/fleeing and the wings held the rights to very talented players like fedorov, konstantinov etc. Back to my Europe point, we had the best European scouting and thus we drafted (stole) guys like lidstrom, zetterberg, datsyuk etc. So this transitions us to drafting in general. Our drafting since the lockout in 2004 has been bad, especially in the first round. We didn’t have any elite players waiting to take over after the group of players that took us to the back to back cups retired.

We made the playoffs 25 straight years and towards the end Ken Holland gave up a lot of assets to keep it alive, and made a lot of bad trades or signings. This hurt our cap situation, our prospect pool, and as I said we weren’t drafting well as it was so it decimated our team.

This is just what I could spontaneously come up with but ya there was a lot of disfunction managerial after I’d say about 2007 with drafting, and it got very bad about 2013.