In baseball, it seems the teams at the top usually stay there, while the teams at the bottom get stuck. Movement in the NBA is also difficult, with most teams stuck in hell while the elite teams battle it out for the championship every year.
If you think every team has a chance at winning the Super Bowl, you haven't been following the Cleveland Browns or Detroit Lions, two teams that have never even played for the Vince Lombardi Trophy, let alone won it.
But in the NHL it seems that if you build through the draft, make the right free-agent signings, pull the trigger on a couple of key trades and hire the right bench boss, you have a chance to skate around the ice in June with Lord Stanley's Cup.
Here's what you need to know. The Detroit Red Wings won the Stanley Cup in 1997, their first title since 1955. After they ended that long dry spell, they repeated their championship in '98. Since then, there have been no back-to-back championships in the NHL.
Eleven different teams have won the Stanley Cup in the last 14 years, with only the Wings and the New Jersey Devils winning more than once.
In the past three years, teams that had gone through miserably long dry spells or had never won the Cup found a way to break through.
The Chicago Blackhawks, Boston Bruins and Los Angeles Kings all had seemed cursed at various points in the last 25 years before they finally won. However, there was no curse involved. It was a series of outstanding management maneuvers that put each of those teams in a position to deliver championships.
In Chicago, the Blackhawks planted the seeds for the title when they drafted future stars Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane. Both were rookies in the 2007-08 season. While the team started to improve, management was not fully happy with the team's execution under former Hawk legend Denis Savard.
The...
Article Source: Bleacher Report - Los Angeles Kings
