Defining a Contender
To optimize “resonant waves of talent,” shifting to binary thinking about your franchise is necessary. Are you a legitimate contender, or are you building? For my blueprint, the definition of a contender is an organization with a roster of players in place to be a top-two team in their conference and, crucially, the prospect and draft pick capital capable of sustaining the organization through the competitive lifecycle or window.
Many teams fool themselves and their fans into believing they have what it takes to be one of the top 4 teams in the league. League variances in injuries and luck can provide a shortsighted franchise with all the misguided belief they need that they are among the elite echelon of organizations. A genuine contender can reliably be a top team in their respective conference year to year.
True contention is maintaining that competitiveness over years and years while using the variance in season-to-season performance to continue to augment your organization.
This can get complicated, as that same year-to-year variance that can lead teams to the wrong self-analysis about how good they are can also mislead teams into how bad they are. A contending team can simultaneously be within their contention window, have down years, and even miss the playoffs while still maintaining a positive trajectory in the overall competitiveness of their organization. Luck and injury variance can have devastatingly positive or negative impacts, but building an actual contending organization minimizes the effects of luck as much as possible in all facets of team building. Ultimately, the best any management group can do is give their team the most opportunities for luck to shine upon them.
Take, for example, the Washington Capitals:
From the 2008-2009 season to the 2019-2020 season, the Capitals were the winningest organization in the NHL. They played the 4th most playoff games, behind borderline dynastic organizations Pittsburgh, Chicago and Boston. With a competitive window of over ten years, the Capitals organization saw tremendous peaks and valleys, including five years between 120+ point seasons, bookending a season where they missed the playoffs. Even though the only time they made the conference final was the year they won the cup, and injury and luck variance diminished the ultimate overall success of their organization in terms of playoff achievement, there is no question that the Capitals organization was a genuine contender over that span.
Crawl, Walk, Run
When using the resonant wave theory to build a contending roster, your organization will have predictable positions within the rebuilding lifecycle to influence your organizational posture. The posture of your organization is about what you’re communicating to the rest of the league about how you operate. Much like non-verbal interaction on a personal level, an organizational posture uses inference to communicate an organization’s goals, actions and needs. A savvy management group can infer quite a bit about another organization by analyzing the type of moves they are making and when and how they are making them.
A “tear-down” posture is different from a “farming” posture, which is different from a “wallowing” posture. A contending posture is different as well.
A contending posture is about sacrificing potential future wins for the increased likelihood of current wins. A contending team should be willing to “lose” trades with a building team, where the value exchange benefits the building team over the long term more than it benefits the contending team. Building is about developing long-term competitiveness, while contending is about maximizing short-term competitiveness.
But how do you know when your team is truly a contender? This is a decision that should be made with hindsight. Even though a team may fulfill part of the criteria of being a contender by finishing in the top two in their conference, a competent management group will not consider themselves a contender unless they have the necessary organizational asset depth to propel the team through their immediate contention window. Much like how bottoming out and drafting high is ancillary to the standard mechanisms and posture of building, topping out and finishing high in the standings is ancillary to contending. A contending team shouldn’t need much help to be competitive; it will happen naturally, like the 2022-2023 New Jersey Devils. A good team must be capable before a management team should consider itself in that category. Generally, a team should “arrive” before changing posture from building to contending. Only once a team has demonstrated they can walk should management begin to prepare the team to run. In the words of Darryl Sutter, you have to “get there” first.
What makes the New Jersey Devils’ transition from building to contender status isn’t just the on-ice aspect of their young core finding success; it’s having the extreme depth of organizational assets in place that coincides with that group finding success. Being able to significantly augment the organization through acquisitions that don’t scuttle the current roster is the accurate indicator of genuine contender status.
Unless your roster is arriving at the top of their conference organically, without significant assistance, you aren’t a contender. If your roster requires substantial acquisitional assistance to reach the pinnacle of the conference, you’re a pretender.
The league is filled with teams trying to buy their way to success.
Don’t fall for pretender status. Become a contender.