It must be heartbreaking for Blackhawk fans to watch their Stanley Cup winning team get dismantled just weeks after winning their first Cup in 49 years. The Hawks have now traded Dustin Byfuglien, Ben Eager, Brent Sopel, Andrew Ladd, Colin Fraser and Kris Versteeg. In addition, a number of free agents will not be resigned including John Madden. You can't take a hit like that in personnel and expect to be back in the finals next season.
The Blackhawks experience is not unique. The season before the Pittsburgh Penguins shed a number of key players after winning the Stanley Cup including Hal Gill, Mathieu Garon, Rob Scuderi, Petr Sykora and Miroslav Satan. The year before that Detroit Red Wings were fortunate and only lost Hasek to retirement after winning the Cup. That allowed them to get back to the Cup final only losing in 7 games to the Penguins.
It will be a challenge for teams to repeat as Champions especially if they are built around young players. That's because the younger players have more leverage with years of services and quickly become expensive players. The Red Wings were able to build around older players and it allowed them to get back to the finals. However the following season if finally caught up to them when they lost Marian Hossa, Mikael Samuelsson, Ty Conklin and Tomas Kopecky through free agency.
The salary cap has created a barrier to dynasty building. As soon as a GM builds a winner he is forced to tear it down and has figure out how to hang onto the core and build another winner. Often teams come up short and still have to rebuild - examples are Ottawa, San Jose, Nashville and it might happen to Washington and Philadelphia. No one really knew how the salary cap would effect the NHL. It was believed that it would close the economic gap between large and small market teams. The small market teams still lose money and the large market teams make even more money because the cap prevents them from overspending on salaries. But it did close the talent gap between small and large market teams. The large market teams can no longer horde all the good players so there is more parity.
So the Islander or Oiler dynasties of the the 1980s will never happen again as long as the existing cap prevails.
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