Problem with those early expansion drafts is they were designed to hose the expansion team and make sure they sucked as long as possible. That’s bad for the product and bad for the league.
Goaltending league wide has gotten too good. With so-so players having save percentages over 90 they’ve become fungible.
Analytics are a better advantage for an expansion team because they start from scratch. They can come in and say “these are the kinds of players we want” and go get them. They don’t have to clear out players that don’t fit that model, they aren’t carrying any crappy contracts, they odn’t have to worry about getting rid of fan favorites. Starting from scratch can be a huge advantage. Just look at how long it’s taken the Canucks to get out from under the mess their crappy GM who loved long term no trade contracts, heck they still aren’t out. All the analytics in the world can’t help the Canucks because of all that baggage.
Depth has always mattered. Even back in the high flying days, 3rd and 4th line scoring got you Cups. High talent first liners are greats, champions roll 4.
A good case in point would be the regular 1993 draft. I picked it out at random just out of curiosity. Here you had a few recent expansion teams who were drafting at the top of every round because they were among the worst teams in the NHL in the 1992-93 season.
Ottawa drafted #1 and selected Alexandre Daigle out of the QMJHL. He'll go down as one of the all-time disappointments as a #1 pick. Eight of their remaining ten picks never played a single game in the NHL. And the one guy among the those next ten picks who had a solid NHL career was Pavol Demitra, who played fewer than 60 games over three seasons before he was traded to St. Louis.
The Tampa Bay Lightning had a similar experience in that draft. Chris Gratton had a half-decent NHL career, but was nowhere near as good as he should have been as the #3 overall pick. And their remaining ten picks played a grand total of fewer than 50 games (combined) in the NHL.
I think many of these expansion teams just didn't have the right people running the organizations.
I'm not sure depth always mattered -- especially when you had enforcers on the fourth line who didn't play a lot. It's actually hard to compare this over long periods of time, since it wasn't unusual for teams to roll three forward lines and two defense pairs as recently as the early 1990s. I was recently watching some epic playoff games between the Devils and Rangers in the 1994 Eastern Conference Finals, and I was shocked to see Mike Keenan putting four defensemen out there for most of the games.
The 1995 Devils were probably the first modern team to win a Stanley Cup while spreading its playing time fairly evenly across a full 18-man roster. Their "Crash Line" may have been the best fourth line ever to play in the Stanley Cup playoffs.
Here's an interesting thought about the Golden Knights this season ...
Winning the Stanley Cup might end up being the worst thing that can happen to them in the long run. In my experience, the key to the success of an expansion team is their ability to cultivate a fan base as they build the roster and improve over time. The local interest in the team will grow as the team improves, and eventually they'll hope to see the organization put it all together and put a championship team on the ice. In that scenario, you'd hope to see a loyal fan base that will stick around while the team goes through some lean years and rebuilds.
If a new team wins right out of the gate, then I'm not sure how long the fans will hang around once they fall back to mediocrity over time.
It sounds preposterous, but this is pretty much what happened to the Colorado Avalanche. They weren't an expansion team, but when they moved from Quebec in 1996 they already had a formidable roster. They won the Stanley Cup in 1996 and remained one of the top teams in the NHL for another 5-6 years. Once the Joe Sakic era ended in the late 2000s it seemed like the team lost so much of its luster. I know they were decimated by the adoption of the salary cap after the 2004-05 lockout, losing Hall of Famers Peter Forsberg and Rob Blake to free agency. I think they've won a single playoff series in the last ten years, and their 12+ year long streak of home sellouts came to an end as well.