Imrem: Repeating shouldn't be so difficult, but it is
Repeat after me, repeatedly.
Repeating as Stanley Cup champions shouldn't be so difficult.
Repeat after me again.
Repeating as Stanley Cup champions shouldn't be so difficult.
Stay after school and write it on the whiteboard a thousand times.
Repeating as Stanley Cup champions shouldn't be so difficult.
But it is.
The degree of difficulty seems to never decrease and if anything becomes more difficult every year.
The Blackhawks have tried to repeat three times this decade and failed each time.
The latest elimination came Monday night at St. Louis when the Hawks lost 3-2 in Game 7 of a first-round playoff series.
"We faced the toughest opponent you could have in the first round," Hawks head coach Joel Quenneville said. "We didn't get it done."
Now the league will have to wait at least one more season before a team wins a second consecutive Stanley Cup.
One debate is whether dynasties are good for sports. Sure they are. They raise the bar for everyone trying to win a title.
Yet merely winning consecutive Stanley Cups has become so improbable, if not impossible, the debate transitioned to whether three Blackhawks championships in six years comprise a dynasty.
You'll have to decide that for yourselves, but one thing is a certainty: The NHL is the champion of nonrepeat champions.
No team repeated as Stanley Cup champs since the Detroit Red Wings in 1998. The Hawks tried in 2011, 2014 and this year but failed each time.
Repeat after me: Repeating in the NHL shouldn't be this difficult.
For a long time I bought into the system: Win the championship, lose upwardly mobile players to the salary cap and enable other teams to catch up.
I'm defecting from the system. The system stinks. Sports need a new system.
Leagues, all leagues, especially the NHL, should design economic structures in which a champion has a fair chance to defend.
MLB hasn't had a repeat champion since the Yankees in 2000 and the NFL since the Patriots in 2004.
Three years ago the Heat repeated in the NBA, where repeating is plausible because of a softer salary cap.
Still, it's hard.
The Golden State Warriors were favored to win a second straight title, Steph Curry sprained a knee, and now they aren't favored anymore.
Repeating is tough enough thanks to the fickle nature of age, injury and complacency, but the NHL's hardest of salary caps makes it even tougher.
The solution? Reward Stanley Cup champions instead of penalizing them.
How? Give them more money under the cap than the teams trying to catch them have.
The Hawks would have been granted bonus dollars last off-season to help sustain success, but they wouldn't be allowed to use the cash to purchase expensive free agents escaping their previous teams.
No, the Hawks could use the money only to resign their own free agents like Brandon Saad, Patrick Sharp and Johnny Oduya from last season's champs.
Unfair advantage? Maybe, but it would force the rest of the league to catch up to the Hawks by being smarter at scouting and spending.
As is, as hard as it is to repeat as champions, much less become a dynasty, the top end of leagues are shrinking toward the lower end instead of the lower end growing toward the top end.
So, seriously, repeat after me.
Repeating as champion in the NHL is too difficult and the system should be altered.
mimrem@dailyherald.com