Your message is long and I will reply to it in more details later
I'd like to address that bit right now, though. I fully sympathize with what Pens fans have to go through. However, one always needs to look at the bigger picture and that's why I am trying to do here.
In my humble opinion, the bigger picture is that it goes against sportsmanship for an organization to tank it like that. It's a competitive league and by its nature, the product should be about competition. But we've got this new trend now of teams taking it easy and tanking. It cheapes the sports in its entirety.
It's bad for the sport. It's even bad on a materialistic level because it makes the entire NHL a lesser product.
If we focus on Pittsburgh fans now, it's bad for them too. How can you feel good about this if, for instance, you paid hard-earned money for seasons-tix? It's just an injustice and near-theft.
The question is not to punish Pens fans. Heck, I'd love for Pens fans to get a bright future. But this situation of tanking is unacceptable and it must NOT be rewarded. Or it will be repeated elsewhere and more fans will get screwed up in another city, not to mention that as I already said, it cheapens the sport at large as well as screw up the NHL at large.
Are you going to enjoy your Pens game featuring Ovechkin in 6 years when (example totally out of the blue, it could be any team) the Red Wings come to twon with a depleted lineup of AHLers because they are trying to tank it to draft some Czech kid by the name of Marek Puckev? No, you're going to be bored to death. You're going to wonder why the **** you paid tickets at that price to see a one-sided effort leading to a boringly predictable effort.
And you'd feel even worse if unlike you or I, you had zero interest in prospects and were just there to enjoy a good game of hardfought hockey.
This goes beyond what Pens fans may selfishly feel they deserve. It goes right at heart to the issue of what the NHL is supposed to offer as a product and what is becoming a problem in this league. I remember when it was a 21-team league it wasn't much of a problem. You had maybe 1, perhaps 2 teams tanking when the draft year was UNBELIEVABLE. Sure, that sucked. But at least the problem was smaller.
Now it's every year. And some years, you see teams to go to such unbelievable lengths to tank it that it is just disgusting. This is one of those cases. The NHL needs a new system where teams will not be rewarded in such a way. Hard to do, but needs to be addressed as soon as possible. This is not acceptable, IMO.