You only need championships if you play for the Leafs or the Cowboys because those fanbases are always flapping their gums. Cups arent required in Edmonton because their fans arent a pain in the ass.
It's only BS if you have no talent to back it up. Hard to be a leader when your play is so awful that you have to be scratched for half the games and limited to 5 minutes of ice time in the other half.
Swapping draft picks barely qualifies as a trade. And the Dryden trade was, at the time, 2 nobodies for 2 other nobodies, none of whom, at the time, had ever played a second of NHL hockey. This is not a trade "history"; it's a footnote.
Even at that, 3 "transactions" in every a century tells us...
Every independently commissioned economic impact survey ever done on the subject of using taxpayer money to build stadiums and arenas for private owners to profit from has concluded that it's a colossal waste of money. Not just some studies or even most. ALL of them.