The best way to win the Stanley Cup is to have more great players than everyone else does, but the Cup is known as “the hardest trophy to win” for too many reasons for it to be quite that simple.Teams get hot. Goalies get hot. Players put cross-checks into other players’ spines. Unsung heroes like John Druce, Fernando Pisani, or Jordan Staal get to the right pucks at the right times to go on goal scoring tears that they haven’t replicated at any other time in their careers. Even the math of it is cruel: An 80 percent favourite to win any one series is a 41 percent underdog to win four in a row. Shifts happen so often in hockey that the best team in the NHL is more likely not to win the Cup than to win it in any given year.So what are the 26th-place Winnipeg Jets to do?It’s one version of a question that fans have asked and we’ve tried to answer all offseason. Reeling from Winnipeg’s underachievement, Jets fans have wondered how the Jets are meant to win the Stanley Cup, as built. How can Winnipeg collect more top-end talent than its competitors? How do the Jets get great and stay great for long enough so that they make multiple playoff runs, protecting themselves against hot and cold streaks?Patrick Kane homecoming in Chicago or Buffalo?Mark Lazerus and Shayna GoldmanThe Cup contention cycle theory answers those questions by evaluating two things: