‘Trade everyone.’ ‘Tear it down to the studs.’
Sound familiar? Sounds like the start of a rebuild, the NHL’s best advertised strategy for building a contending team. A team acknowledges that their roster isn’t good enough, that they need to replenish their prospect pipeline and they set off on a rebuild.
The rebuild has become the de facto strategy for this scenario in the NHL. Veteran roster players are jettisoned for prospects and picks. The roster deconstruction helps the team bottom out, improving their draft position for those additional picks. Those picks and prospects form a new core that develops together and, when they hit their prime, they bring home the Stanley Cup. Right?
That might be the case. It worked for the Colorado Avalanche in 2022. It worked for the Tampa Bay Lightning in 2020 and 2021. And we’re also seeing the longer term effects of the rebuild strategy play out with those two teams. We’ve seen remnants of the ‘just get in’ strategy play out as they loaded up for deep playoff runs by unloading their future assets. Cap casualties have eaten away at their depth. And their prospect pipelines have been depleted again.
Rebuilds fail. Ideally, rebuilds fail eventually; after a parade. Rebuilds also fail often, and early. For every Avs/Lightning success story, there are multiple failed rebuilds. Ask a Sabres fan what they think of rebuilding. Or an Oilers fan about the Decade of Darkness. Or the Senators. Or the Blue Jackets. Why do so many rebuilds fail?
Rebuilding takes an incredible amount of patience. For a true tear-it-down-to-the-studs rebuild, we’re looking at a decade. It takes a couple of seasons to strip the roster and accumulate picks. It takes another few seasons tanking to pile up top end draft picks. Then it takes another five years for most of those prospects to percolate and start to have a significant impact at the NHL level. It’s a methodical process and it takes time.
A major reason why so many rebuilds fail early is that NHL front offices don’t have the patience required to see the rebuild process through. It takes a commitment to being bad for a long time, then it takes discipline to slowly building, letting your prospect soup ferment, without flipping those hard-earned prospects for quick fixes in an attempt to accelerate the rebuild. Striping the roster down and drafting a bunch of exciting prospects is the easy part. Building the roster back up is hard. If you’ve truly bottomed out, there are 31 teams better than yours that you now have to leapfrog to become a contender.
The NHL is a copycat league. Rebuilds work (sometimes). So teams aim to mimic that success with mixed results.
There has to be a better way.
