How long should an NHL rebuild take?

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How long should a rebuild take in the National Hockey League?

It’s about as broad a question as you can ask, but it’s also a critically important one if you are an organization going through the natural rebuilding cycle. A tremendous number of factors come into play – a team’s ability to manage through its immediate salary cap situation, a team’s fortune at the time of the draft lottery, the ability for coaching staffs to positively progress players through developmental leagues. That’s just a microcosm of all the components at play. And naturally, no two situations are alike.

But rebuilds cannot be endless. No one would point to the Buffalo Sabres from the last decade as a successful rebuild. Despite perpetually finishing near the bottom of the NHL standings and collecting valuable draft picks en masse, the organization has not been able to get off the mat. The mistakes from the various front offices were endless and have been exhaustively discussed. So, at some point, a rebuild can be too long.

I started to think about the rebuilds of the Colorado Avalanche and Vancouver Canucks, the two organizations that brought up the rear in the 2016-17 season. Colorado and Vancouver would both go on to pick inside of the top five – the Avalanche grabbing phenom defenceman Cale Makar, the Canucks grabbing star centre Elias Pettersson. Despite both teams finishing down on the year, the organizational talent disparity was obvious. Colorado had a handful of talented and valuable players throughout the lineup (Gabriel Landeskog and Nathan MacKinnon were already rostered, as two examples), while Vancouver was winding down the legendary Sedin years and, consequently, figured to have a lengthier rebuild.

And yet, we must