One big disparity I'm seeing here is that acquiring 22-25 year olds is being lumped in with rebuilding. We're fully aware that Benning is willing to pick up and trade for near-NHL-ready, about to expire young-ish reclamation projects as an attempt to re-tool on the fly while trying to compete simultaneously. Strange to consider that rebuilding, though.
If you want to consider that a rebuild anyways (purely on the basis that he IS making changes and transitioning to a new set of YOUNGER players than what we had before, which I think we can all agree that he is), I suppose you're free to do that, and it's just disagreement about a technicality, where you're a little less strict/extreme about your definition of "rebuild".
He's certainly not rebuilding using any approach that resembles anything that makes the idea of rebuilding something that is actually worth considering, though.
I would also contend that you're dead wrong that people are only refusing it to consider it a rebuild based on poor performance. If Sbisa, Bonino, Vey, Gudbranson, Baertschi, Goldobin, Granlund, and whoever I'm missing all turned out fantastic, and we won the cup on the backs of that new group of players, it still wouldn't be considered a rebuild by most people-- it would be considered a shockingly successful retool-on-the-fly.
It's a very important distinction, because it's a completely different approach from what most people have in mind when bringing up the idea of rebuilding. (and hell, Benning/Linden themselves appear to share that definition, because they didn't want to use the word "rebuild" to describe what they were doing earlier on, despite clearly being willing to make those kinds of "getting younger with 22-25-year-olds" moves)
