Victims of "bad" tanks and rebuilds: How soon did you know something was going wrong?

[Pavels Dog]

Like he said though, Grier's pro scouting has been great.

Blackwood, Granlund, Walman, Liljegren, Dellandrea etc. were all traded to SJS and seen as reclamation projects/acquired for next to nothing and are now key players for the team. Blackwood was acquired for a 6th and just returned Kovalenko and a 2nd. Walman was traded with a 2nd that was used to move up in the draft. He's used expendable assets to address areas of weakness such as the Askarov trade. Even in free agency, he's not committed to any longer term contract, and brought in complimentary veterans like Toffoli and Wennberg for 4 and 2 year contracts.

Alot of the other "rebuilds" used as his example have failed to do so. By either failing to bring in veterans, bringing them in on bad contracts, or just bringing in players who aren't good.

It's the rose-colored glasses part of rebuilding. Taking chances on other teams throwaways, using cap space and flexibility to acquire some picks, a forward with 4 points in 29 games being viewed as a "key player" with no hint of irony.

I like San Jose's rebuild because they have Celebrini, Eklund, Smith, Dickinson and Askarov, a really good start to a foundation. I'll maintain that they're in a spot where most rebuilds are early on, and it's by far the easiest phase.

 

[QuizGuy66]

One of the challenges appears to be having the talent coming through the pipeline while also having a sufficiently positive veteran presence to help develop those players in the right way.

If you are too flush with mediocre veterans, it may prevent you from getting into the top 5 in drafting on a regular basis and acquiring the necessary talent to get out of the playoff bubble cycle.

But if there are too few, or they are the wrong guys, the potential that everyone is raving about never really pans out and the youngsters only learn about how to lose.

Yep - and in this context in a lot of ways it makes MORE sense for a tanking/full rebuild team to add washed veterans who have had solid careers but that are cooked now. They know how to win and be a professional, they just can't do it physically anymore. Read in this context something like the Trouba trade makes a bit more sense - keeps a team that doesn't need to pay salary off the floor while getting a player who has been a captain in his career and has been able to play at a top level but can't do so now. They don't materially improve your team enough to threaten the tank but they also (hopefully) teach professional habits and leadership to your young and upcoming players And the funny thing is if they look good relative to the rest of your team that is still developing you flip them for more assets than you paid for them.

 

[MXD]

...When Montreal didn't pick Zadina?

 

[Byron Bitz]

when we signed Tavares.

How Sabres, Wings, Sens and Ducks fans truly feel when they see Leafs fans complaining about signing Tavares.

 

[FlyguyOX]

Sign a fantastic coach who gets the most out of his players, keeping you from getting high picks.

Win a lottery, move up to #2, and get a player who lasted only a couple seasons, oh and missed out on 3 all stars drafted right behind him, including one of the best D-man to ever play the game.

 

[HanSolo]

Watching Anaheim's kids stagnate while the team around them is playing a lot poorer hockey than they're capable of with systems that aren't tailored for the team's success gives me fear that if Cronin isn't fired, and soon, and if the Ducks don't improve their player development as a whole, they're going to end up with a spoiled youth core and will have to reset the rebuild. I don't know that they've hit that critical point yet but it feels like it's getting there.

 

[ponder]

For the Leafs, it has certainly been disappointing so far, and may end up being a failure, but our core is still young and talented enough that I could see real cup contention happening. TBD.

As for the poor results to date, I think the key bad move was putting a completely inexperienced GM in charge (Dubas). He got better over time, but made a tonne of critical mistakes early on, and honestly he's still a mediocre at best GM. Some of the most critical mistakes he made:

• Signing Tavares to a MASSIVE UFA contract, when we were already stacked at forward. Even though Tavares has had plenty of good seasons with us (including this year, big bounce back), it was just not the right move in a salary cap world, especially when we had so much young talent at forward
  • Before the JT signing we had:
    • Auston Matthews
    • Mitch Marner
    • William Nylander
    • Nazem Kadri
    • Zach Hyman
    • Connor Brown
    • Trevor Moore
    • Kasperi Kapanen
    • Andreas Johnsson
    • Pierre Engvall
    • Mason Marchment
  • Other than Matthews/Marner/Nylander, we let everyone else go for little to no return, either directly due to cap pressure, or indirectly (e.g. Kadri, where IMO Dubas was trying to improve our D on a budget, and used Kadri to do so, albeit with a crap trade). Terrible asset management, turned a massive amount of good young forwards into nothing just to try to squeeze in JT
• Way before their rookie contracts even expired, utterly folding in contract talks to Matthews and Marner. They got insanely player friendly AAV AND player friendly term - signed for just 5 years (Matthews) and 6 years (Marner), when they both had 4 RFA years left. If you give massively player friendly AAV like this, at the very least you should buy all 4 UFA years, we bought only 1 for Matthews and 2 for Marner. The JT signing started our cap problems, and this took them up a notch
• While driven by cap pressure, the Kadri trade was just bad. Barrie was the main return and he sucked
• Again driven by cap pressure, but letting Hyman walk for nothing when he wanted to stay was also bad. His cap was used on Mrazek/Ritchie :/
• And just generally, did a poor job with team composition - too soft and finesse oriented too often, which would really show in the playoffs

When you look at the insanely amazing situation Dubas inherited from Lou, stacked with young talent and a great situation (Marleau the only bad deal on the books), just 1 playoff series win in 5 years is a terrible outcome. But I still wouldn't say this iteration of the Leafs is cooked, Matthews and Mitch are 27 while Willy is 28, we're one of the better teams in the league, and have some decent young/emerging talent (Knies, Woll, Cowan, McMann, Minten, etc.), I'd say we've still got ~3-5 legit years in our window, even if our aging defence does scare me a bit.

 

[FlyguyOX]

Why tf are the leafs in here saying their rebuild was a failure??

One of the best records in the regular season for years. Playoffs have a high degree of randomness in short sample sizes.

What a ridiculous fanbase.

 

[Habsfunk]

As a Habs fan, this season is slightly concerning. I thought they would move from bottom five into the 10th-last range, and be in reach of a playoff spot until the trade deadline. So far it's not looking that way. Still, their core is still young and are signed until the end of the decade, so there's still lots of time to contend. Demidov is our best forward prospect in decades and hopefully Reinbacher proves worthy of his fifth overall selection.

I can't see the Habs being in the Stanley Cup conversation unti Gallagher and Anderson's contracts come off the books in 2027 and free $12 million in cap space. By then, we'll know if Dach is a true second line centre, or if they need to find someone else via trade or free agency. If we're lucky, Beck or Hage can step into that role. Our logjam of young defencemen will hopefully be sorted and the true NHLers will be established and the rest dealt to fill roster holes or accumulate draft picks.

Realistically, the Habs current window stretches until 2030, when Suzuki is a UFA.

 

[Gil Gunderson]

That any of these goofs are still with the org is such a slap in the face. Does any management in the league embarrass itself better than Oilers' management?

Wasn’t it reported that Kevin Lowe and MacT were jumping in the hallways after they won the lottery for McDavid?

 

[NVious]

Why tf are the leafs in here saying their rebuild was a failure??

One of the best records in the regular season for years. Playoffs have a high degree of randomness in short sample sizes.

What a ridiculous fanbase.

Kinda depends how you look at it.

On one hand the team had a ton of previous assets from previous failed retools and they had an amazing "rebuild" over the course of just 3 years where they drafted Nylander/Matthews/Marner. They've been in the playoffs ever since (except it took 13 years to do that post lockout to when their streak started).

On the other hand this team hasn't ever gone on any significant run with a squad clearly talented enough to be making the later round, i.e:

Buffalo has won 0 playoff rounds in the past 13 years
Leafs have won 1 (out of 9) playoff round in the past 13 years

You can easily call it a failed rebuild, but the rebuild itself was a massive success, the asset management afterwards is what caused it to fail, but if you're gonna include that in it, then you can call it a "failure" considering the team's lack of playoff results (ever so marginally better than the Sabres).

 

[DJJones]

Piss off Leafers haha

You won a Matthews lottery and got two good players with the other high picks.

The rebuild was a wild success. Team management and player selection of the rebuilt team was the issue.

 

[FissionFire]

I'm referring to teams that sold vets, missed the playoffs a bunch and lost, and didn't really every compete for the Cup after.

What are some signs the rebuild is going sideways?

Lack of a clear vision from the GM and coach. This was the problem in Detroit with Holland.

Missing on high picks. That will sabotage a rebuild faster than anything. Getting busts/plugs with top 10 picks like Zadina and Rasmussen. Those picks set the rebuild back at least 5 years especially considering who they SHOULD have taken.

Bad lottery luck. You can tank all you want but if the balls fall badly you wind up missing on the franchise talents in drafts to build around. It’s hard to get those foundational sure-fire studs outside of the top 2-3 picks. Very few elite Cup contenders don’t have at least one top of the draft cornerstone to build around (Stamkos, Hedman, MacKinnon, Barkov, Ekblad, McDavid, Matthews, etc).

Trying to compete too soon. While I understand trying to build a winning culture it can speed up rebuilds and keep teams for getting the full value of high picks for tanking. Winning too much too soon can doom teams to mediocrity where they get good enough players to be a bubble or low seed playoff team but not enough elite players to seriously compete for a Cup.

To me these are the biggest red flags. Just look at Detroit, who has checked all the boxes.

 

[Herby]

For the Kings it's two parts. But I would say the summer of 2021 is when I knew it was doomed as far as building a true contender.

It was apparent pretty quickly that neither Byfield or Turcotte were going to be the type of players that you would normally expect to end up with when you draft guys in the Top 5. I remember going to see Turcotte play his freshman year at UW, and I think my baseline expectation based on draft position and USHL production was that he was going to be at worst a Dylan Larkin type guy, I had read the draft reports that maybe questioned the offensive upside, but it was glaring to see just how little offense there was from a guy taken that high in the draft. I remember telling a buddy of mine, "The Kings used a #5 pick on Andrew Copp"

With Byfield it was kind of the same thing, I didn't see him in person that rookie year, but usually when guys truly are destined for stardom you see signs early on, even on TV, and with Byfield there just weren't any of those hints that you would have expected from a player who was expected to be the teams future franchise 1C. And nothing that has happened since has changed from that view, Byfield has 2nd line upside, which you just can't have from a #2 overall pick that you ended up being all in on, and hope a rebuild will work.

Now this didn't have to be the end of it, the Kings could have easily kept in the accumulate assets stage and added studs in 2022, 2023 and 2024, but when they signed Danault, traded for Arvidsson and then traded the best player (by far) they drafted in that time frame, you knew that it wasn't going to end up being like the previous rebuild, or like Chicago or Tampa's.

I think Blake's plan all-along was to hope to hit a couple of homeruns between 2019-2021 and hope to do something similar to what Dallas has done, draft a new core and then still be able to have your previous core be solid secondary contributors on a cup contender. And hey, if LA ends up with Stutzle, Boldy and keeps Faber/Vilardi that may have easily happened, but they had to chase veterans to fill holes that were left empty with poor top of the board picks.

 

[JeffreyLFC]

The Leafs don't have a failed rebuild, they've consistently been one of the better teams in hockey for the last 5 years or so

They have struggled to go from good team to top tier contender, but that's more how they handled the steps after their rebuild than during the rebuild

In reality, the Leafs have had one of the best rebuilds of any team in the last decade. They bottomed out for 3 years, got 3 superstars and shot back in to the playoffs

They did trade 2 x 1st + 2nd for Kessel though. Which IMO was ill advised for them.

Would have drafted top 10 for 8 out of 9 years span (2008 to 2016) trading away 2 x 1st + 2nd. And drafting Schenn, Kadri, Reilly and THEN Nylander, Marner and Matthews.

If not of Matthews, quite possible it would have been considerd a failed rebuild.

 

[Fixed to Ruin]

Sabres probably after that meeting with the owner...