Jun 30, 2022
How long should an NHL rebuild take?
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. Travis Yost has more.
By Travis Yost
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 acknowledge Colorado’s shrewd roster building from that point forward – trades involving Matt Duchene, Nazem Kadri, and Devon Toews are a few obvious examples of advantage trading from the Avalanche front office. While Vancouver has moved methodically through a gruelling multi-year rebuild, the Avalanche quickly became the most dominant team in hockey.
Consider the two in contrast:
A lot went right for Colorado to rebound in this manner. It feels like the franchise, in some ways, is an exception to the rule of how long rebuilds should take. But again, I ask: how long is too long, and what can history tell us?
To try to complete this analysis, I looked at teams from 2007-16 that finished in the bottom five of the standings each year, and then looked at the improvement of those teams over the span of the next five seasons. Not every bottom-five team is in a rebuild, and not every team that reaches the playoffs in a subsequent year has finished their rebuild, but it’s a sensible proxy for the two.
The below graph shows three measurements: the percentage of those teams that would go on to reach the postseason in the next five years, the percentage of those teams that would finish inside of the top five of the standings in the next five years, and the percentage of those teams that would finish inside of the bottom five of the standings in the next five years:
There is clear directionality within these teams – as elite teams fall rebuilding teams invariably rise. Couple that with the laws of regression that always apply, and you see how these trends all follow a similar pattern.
But one interesting takeaway is that five years out, the likelihood of a team being inside of the top five is about the same as it is being inside of the bottom five. That is to say: as unique as Colorado’s wildly accelerated rebuild appears to be, it’s similarly unique to be such a poorly performing franchise for so many years.
To that end, it makes some sense why rebuilding organizations like the Detroit Red Wings and Ottawa Senators have a multi-year plan. It takes time. But it doesn’t, and shouldn’t, take forever. At some point, organizational strengths (weaknesses) will manifest themselves. For those who adjudicate the performance of front offices and player development, it gives us a reasonable timeline to work with when it comes to expectations.
Rebuilds take time, but they shouldn’t be endless. And the longer they go on, the more critical we should be of roster-building efforts.
Data via Natural Stat Trick, NHL.com, Evolving Hockey, Hockey Reference