The Full Teardown Rebuild Doesn’t Work Anymore

A few years ago, it was common for NHL fanbases to call for their favorite team to bottom out when it came time to rebuild the organization’s roster, and for good reason. The bottom-out rebuild had become trendy because most Stanley Cup champions during the 2010s had used that method of roster construction, and other teams began copying it, as is often the case.

However, late in the decade, another trend began to surface: the teams that were bottoming out couldn’t turn the corner in their rebuilds and remained in a perpetual state of losing. That leads us to the past couple of seasons, when some of those teams, namely the Sabres, have remained at the bottom of the NHL standings, while others, such as the Capitals, have successfully orchestrated softer retools.

At this point, it’s becoming evident that the bottom-out rebuild no longer works in today’s NHL.

There are many reasons it doesn’t work. Most notably, the draft is no longer a safe bet for bottom-feeders to land generational talent. Ten years ago, high picks were nearly a guarantee if you finished at the bottom of the standings, and now, with the new draft odds, it’s much harder to win a top pick.

Teams can no longer rely on a top draft pick to secure elite talent, which has reduced the incentive to tank via roster construction. After all, you still need fans to buy tickets and merchandise, and they won’t do that if your club is getting beaten every night.

This leads to another point about tearing down the roster. If you do acquire young talent who have no one else to play with and play in a culture of losing, that type of environment does seem contagious.

You can simply look at Edmonton and Buffalo in the 2010s. They couldn’t shake the stink of a losing culture, and it seeped into much of their young talent. Buffalo is a particularly egregious example, as many of their top draft picks more or less forced their way out of Buffalo to go on and win Stanley Cups in other cities.

This culture also shapes the development outcomes for younger players and explains why some young players get drafted late but, once in an NHL environment, find new levels in their games they had never reached before. It was no accident in the 1990s and 2000s that the Red Wings consistently found stars late in the draft. They had built a development machine and a culture of excellence that brought out the best in all of their young players. That dynamic can go the other way if you have a culture of losing. There is a real irony to all of it. The worse your team is, the less equipped your organization is to develop the players who might save your franchise.

Even if you hit the lottery and draft elite players, it doesn’t compound year after year the way it used to when the Penguins could grab Marc-André Fleury, Evgeni Malkin, Sidney Crosby, and Jordan Staal. The new rules from 2022 mean that a team cannot win the lottery more than twice in five years. Now, technically, that wouldn’t change things in the case of Pittsburgh, as they traded up to draft Fleury and drafted Malkin and Staal second overall, but it does reduce the incentive to ice a poor roster.

It’s also difficult to sustain the financial costs of an NHL roster in the salary-cap era while intentionally fielding a poor roster for several seasons. Back when Pittsburgh and Chicago were building their bottom-feeding rosters, they could literally sign every player to the league minimum (and they almost did) because the salary-cap floor they had to meet to be cap-compliant was much lower. Now, with an elevated floor, very few NHL teams could afford to reach the floor and ice a poor roster year after year without suffering a significant drop in gate revenue.

Speaking of money, another wrinkle in the bottom-out rebuild is that if you somehow draft elite players and develop them into NHL stars, they are set to exit their entry-level contracts and cash in big. Young stars can demand bigger extensions earlier, meaning the cheap years of their careers are behind them, and the team has to allocate massive amounts of cap space to them and can’t insulate them with other players. Stated differently, once your rebuild starts to bear fruit, the discounted years are over.

Then there is the issue that it’s tough to deconstruct an NHL roster, and even when you try to tear it down, you might end up with a team that falls into the mushy middle. This has happened to the Penguins this season: they tried to trade many of their veterans this past summer (Rickard Rakell, Bryan Rust, Erik Karlsson) but weren’t able to, and now find themselves in a playoff hunt.

It would have been foolish for Pittsburgh to give away its top players for very little, and whether they were serious about moving them is known only to management. Still, they elected to hold onto them and continue to ice a team that is competing for a wild-card spot. This is different from 20-plus years ago, when there was no salary cap, and Pittsburgh could simply call the Rangers or the Capitals to dump their star players.

Finally, there is the difference that social media and modern society make in rebuilding a team. Twenty years ago, entertainment options were much more limited, so fans stuck around to watch their favorite team, even when it was bad. This meant that management and coaches had a longer leash to rebuild and develop young players, as ownership had more patience because supporters were more committed and less distracted by other forms of entertainment. Nowadays, though, fans have a million choices for their leisure time, and if their favorite club is bad, they can do other things to fill their time.

Social media also plays into this, as fans have a louder voice than ever, which can put pressure on ownership if the naysayers get too noisy or create their own narratives. A rebuild used to be allowed to breathe for months at a time with minimal criticism, but nowadays it is litigated on social media daily. This can accelerate impatience and force management and ownership to show progress more quickly, making the long, painful rebuild a near impossibility.

Then there is self-preservation, which is often the primary motivator in management, leading to avoiding the long rebuild or not fully committing to a teardown. GMs notoriously shorten their own timelines and make job-saving trades that often turn out to be poor moves for the organization and for themselves (Kevyn Adams in Buffalo, for example).

The modern reality of a rebuild is that it is no longer about losing for a long time and collecting top picks. You can do that and still go nowhere, as evidenced by many teams in the last ten years. Rebuilds have become about timing long-term contracts.

They’ve become about layering prospects so they arrive in consistent waves year after year, keeping your depth intact when your internal players become too expensive to retain. They’ve become about patience and development, avoiding giving up on players too early, moving them prematurely, getting impatient with your current roster, and making a bad move. And finally, they’ve become about protecting your assets, draft picks, roster players, and cap space.

The teams that win now are no longer the ones that lose their way to the top; they are the disciplined ones that build the right way.