princedpw said:
I do think that people fail to calculate the amount of time a tear-it-down rebuild takes. Suppose you need 4 really good players to compete for a championship. That's 4 years in a row of top draft picks (with none of those years being a bust). Then you have to let those 4 players mature a number of years each. If the last of the 4 takes 3 years to mature (unlikely for a defenseman, so you have to draft your star defenseman early, which, Edmonton, for example, didnt do, meaning they have to wait several more years for a guy like Nurse to be a force). Anyway, we are at 4+3 = 7 years minimum for a normal burn-it-down rebuild. We might be a little better than that because we already have Rielly and Gardiner, who have some chance at turning in to those top defencemen that one needs.
Except that's not a realistic portrait of how any top teams were actually built. In order for a team to be competitive you're right that they probably need at least 4 exceptional players but exceptional players can be acquired in any number of ways. Here's the recent champions and a reasonable guess at their four best players and how they obtained them:
Blackhawks: Kane(1st overall), Toews(3rd overall), Keith(54th overall), Sharp(trade) or Hossa(UFA) or Crawford(52nd overall)
Kings: Quick(72nd overall), Kopitar(11th overall), Doughty(2nd overall), Mike Richards(trade)
Bruins: Thomas(UFA), Chara(UFA), Bergeron(45th overall), Lucic(50th overall)
Penguins: Crosby(1st overall), Malkin (2nd overall), Fleury(1st overall) Gonchar(UFA)
Even if you want to throw a bone to the argument and say that the Penguins 4 best players were the four guys they drafted at the top of the draft, making them the only team that really fits your mold, then there's still the noticeable absence of any defensemen on the list.
Teams who are rebuilding still get to make trades. They still have draft picks beyond the first round(and can have multiple first round picks). Those four exceptional players can come from anywhere and while the smart money is on finding those players at the top of the draft it's the ultimate strawman argument favoured by defenders of MLSE's seeming religious objection to proper rebuilding that simply drafting high for multiple years will guarantee a team that eventually contends for a cup, Truth is in order to build a cup contender a team does have to sign good free agents and make good trades and draft well outside of the top ten.
The ability to do those things, the ability to turn up nuggets of gold in unlikely methods
in addition to drafting at the top of the draft is how teams speed up that process. 7 years may be a fair benchmark for a rebuilding team reaching their full potential but a base built by superstars at the top of the draft and augmented in other ways does not take 7 years to become an entertaining playoff team or even a contender.
The Leafs wouldn't be rebuilding from nothing. They'd still have Rielly. They'd still have guys like Finn and Percy. They'd still have the assets trading guys like Phaneuf would bring back. Heck, they might even still have Kadri and Gardiner. There's no denying that the first few years of a rebuilding process would be tough to watch but can get better fairly quickly.
