Nowadays, the word “parity” is thrown around quite a bit to describe the NHL. You’ll hear people say that any team can beat any team on any given night. Technically, that is true. But if the rise of sports gambling has revealed anything, it’s that we all don’t really believe in “parity” absolutely. Most of us would put our money on the Vegas Golden Knights this season when they square up against the Buffalo Sabres.
There are tiers in the NHL. Powerhouses and perennial contenders like the Dallas Stars. Talented teams who can’t make it over the hump to be considered great like the Toronto Maple Leafs (sorry). Good teams who are hit or miss any given night like the St. Louis Blues. Finally, varying degrees of not-so-good teams whose fanbases I will not offend (but you know who you are).
Those are just a few categories I made up off the top of my head. You may disagree with how I sliced and diced it or with what teams fall into which category. It doesn’t really matter. Clearly, teams run the gamut from terrible to terrific.
How teams end up in these stages is what fascinates me. After years of Stanley Cup runs, does gravity finally pull you back down to earth? Are you perpetually stuck in a no man’s land, not good enough to win it all but not bad enough to embrace burning it down?
Whatever the case, teams are constantly evolving and looking for ways to improve. There are different phases of evolution in that process, depending on where your team currently stands. Here, I want to explore three of the most common terms coined: rebuild, retool, and reset.
Are there any practical differences? Or is it a marketing ploy used by general managers to manage expectations and avoid panic? I think it’s a little bit of everything.
Rebuild: What Everyone Fears
The term of the trio that needs the shortest introduction is “rebuild.” A rebuild is when a franchise trades or offloads every player aside from one or two youngsters. In exchange, the team accumulates young talent, prospects, and draft picks who will need time to develop into NHL players. This process takes two years at minimum but most likely three or four, at least before the team is competitive. The intervening period contains a lot of losing.
Owners, general managers, coaches, players, and fans will do anything to avoid a rebuild. What’s more, the teams that do embrace rebuilds have no guarantee it will pay dividends. Ask the Sabres.
Related: Why Has the Buffalo Sabres’ Latest Rebuild Failed?
If you search for a list of NHL teams currently in the rebuild phase, you will find articles ranging from 10 teams to 16 teams. I’m not here to argue which teams qualify and which don’t. We can, however, look at two of the obvious ones: the Chicago Blackhawks and San Jose Sharks.
Both teams certainly show the symptoms of a rebuild. They are struggling to win, score goals (the Sharks are 26th in the NHL and the Blackhawks are 30th in goals scored), and keep the puck out of their net (the Sharks have let in the second-most goals, and the Blackhawks the fifth-most). They last made the playoffs in 2019 and 2020 respectively.
These facts are, like I said, symptoms of a rebuild. They are not the cause or the defining features. The death knell of each franchise’s high-water mark was the moving on from core players. After the Sharks lost in the Western Conference Final in 2019, Joe Pavelski signed with the Dallas Stars and longtime defenseman Justin Braun was traded to the Philadelphia Flyers. Both had only ever played for the Sharks.
The team subsequently shed Brent Burns, Brenden Dillon, Barclay Goodrow, Evander Kane, Erik Karlsson, and Joe Thornton. Pretty quickly, the 2019 roster that won two playoff rounds was being torn down to the studs.
Similarly, the only player remaining from the Blackhawks’ 2020 roster is Connor Murphy. Patrick Kane, Jonathan Toews, Corey Crawford, and Duncan Keith all moved on or retired. Again, the end of an era was evident. Connor Bedard was drafted three years later.
All this to say, the indicators of a rebuild are indisputable. Move on from an older core, draft a (hopefully) franchise-transforming player, acquire talent to support that piece, and play hockey. It will take time. There is no promise it will work, but that is the formula.
Retool: A Term to Ease the Pain?
Rebuilds are laborious. They require strong leadership, vision, players, total organizational commitment, and, frankly, luck. Given the stakes, are we surprised that owners and general managers avoid them at all costs? However, the reality that teams need to be adjusted and improved can’t be ignored. The question then arises: how do you address concerns without tearing everything down?
Enter everyone’s favorite term with undeniable saving power: The Retool.
(Please read the following in the tone of a late-night infomercial salesman). Are you too afraid to confront foundational issues plaguing your roster and preventing your team from winning? Does the fear of committing to a major decision that may alter the course of your franchise for generations paralyze you? Do you want to appear as if you are making changes without actually doing anything to improve your team? Introducing, The Retool! An all-in-one fix for any team’s issues.
The key to The Retool’s success is its patented technology to obfuscate issues by making a series of moves and decisions that, on the surface, seem consequential enough to appease fans while simultaneously doing nothing at all. Don’t believe us? Try a retool now, absolutely free, for two years! If The Retool doesn’t work for you, we will give you back the money you never paid and supply The Rebuild!
I (somewhat) jest about the term retool. It is a legitimate strategy. However, it’s been used much more frequently in recent years, and, despite this, I’ve never heard an agreed-upon definition. We nod along and use the word ourselves. But what does it mean?
There is a great thread on Reddit (where any serious scholar goes to conduct research) where hockey fans have tried to discern the difference between a rebuild and a retool. One user wrote an apt analogy, comparing rebuilds and retools of teams to houses. If you rebuild a house, you knock it down and build a new one from the ground up. If you retool a house, you are renovating some of the existing structure but maintaining the integrity of the original building.
That is probably the most helpful answer I found. The least helpful answer (but the funniest) differentiated the terms like this: “A re-tool is a rebuild around your core players. A rebuild includes the core players.”
Huh?
To bring things back down to more practical hockey terms, my colleague Jacob Billington put it best. A retool keeps some of the core players but brings in new, complementary players who will join the core. You may let one or two core players go, but you aren’t cleaning house like the Sharks or Blackhawks.
The Tampa Bay Lightning are the perfect example.
After winning back-to-back Stanley Cups in 2020 and 2021, the Lightning lost to the Colorado Avalanche in 2022. Three straight Stanley Cup Finals is a success by any metric. The team then lost in the first round of the playoffs in both 2023 and 2024. That’s 82 games of playoff hockey over five seasons. To maintain a competitive roster, adjustments were needed and made.
After 2021, the Lightning lost several players who were instrumental in their championships, including Blake Coleman, Tyler Johnson, Yanni Gourde, and Luke Schenn. General manager Julien BriseBois maintained his core of Victor Hedman, Nikita Kucherov, Steven Stamkos, and Brayden Point. Thus, when important players left, he found new skaters to complement the existing core (Brandon Hagel, for example). No fundamental changes were required, and two more postseason appearances were earned.
Even when faced with challenging roster situations, BriseBois made gutsy decisions about how to keep his team competitive while retaining as many core pieces as possible. That’s why he let Stamkos join the Nashville Predators last offseason and brought in Jake Guentzel. The best player in franchise history was let go in order to protect as much of the core without needing to tear everything down. It’s hard to argue with the results. The Lightning are positioned for yet another postseason berth after many expected the team to decline significantly.
That, I believe, is another distinguisher between a retool and a rebuild. Retools know that a decline is either happening or on the horizon. Moves made are attempts to stop the snowball from gaining too much momentum as it rolls down the hill. Rebuilding teams might as well be making a snowman at the bottom of the mountain.
Reset: On the Fly Changes
At last, we arrive at the term I find the most intriguing and the one with which I am least familiar: the reset. I first heard Elliotte Friedman use the term to describe the New York Rangers this season. I’m sure the term has been used before, but, since it was new to me, I immediately tried to figure out what a reset is and how it compares to our favorite products Rebuild and Retool.
An important characteristic of a reset is the swiftness with which a problem is addressed. Something with the roster isn’t clicking—perhaps a few players are slotting in roles above their ability—so you trade one away, acquire a new guy, and call up a prospect all within one season. You haven’t made any major changes as you would in a retool. If a reset is a pair of glasses, then the frames are your core players and the changes you make are tinkering with the lenses and prescription to hone the vision as precisely as possible.
As always, an example is helpful. A few were recommended to me, including the New Jersey Devils, Vancouver Canucks, and Boston Bruins. Those teams fit the build, but let’s stick with the Rangers since it’s the team that sparked this conversation.
This season has been difficult, to say the least. The Rangers are sixth in the Metropolitan Division and 22nd in the league. These results are far from expected after advancing to the Eastern Conference Final last season. As the team began to nosedive, general manager Chris Drury decided to shake his roster up by trading captain Jacob Trouba and Kaapo Kakko, the second overall pick in 2019. Drama has followed the Rangers this entire season like it has been paid to do so, and these moves didn’t help shake it.
However, if we can put that aside, and even look past evaluating these transactions, we can see why the Rangers are “resetting” rather than “retooling.” No major pieces of the core (Artemi Panarin, Adam Fox, Mika Zibanejad, or Chris Kreider, for example) were moved. No complementary core players were brought in. While Trouba’s and Kakko’s names carry weight, neither served integral roles on the team, at least in terms of on-ice performance. Moving on from both was an attempt to jumpstart (reset) the Rangers while acquiring some cap space and assets.
While there has been speculation about trading Kreider and Zibanejad, since it hasn’t happened yet, we can’t call what the Rangers have done a retool. If either leaves, it’s safe to say the Rangers have crossed that bridge.
A final point on resets: we should think of the word “attempt” before reset, as in, “The Rangers are attempting a reset.” This distinction matters because a reset is a last-ditch effort to stop a team from purchasing the more stable products Rebuild or Retool. A reset, more so than the other two terms, not only does not guarantee success but also is much more fleeting. You can’t stay in the reset phase for years like you can in a rebuild or retool. You either start winning after a reset, or you begin a more serious plan of action.
Final Thoughts
Phew. That was a lot to unpack. But I think we’ve identified important points. First, there are differences between a rebuild, retool, and reset. Second, those differences can be minute enough that teams can move between the three phases in the blink of an eye. Third, general managers and owners certainly use one term to avoid the others (“We aren’t rebuilding, we are retooling!”).
Fourth, and finally, never buy a late-night infomercial product.
