Where they are now: It was assumed that a healthy Robin Lehner could keep the Sabres in the playoff hunt, but as Harrington alluded to, they are actually in a position most rebuilding teams find themselves in at one point or another - they have the top-end talent to get excited for, but the rest of the roster isn’t good enough to compete for a playoff spot. The Leafs did not tear down as much and ended up with Auston Matthews.” “And that’s really what their undoing is, their bottom six is terrible. “Frankly they tore down too much to get here,” Mike Harrington of the Buffalo News said on the Jeff Blair Show. They’ve finished in one of the bottom two spots of their division four years in a row and have had a top-10 draft pick in each of those years. All of them have since been moved, most by trade.

How they got here: The Sabres were last in the playoffs in 2010-11 with a core that included Thomas Vanek, Jason Pominville, Drew Stafford, Tim Connolly, Jordan Leopold, a second-year Tyler Myers and Ryan Miller in net. The Sabres, with a 17-17-9 record sit ahead of only the New York Islanders in the Eastern Conference standings and are the fifth-lowest scoring team in the NHL with a 2.33 goals per game average. Less than two seasons later, Toronto looks like the team that’s ahead. When Mike Babcock chose to become head coach of the Toronto Maple Leafs instead of the Buffalo Sabres before the 2015-16 season, the common line of thinking was that the Sabres were a year ahead of the Leafs in their rebuild. Here are some teams currently in a rebuild and a look at what kind of shape they’re in. In fact, it can be more of a bumpy road than a track. There are stages to a rebuild and they don’t always stay on track.

Like it or not “tanking” is a reality in today’s NHL, but that doesn’t mean every rebuilding team is undertaking that unsavoury process. If rebuilding was as easy as making a top five pick, this generation’s Oilers would have a Stanley Cup by now. Obviously, it takes more than losing for a few years to build a contending team you still need to make smart acquisitions to fill out the roster and surround your star players with capable talent.

Pittsburgh, Washington, Los Angeles, Anaheim, Chicago and Columbus (if you want to go that far) have all had top five picks in the draft in the past 13 years, which were building blocks of the rosters they’re putting forth today. Most of the teams you would consider contenders, though, were at or near the very bottom of the league not all that long ago.

Nhl 2004 rebuilt old rosters