ANAHEIM – Five years.
That was the timeline Pat Verbeek had in mind shortly after he took the wheel in Anaheim, a franchise that needed to tear things down before it could dream of building something special again.
The goal wasn't to win a Stanley Cup in five years. It wasn't even to guarantee a playoff spot. It was to become a team that could start contending for a sprinkling of spring hockey.
As the Calgary Flames embark on their own uncomfortable transition, Verbeek's Anaheim Ducks are beginning to look an awful lot like the blueprint Craig Conroy would love to follow.
The similarities aren't lost on Verbeek, who has watched his young Ducks take a significant step forward after years of accumulating draft picks, developing talent and carefully adding veterans to help the kids grow.
"When I talk to Connie, yeah," Verbeek said of the parallels between Anaheim's rebuild and Calgary's.
"Transitioning is probably the hardest thing to do, not wanting to take a step back, but just kind of gaining a little ground every year.”
Easier said than done, of course.
In a one-on-one chat outside the Ducks dressing room, Verbeek said that when he arrived in Anaheim in Feb. 2022, his first instinct was to try to retain the veteran foundation on a team that missed the playoffs three years running. But Josh Manson, Hampus Lindholm and Rickard Rakell couldn't be signed to new deals, forcing the general manager to change course.
That pivot, as he calls it, became the foundation of the rebuild.
Rather than cling to a group that wasn't going to take the Ducks where they wanted to go, Verbeek traded those veterans and began stockpiling draft picks, putting an emphasis on identifying and developing young talent.
The results are now evident in a lineup increasingly driven by players who weren't old enough to rent a car when the rebuild began.
Leo Carlsson, Cutter Gauthier, Beckett Sennecke and the young defencemen coming through the system represent the payoff for years of patient work. On Tuesday, another first-round pick, Roger McQueen, made his NHL debut, offering another glimpse of what the future holds.
But the lesson from Anaheim isn't simply that rebuilding teams need to draft well.
It's that they need to get the rest of it right, too.
Verbeek knows that from experience. As a young player with New Jersey, he was part of a talented group that included Kirk Muller, John MacLean, Sean Burke and others who were around 20 or 21 years old. They could play, but winning consistently in the brutally competitive Patrick Division was another matter.
They needed help.
"When Lou brought in some other types of players, it just kind of pushed us," Verbeek recalled, referring to general manager Lou Lamoriello.
That experience helped shape his thinking in Anaheim. He wasn't interested in surrounding his prospects exclusively with fellow prospects and hoping everything magically fell into place.
Alex Killorn and Frank Vatrano were brought in to take some of the scoring burden off the youngsters. More recently, the additions of Chris Kreider and Ryan Poehling helped provide another layer of support, with Poehling offering defensive reliability and an offensive dimension. Captain Mikael Granlund is also on that list.
The idea is to ensure that when the kids aren't scoring, somebody else can pick up the slack.
It's also about teaching them how to handle the inevitable adversity that comes with life in the NHL.
"The more that the older guys can help out the younger guys adjust to the NHL, the more that rebuild is going to turn the corner," said Vatrano, who said vets teach good habits, demand accountability and make sure nobody mistakes an opportunity for an entitlement.
"You forget, they've been in the league four years, but they're only 21. They're still kids."
Verbeek believes the turning point for Anaheim came two summers ago, when Carlsson and Gauthier had a full NHL season under their belts, Sennecke arrived after a tremendous junior campaign, and the veteran additions began making a noticeable difference.
The improvement was no accident. Carlsson's first season had been handled carefully, allowing him to develop without being asked to carry the franchise before he was ready.
Now the expectations are changing.
Enter Joel Quenneville, hired to bring the tactical expertise of a coach who knows what it takes to win a Stanley Cup. Having guided Chicago to three championships, he understands the challenge of turning a talented young group into a team capable of surviving the grind of playoff hockey.
Quenneville said he sees plenty of similarities between these Ducks and the young Blackhawks he coached.
"Very comparable in a lot of ways," he said.
“Privileged to have those type of players on your bench and to work with them. But I always said, ‘get out of the way, let them go.’”
That is the delicate balance.
Today's young players are better equipped to drive NHL teams than their predecessors were, thanks to heightened skill levels and rules that allow those skills to flourish.
But they still need guidance.
"We need our younger guys to act like veterans now because there's so much dependency on them," said Quenneville, whose club ended a seven-year playoff drought last season – one year ahead of schedule – and shocked the Oilers in the first round.
Conroy is in Year 1, and will spend years identifying the young core, get the development right and strive to have the right experienced players who can help establish a winning culture without blocking the kids' path.
“The young players and high draft picks are dominating this league now,” said Ryan Strome, who was one of Anaheim’s veteran leaders, now with Calgary.
“Having said that, I think in the team dynamic and being a professional, it's really important to have those older guys around. I think it's understated what older guys do for the young guys.”
Clearly, the highest draft picks must become players, prospects must learn to win and management must stick to the plan.
Anaheim has accelerated its timeline by hitting on young talent and supplementing it with the right veterans. The Ducks now appear poised to be a juggernaut.
It remains to be seen how long it will take for Calgary to do the same.
