On Thursday’s episode of Canucks Conversation, David Quadrelli and Harman Dayal tackled a topic that’s been hovering over the Vancouver Canucks for years – whether it’s finally time to stop running from the inevitable and commit to a full rebuild.

After a 5–2 loss at home to the rebuilding Chicago Blackhawks, patience has worn thin, and the guys admitted the current direction just isn’t leading anywhere close to contention.

“What this Canucks team needs to be championship calibre over the next few years, I don’t see a realistic path,” Harm said. “I can see a path for, if things break right, making the playoffs, but is that really the bar we want to throw up there? The goal is just making the playoffs?”

It’s a question that hits at the core of where the organization has been stuck for nearly a decade – good enough to chase the bubble, never good enough to climb higher.

“We often think through the lens of ‘this organization won’t rebuild,’ so we don’t talk about it,” Quads said. “We’ve looked at it as, what can this team do to get there without a rebuild? I’m at the point now where, best case scenario, this team can’t get to a point where they’re contending for a Stanley Cup without a full rebuild. You have to do the hard work and go through those painful years.”

The painful years, as Harm pointed out, have already happened – just without the payoff.

“The crappy thing is, they went through the painful years – they had all the pain and more of a rebuilding team, they’ve been bad for eight years, but because they took shortcuts, they had too many self-inflicted wounds,” he said. “It’s not even so much that 10 years ago they had to commit to a rebuild, but at every checkpoint, they’ve shot themselves in the foot by trying to accelerate too quickly.

“In 2015, why did you need to trade a 19-year-old Jared McCann for Erik Gudbranson? Look at the player McCann has become. When the 2021 season ended, coming off the bubble playoff run, then the disastrous year in the All-Canadian division, there was only one year left of pain with the Eriksson, Roussel, and Beagle contracts. It was such a layup to ride that out, and they’d have had all this cap space when cap space was king, but they went out and made the OEL trade, and that draft pick traded away ended up becoming Dylan Guenther. Just so many missteps along the way, and now you’re at a point where you’re stuck in mediocrity.”

The guys agreed it’s not yet time to blow it up completely, but any talk of buying or adding more short-term fixes should be off the table.

“This early into the season, we’re not sitting here and saying they have to blow it up this minute,” said Harm. “However, we clearly have a lot of concerns about this team and at the very least, they’re in a position where buying should be off the table. I can’t say trade Quinn Hughes yet, it’s too early for that and you have to see how the season plays out, but at this moment as the Canucks, you can’t be in on Pavel Zacha, for example. You’re not a Pavel Zacha move away from righting the ship, and you can’t take the risk of mortgaging additional future assets.

“You’re going to have to ride it out the way you built this roster, and if it leads you to a bottom-10 finish in the league, then you have to have some conversations down the road. At the bare minimum, this team should not be discussing trading for help because it hasn’t proven it deserves those reinforcements yet.”

Quads pointed to the pattern of half-measures that have defined Vancouver’s front office approach for a decade.

“There were years where publicly the ownership and management were saying, ‘We really like our young players, we’re going to commit, we have to stick to our timeline and our process,’ but it was always a shortcut here and there,” he said. “It was one foot in the rebuild pool while the rest of their moves were trying to win now.”

That constant hedging, Harm added, is exactly how the Canucks ended up with a roster that lacks the foundation of a true contender – especially down the middle.

“The team’s biggest issue is its centre depth right now. They have one top-six centre in Pettersson, but when you retrace the steps, why does this team have centre issues?” he said. “They had Miller and Horvat, and they moved those guys to address some of the holes on the back end. The first-round picks in those trades indirectly became Marcus Pettersson and Filip Hronek.

“If you had accumulated draft picks while you were rebuilding, drafted maybe a single defenceman outside of Quinn Hughes, maybe you wouldn’t have been in this spot. If you have other young defencemen coming, you don’t have to trade Miller and Horvat to address back-end needs. If you had just done it properly the first time, you would have perhaps been able to keep those assets down the middle and had a proper team rather than robbing from your centre depth to pay for your back-end goals.”

For Quads and Harm, the message was clear: Vancouver’s decade-long attempt to skip the hard part has only delayed the inevitable. If the Canucks want to truly contend one day, they’ll have to stop patching holes and finally do what they’ve avoided all along: rebuild, for real this time.

You can watch the full replay of the show below!