In the short term, the Vancouver Canucks‘ California road trip this week produced two hard-fought games, one win and one loss.

But big picture, it served as a reminder of just how much stockpiling of talent a rebuild actually requires to come out the other end as a competitive team.

How one judges the success of a rebuild obviously varies. Some will say it’s only a success if it ends up in a Stanley Cup Championship, and we won’t argue with that high bar. For our purposes, though, we’ll say that, at the very least, the bar for the Canucks’ rebuild is coming out the other side with a consistently competitive team, capable of sustainable success and consistent playoff appearances. To be considered one of the NHL’s can’t-miss top ten teams.

And that’s a bar that, even with all of their young talent, the San Jose Sharks and Anaheim Ducks haven’t reached just yet. Which is a reminder of how much patience and stockpiling of young talent it takes to make all this losing the Canucks are currently doing actually worth it.

Let’s begin with the Ducks.

The Canucks would be ecstatic to land players like Cutter Gauthier, Leo Carlsson, and Beckett Sennecke during their rebuild. Who wouldn’t?

So how does a team with those players still find itself a coin flip to make the playoffs this season? Not to dumb it down too much, but it would appear that the Ducks need even more talent surrounding those players to compete on a consistent basis. The Ducks still have all their upcoming first-round draft picks and three second-round picks in 2027. They’ve of course got more help on the way, having just selected Roger McQueen 10th overall in the 2026 NHL Draft.

For the Ducks’ rebuild, they seem to have gotten the part about locking up their young talent early wrong, and hope that a rising NHL salary cap can bail them out a bit in the years to come. But the point is: even with all the talent they’ve drafted, the Ducks’ rebuild still isn’t guaranteed to be a successful one. Of course, we could talk about the Montreal Canadiens as the opposite of this, and a solid blueprint for the Canucks to try to follow, but that would be steering off course and is something we’ve written about plenty before already.

So instead, let’s now talk a bit about the Sharks, the second California team the Canucks’ just played.

By his standards, 20-year-old superstar Macklin Celebrini had a relatively quiet night on Thursday night against his hometown team. So instead, it was Will Smith, the Sharks’ 2023 fourth overall pick, who stepped up and scored two goals to help spark the Sharks’ comeback victory.

Held off the scoresheet last night and not exactly off to the hottest of starts this season was 2025 second overall pick Michael Misa.

Oh, and 2026 second overall pick Ivar Stenberg was also held pointless. And the Sharks still won the game. Are you seeing a pattern here?

The Sharks have selected in the top five of four straight drafts. They landed a generational talent in Celebrini at first overall along the way, and don’t appear to have made any big whiffs with any of their selections.

And even with that embarrassment of riches, they’re not exactly done with their rebuild.

The Sharks chose to make their team worse in the here-and-now this past offseason when they traded William Eklund to the Ottawa Senators for the ninth overall pick in this past summer’s draft. That gave the Sharks three first-round picks, allowing them to add highly-touted defence prospects Keaton Verhoeff and Ryan Lin on top of landing Ivar Stenberg at second overall.

Can the Canucks stay patient enough to be in a similar position where they’re still adding that much young talent in the draft 3-4 years from now? They better, or they risk doing what we’ve seen before: “rebuilding” into another middle-of-the-pack team capable of not doing much more than being “in the conversation” for a wild card spot year after year. To their credit, Ryan Johnson and the Sedins have said all the right things, and their actions have followed. Trading Marcus Pettersson for a first-round pick certainly stands out as their best rebuilding move so far. But they’ve still got decisions to make on a few more players over 24 years old that will help us better judge how the Canucks’ rebuild is actually going to go. For now, they’re preaching patience, and that’s exactly what many in this fanbase have wanted to hear for a long time.

And here’s the really sick part. Even if the Canucks are patient enough, it might not end in a Stanley Cup — it might not even end with them being a consistent top-10 team in the league. There’s no can’t-go-wrong approach to this, and no guarantee that you won’t whiff on a top-five selection, either.

But what we do know is that what the Canucks were trying over the last 10+ years — constant shortcuts and retools instead of going through the painful part for an extended period of time — wasn’t going to work either.

And so the teams the Canucks faced on this road trip help remind everyone that this rebuild is going to be filled with plenty more long losing streaks and that, at minimum, the Canucks are going to need to lose a lot more games for a few more seasons and accumulate more future assets via more savvy trades if they want to see this thing through.