To call the Conor Garland trade a controversial one would be a step too far. Most fans and followers of the Vancouver Canucks came away from the Trade Deadline Eve transaction that sent Garland to the Columbus Blue Jackets feeling more or less fine about the whole thing, or at the very least glad that it was over and done with.

But if we were to look at the Canucks’ four major trades of the 2025-26 season – those being the trades of Quinn Hughes, Kiefer Sherwood, Tyler Myers, and Garland himself – the one whose return was most hotly debated is definitely Garland’s. Hughes brought back one of the largest trade packages in modern history. Sherwood landed two second-rounders as a pending UFA. Some felt Myers could have gone for more than a second and a fourth, but probably not all that much more.

Given Garland’s entire body of work since joining the Canucks, given his usual consistency, given his unparalleled levels of effort on the ice, one can’t help but feel as though the second and third round picks the Blue Jackets paid for Garland constituted some form of an underpay.

If there’s an extra layer of complaint that has been levelled at the Garland return, it has to do with the timing of the picks, more so than the picks themselves. The third round pick will come in this year’s draft, but the second – the main prize, so to speak – comes from the 2028 Entry Draft, a date more than two years away.

In the wake of the Garland trade, this was perhaps the most common critique: “The picks are fine enough, we guess, but do they have to be so far away?”

This wasn’t even the most future-flung pick the Canucks traded for around this deadline. That honour goes to the 2029 fourth-rounder they got back from Dallas for Myers. But the sentiment remains the same, and it’s that such draft picks might be too far into the future for the Canucks’ own rebuilding purposes.

It’s not hard to see where these thoughts are coming from. Being a supporter of a rebuilding team is a patient game already, and any extra patience required is a big ask. We’ve heard a whole bunch of different timelines thrown around for the Canucks’ ongoing rebuild, from the standard “two to three years” to more recent admissions that it might take longer than that. Most hope and assume that the Canucks will at least be moving closer to contention by the time we hit the 2030s. So what does that mean for draft picks that are slated at the tail-end of the 2020s?

Any player selected outside of the first round is very likely to need at least a few years of development before making the NHL, if they ever make it at all. A player selected with that 2028 second-round pick the Canucks got back for Garland, then, is probably not making their debut until the 2030-31 season at the earliest, and is not hitting their prime years until the middle of the decade.

Any players selected in subsequent drafts have to wait even longer. And with more trades eventually coming in this rebuild, one has to expect the Canucks to continue accumulating picks in 2028, 2029, and beyond.

Will the prospects yielded by such selections arrive too late for the Canucks’ rebuild timeline, as some are so clearly worried it will be?

The answer to that is, of course, “no.” Or, to give a longer answer, “not if the Canucks do their rebuild right.”

It’s important to remember that getting the Canucks back to some sort of contender status is only the first stage of what could be called a successful rebuild. But one playoff appearance, or even one playoff run, does not a rebuilt team make. See the 2023-24 Canucks for any evidence one might need of that notion.

Truly successful rebuilds are those that build a team into a perennial contender, one set to compete for the playoffs and eventual playoff glory for a number of seasons in a row. In the end, it’s the only way to give one’s team a real shot at winning it all.

To bank everything on any one year, no matter how strong a team might be in that one year, is a fool’s pursuit. So much can go wrong in the sport of hockey, and every year, would-be contenders are sidetracked by injuries and other such barriers. Just look at the fabled 2011 Canucks, who built up the greatest contender in franchise history, only to be waylaid by Dan Hamhuis trying to balance Milan Lucic on his hip bones.

There are no guarantees of success in hockey if success is measured exclusively by Stanley Cups. But the closest one can come to that guarantee is by building a team that will get multiple shots at a championship over multiple consecutive years, so as to minimize that chance of something going wrong in each of those campaigns.

In other words, if the Canucks are going to rebuild right, they’ll be rebuilding to start competing around, say, 2030, but not to stop competing anytime near there. A properly rebuilt Canucks team should contend well into the next decade.

Which, to bring us back to our original point, is where all those far-flung draft picks will come in handy. It should translate into players showing up on the Vancouver roster on cheap entry-level contracts right at the beginning of their planned contention period, which is great. Those players can grow with the team, and their prime years should coincide with those later contending years.

Even draft picks made even further into the future will hold a vital role, too. The closer a team comes to contending, the more it has to think about budget – and these halcyon days of cap ceiling increases will have to end eventually. Come the 2030s, the Canucks may find themselves in need of cap space again. And that’s precisely when a bunch of incoming ELCs, perhaps selected in the 2029, 2030 and even 2031 Entry Drafts, will come most in handy. They’d ideally be able to slide onto the roster, replacing those pieces who have either aged or priced themselves out of the picture. The cycle gets going, the contending team sustains itself, and the odds of the Canucks finally bringing home a championship are greatly increased by that sustainability over time.

What we’re really trying to say here is that while picks from drafts that are years away inherently require some patience, they should not be looked at as a bad thing by a fanbase, and especially not this fanbase in particular. They’re signs of the team really committing to a truly long-term vision, and that’s something that has been all too absent in this franchise’s history.

This decade is already a write-off. It’s a good thing to be building toward the entirety of the 2030s being something to write home about instead.