Doug Wilson's Plan for the San Jose Sharks' Rebuild Deserves Serious Criticism

San Jose Sharks general manager Doug Wilson said a lot of significant things in a meeting with the team’s season-ticket holders on Thursday.

When he wasn’t rehashing San Jose’s decision to strip Joe Thornton of his captaincy or taking gratuitous shots at Patrick Marleau’s plus/minus, he spent time defending his handling of a difficult transition period as the team attempts to shift responsibility to younger players.

David Pollak of the San Jose Mercury News has rightly been receiving accolades for his coverage of this whole fiasco, and in two articles for that outlet, he detailed many of Wilson’s statements. Some of Wilson’s comments, such as those undisciplined ruminations about Thornton and Marleau, were ill-advised and possibly even damaging. His defence of San Jose’s rebuild was merely unconvincing.

According to Pollak, Wilson was asked if he accepted any of the blame for the problems the team has had this season and if he would do things differently if he had the chance. Wilson responded by talking about the need for patience during a rebuild and stressing that the team “did an awful lot this summer.”

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Except, of course, Wilson and the Sharks really didn’t. They talked a good game—Wilson boldly told Eric Gilmore of NHL.com that San Jose was now a “tomorrow team”—but when it came time for action in the summer, the Sharks did things such as sign John Scott, take away Thornton’s captaincy and let a couple of veterans on expiring contracts walk.

Did those decisions open up some ice time for younger players? Sure. Did they dramatically advance a Shark’s rebuild? Not remotely. However, per Pollak, that didn’t stop Wilson from declaring victory, though:

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I'm going to give you a statement I believe in: ‘Vision without action is a dream; action without vision is a nightmare.’ We put a crystal-clear plan in place. I told everybody exactly what we were going to do and we followed through.

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There’s nothing laudable about the early stages of a rebuild; any idiot can make a team worse. Wilson only managed the bare minimum in that regard because the Sharks are still laden with veterans who, thanks to the magic of the no-trade clause, have significant control over their respective futures. Nobody wins GM of the Year for making his team moderately worse.

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And as fans in Atlanta, Edmonton, Toronto and countless other cities can attest, this is the easy part. The hard part in rebuilding isn’t tearing a decent team down—it’s erecting a great team in its place.

Back in August, San Jose coach Todd McLellan told NHL.com’s Dan Rosen that “the players that are with our organization are part of the solution and not the problem now” and that the team had reset the organizational “hierarchy and culture.” Combine those comments with Wilson’s suggestion that the Sharks were focused on 2015-16, and it seems that the organization feels it has already taken the most critical steps despite the sad necessity of a microscope to identify what those steps were.

The cost of San Jose’s adherence to an allegedly crystal-clear plan is also readily apparent. As of this writing, the Sharks sit three points out of the postseason and are in serious danger of missing the playoffs entirely. If they do, that’s going to prove costly to the organization, which will forfeit a significant chunk of change thanks to the loss of those home playoff games.

More significantly, the Pacific Division is wide open, and a better San Jose team would have a pretty reasonable path to the Conference Final. It’s entirely possible that if Wilson had spent the summer trying to make his team a little better rather than a little worse, they’d be contending for the Stanley Cup.

Wilson’s vision for the Sharks has been poorly articulated and often at odds with his actions, which have been tentative and in some cases damaging. San Jose is basically the same team as ever but with just enough subtracted to probably put the team on the wrong side of the playoff divide. It’s hard to see how anything the team has done in the last year makes a Stanley Cup championship more rather than less likely.

Wilson apparently believes in his plan. He hasn’t given anyone else any reason to do so. 

Jonathan Willis covers the NHL for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter for more of his work.