There are only two reasons to engage in a full-on rebuild as an NHL team. One practical and the other aspirational.

The practical reason is that you have no other choice. Your stars have aged out or left for greener pastures. Your futures have been traded away or have failed to replace your stars. A previous regime’s foundation has crumbled and the only thing left is to build something new.

The aspirational reason is to build an enduring Stanley Cup contender.

Rebuilds come with a lot of pain and attendant risk. Multiple seasons of hopelessness and bottom-of-the-league finishes. Pending free agents looking for the exits. Fanbases resigned to looking only into the distant future for hope.

One of the key steps to building a legit contender is finding an era-defining talent, like a Johnny Gaudreau or Jarome Iginla. The kind of guy who can form the nucleus of a core for a decade.

However, the single superstar is necessary, but not sufficient, to create a team that can consistently contend for a Cup. That may get you out of the basement, but it won’t keep you in the penthouse.

How many stars do you actually need?

In fact, most NHL contenders boast at least five stars on their roster. For example, let’s look at the Tampa Bay Lightning.

They’ve spent the past decade hanging around the top of the NHL, going on deep playoff runs, and winning multiple Cups. A true contender.

Their primary core of Nikita Kucherov, Brayden Point, Victor Hedman and ​​Andrei Vasilevskiy has consistently been supplemented by other star performers, including Steven Stamkos, Mikhail Sergachev, Brandon Hagel and Jake Guentzel over the years.

A similar pattern emerges when you look at other dynastic teams of the recent past, like the Chicago Blackhawks (Jonathan Toews, Patrick Kane, Duncan Keith, Marian Hossa and Brent Seabrook) or current heavyweights like the Colorado Avalanche (Nathan McKinnon, Cale Makar, Martin Necas/Miiko Raantanen and Gabriel Landeskog).

There’s obviously more to building a great team over multiple seasons than this, but the Five Star Rule is a simple, orienting North Star for rebuilding teams like the Calgary Flames. A clear rubric for grading the rebuild’s progress.

Patience is a must

Collecting a bunch of draft picks isn’t enough. Drafting a new superstar isn’t enough, either. Trying to accelerate out of the rebuild too early by signing or trading for respected veterans can short-circuit your efforts.

It is, of course, not required to pick every star on a contender. Hagel, Necas and Hossa all were acquired through trades, but they were supplementary additions to an established, homegrown core. They joined players who grew up in the league together, building substantial chemistry along the way.

Calgary is only just beginning this process. While this year will mark four seasons out of the playoffs, general manager Craig Conroy has only had two drafts so far to plant the seeds of a contention-level “five-star” pipeline. With zero lottery picks to date, the organization still needs to pick both early and often to make this a reality.

While “get a lot of stars, be great” is a very obvious strategy for building an NHL team, the issue is one of timing and patience. Ownership and the front office usually is eager to exit a rebuild as soon as possible. The temptation to stop being bad once one or two star kids arrive can spur decision-makers to thirst for a playoff berth as soon as possible.

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That can result in pre-emptive signing of expensive veterans and trading away of prospects and draft capital, turning a potential contending roster into a mushy middle “competitive” one.

And if the Flames are going to face four, five, six or more seasons out of the playoffs, down near the bottom of the league, the fate they most want to avoid is building another team that tops out as just “competitive.”

Calgary already has a much better futures cache than when former GM Brad Treliving left. The coming draft could result in the team picking a true superstar-level talent.

But if the team focuses not just on finding one core player, but assembling four or five, it could help them build a true contender for the first time in decades.