DENVER — It’s entirely possible that the 30th, 31st or 32nd pick in the 2026 NHL Draft becomes a really good NHL player.Mavrik Bourque was the No. 30 pick in 2020, and he’s a key depth scorer for the Dallas Stars. Joe Veleno was No. 30 in 2018, and he’s been a solid bottom-sixer in the league for years. Eeli Tolvanen was No. 30 in 2017, and he’s carved out a nice career with 92 goals over 423 games. Rickard Rakell was the 30th pick in 2011, and Brock Nelson was the 30th pick in 2010 — both have had excellent careers as top-six mainstays.Of course, it took Bourque six years to really break through. Veleno’s just a journeyman role player. Tolvanen’s a one-time 20-goal scorer. And no other players taken in that range dating back to Rakell and Nelson have amounted to much of anything.So for the Colorado Avalanche, Nicolas Roy’s overtime goal in Game 2 against the Los Angeles Kings this spring was worth one of those picks — the one in 2027 — all by itself. Having Nazem Kadri back on the top power-play unit and as a luxury third-line center as they chase another Stanley Cup was clearly worth the one in 2028. Nelson’s Selke Trophy-caliber season as the Avs’ second-line center certainly was worth this year’s first-rounder plus prospect Calum Ritchie. And the 2028 second-rounder that Colorado sent to the Pittsburgh Penguins along with Sam Girard was worth it just for Brett Kulak’s series-clincher in overtime against the Minnesota Wild last week.The hockey world looked at all of those as steep prices at the time. They all look like steals in hindsight, especially considering how late in the first round Colorado’s pick surely will be for the foreseeable future.The Avalanche don’t need some project that’ll take a handful of years to get to Denver. The second round in 2028, are you kidding? That might as well be the seventh round in 2048. The Avalanche care about right now — this playoff run, this Western Conference final against the Vegas Golden Knights, this Stanley Cup. Quite literally nothing else matters.“We’re trying to win, right?” Colorado general manager Chris MacFarland said. “So we’re sacrificing some of that youth, some of those picks and prospects.”The NHL is in the age of the long-term rebuild, in which teams go through painful, years-long processes of tearing their roster down to the studs, only to slowly and patiently and painstakingly put it back together through the draft. It’s what the Chicago Blackhawks have been doing for four years. It’s what the San Jose Sharks are doing. It’s what the Anaheim Ducks have done. It’s what the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Vancouver Canucks might be considering.But the Western Conference finalists, like the two-time champion Florida Panthers before them, didn’t build from within. They built from without. Gutsy trades. Aggressive free agency. Savvy pro and amateur scouting. The occasional waiver-wire pickup.The Avalanche had no first-round pick in 2024 or 2025. They have no first-round pick in 2026, 2027 or 2028, either. They’ve dealt away their second-round picks in 2026, 2027 and 2028. They have no third-round picks in 2026, 2027 and 2028. Only three players on their roster were actually drafted by Colorado: Gabriel Landeskog (2011), Nathan MacKinnon (2013) and Cale Makar (2017). All of them were taken in a different era of Avalanche hockey.“We’ve got high, high-end drafted players that are still with us and we’re fortunate to have, and we had other ones that are no longer with us,” MacFarland said. “But the cycle that it’s kind of been building on over the last 7-8 years, that’s just part of the beast.”It’s not just trades and standard free agency, either. European and college scouting play a huge role in replacing what is lost in draft capital. MacFarland pointed to undrafted goaltender Pavel Francouz, whom Colorado’s scouts found in the KHL and who went on to play in seven games of the Avalanche’s 2022 Cup run; Logan O’Connor, an undrafted winger signed out of the University of Denver who’s been a key depth player for the Avs for years; and Sam Malinski, a defenseman signed out of Cornell.“There’s lots of different ways to skin the cat,” MacFarland said.Of the 20 players who started Colorado’s first game of the 2024-25 season — in Las Vegas — only nine are still with the team. So MacFarland has been building the plane while coach Jared Bednar’s been in the air. It helps that MacFarland has been in the Colorado front office for 11 seasons, and Bednar has been the head coach for the last 10. The GM has a good sense of who’s going to fit and who isn’t.This is MacFarland’s first time as a finalist for the NHL GM of the year, which is voted on by the other GMs. Bednar said it’s been a long time coming.“Oftentimes with the work you put in, and the blood, sweat and tears, there’s a delayed reaction, a delayed recognition of that,” Bednar said. “This team, for me, wasn’t just built in this year. It was built over the last couple years. … A lot of the tough (decisions) that we’ve made over the years, especially in the last couple of years, they all seem to be turning out and working out pretty well for us again this year. It doesn’t always guarantee success, but I think he’s putting us in a position to have success year over year.”The hyper-aggressive Golden Knights are no different. They had no first-round pick in 2022 and 2025, and have none in 2026 or 2027. No seconds in 2023, 2024, 2028 and 2029. No third in 2027 and 2028. Only two current Vegas players were drafted by the Golden Knights (Pavel Dorofeyev and Kaedan Korczak), with four others (William Karlsson, Shea Theodore, Reilly Smith and Brayden McNabb) acquired through the 2017 expansion draft.Yet look at the 2015 draft. The No. 2 pick was Jack Eichel. The No. 4 pick was Mitch Marner. The No. 5 pick was Noah Hanifin. All of them Golden Knights.“Well, we didn’t have a team in 2015,” Vegas GM Kelly McCrimmon said with a grin.Vegas owner Bill Foley was never going to let the Golden Knights be perennial losers, but even he couldn’t have foreseen the team reaching the Stanley Cup Final in its first season. McCrimmon said that “changed the calculus for the organization a little bit, and we’ve been trying to win ever since.”To win now. Right now. It was a quiet trade deadline for Vegas this time around, but this is a group built through aggression. Some teams see draft picks as precious commodities to hoard, pieces of a grand puzzle that’ll be years in the making. The Golden Knights see draft picks as mere assets, cash on hand burning a hole in their pockets.“It’s a blessing to be on this team for nine seasons now,” Karlsson said. “We’ve gone for it every year. As you get older, the chances to win are fewer. So I do appreciate that the organization and management always want to go for it.”After more than a quarter-century of going nowhere slowly, the Panthers championship teams changed course dramatically, with GM Bill Zito coming in and supplementing a drafted core of Aleksander Barkov, Aaron Ekblad and Anton Lundell with trades (Matthew Tkachuk, Sam Reinhart, Sam Bennett, Brandon Montour, Seth Jones), free agents (Carter Verhaeghe, Sergei Bobrovsky) and waiver pickups (Gustav Forsling).It’s quite a contrast with one of the two teams left standing in the Eastern Conference. The Montreal Canadiens have made some important additions, starting right at the top with captain Nick Suzuki (who was originally drafted by, of all teams, Vegas). But Cole Caufield, Juraj Slafkovský, Ivan Demidov, Lane Hutson, Kaiden Guhle, Oliver Kapanen and Jakub Dobeš were all drafted in the last seven years — all but Dobeš in the first or second rounds. The Carolina Hurricanes, Montreal’s opponent in the Eastern Conference final, is a hybrid of both, with several drafted core pieces (Sebastian Aho, Andrei Svechnikov, Seth Jarvis, Jaccob Slavin, Jackson Blake) but plenty of key additions (Logan Stankoven, Nikolaj Ehlers, Jordan Staal, Jordan Martinook, K’Andre Miller, Sean Walker).“When you look at Tampa and Florida, they’ve used similar strategies, Colorado, (too),” McCrimmon said. “But it’s really a break from what the norm has been for a long, long time. And to that other avenue of building a team (through the draft), there are some teams in our league right now that are really coming into their own having used that. There’s a lot of customer pain along the way. You have to make good decisions, you have to draft good players if that’s the strategy that you adopt.”Chicago, San Jose and now Vancouver are hoping to be the next Montreal, the next Anaheim. But why don’t more teams try to be the next Florida? The next Colorado? The next Vegas? Even the next Minnesota, as Bill Guerin has evolved into a full-blown, go-for-it GM with the Quinn Hughes trade and possibly more to come?Chicago GM Kyle Davidson will be picking in the top four for the fourth consecutive year, and the Blackhawks still seem years away from true contention despite next season being Connor Bedard’s fourth in the NHL. San Jose’s Mike Grier also will be picking in the top four for the fourth straight year (thanks to some help from the draft lottery), and while the Sharks are closer to the playoffs than the Blackhawks are, there are still so many roster holes to fill, even as Macklin Celebrini reaches megastar status.The Canucks are just starting out. How long will it take them to rebuild their talent pool through the draft? Three years? Five? The Detroit Red Wings are in Year 10.Well, here’s the thing: Davidson and Grier have two of the most secure jobs in the league. Ownership has fully bought into their long-term vision, and there’s minimal pressure to start winning championships anytime soon. Aggression, on the other hand, is risky. Had some of these trades not worked out as well as they did, MacFarland, McCrimmon and Zito would probably be out of a job.“It takes bold decisions, but maybe more importantly, it takes good decisions,” McCrimmon said. “Because it’s easy to trade draft picks away, (but) if you don’t convert those to real serviceable players on your team, now you’ve created two holes, right? You don’t have the draft picks to add people into your organization, and you don’t have a player that you traded for.“I look at Noah Hanifin — we put a first-round pick into the deal for Noah. He’s been a really good player for us. He signed an eight-year extension. That’s a decision that was a real good one. I look at Ivan Barbashev — we traded a young player that we had selected in the first round. Ivan’s been a great player for us. Obviously, Jack Eichel would be Exhibit A.”That young first-round pick McCrimmon traded to the St. Louis Blues for Barbashev ahead of the 2023 deadline? It was a center named Zach Dean. He played nine NHL games in 2023-24 and has been in the AHL ever since.He was the 30th pick in the 2021 draft.