Sharks GM Doug Wilson: 'The rebuild is committed to'

Every year the San Jose Sharks are one of the league's most successful franchises. Then the playoffs start.

Despite a decade-plus run of regular season success, the Sharks have spent the past couple of months looking at a core that has never advanced beyond the Western Conference final and they've made a determination: "we're not good enough."

"I don’t think we feel we’re close enough with where the other teams are at," general manager Doug Wilson said during a session with Bay Area sports media on Tuesday per csnbayarea.com's Kevin Kurz. "They went through [a rebuild]. They’re there. I honestly think we’d be fooling ourselves.

"The rebuild is committed to. The players that fit for now and the future, their growth is going to be the primary thing. … Remember where we’re trying to get to. It’s not about here, it’s about there."

Paraphrasing Wilson, Kurz passes along the critical nugget that the Sharks, in the pursuit of postseason success, are willing to take a step backwards in the short-term. Will veteran pieces like Joe Thornton and Patrick Marleau have the patience to go through a rebuilding process?

"That’s really the ultimate question," Wilson said when reporters posed that question. "I don’t want to put a name on you, but you’re a guy that hasn’t won, had a long career, you want to go win. You might say, ‘this doesn’t fit for me.’ I may go to the next guy who has won a Cup. He says ‘I’ve won a Cup, I want to be here, I want to be part of it. That’s an interesting part of my process, and I may want to be a coach in the future.’ I may want to have him because he just fits.

"Then you may have another guy that looks at it and says ‘jeez, I think I want [to stay], but after a couple months, they’re serious about what they want to do. It doesn’t fit for me."

Wilson also told reporters that he's made his club's new posture known around the league, and that there's a good deal of interest in Sharks players. "I’ve had a lot of calls, a lot of people at the GM meetings (last week in new York), they know where we’re going," Wilson said of the types of conversations he's having with his GM colleagues. "[We've] now become a tomorrow team. When you spell that out, it does create a response."

So perhaps there's something to both Marleau and Thornton being mentioned in trade rumors involving Eastern Conference clubs over the past month?