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Pity goalie Ben Scrivens and the rest of the Edmonton Oilers: Since their Cup appearance in 2006, the Oilers have won just 261 games, and will be in the running for their fourth No. 1 pick in six years.Aaron Doster

There have been six coaches. There have also been 81 forwards, 53 defencemen and 13 goalies, seven top-10 picks in the last eight drafts – including three at first overall – and yet the results are the same.

The Edmonton Oilers are still terrible.

In the nine seasons since finishing as runners-up in the 2006 Stanley Cup Final, the Oilers have won just 261 hockey games – or an average of only 31 for every 82 games played. They averaged 71 points a season in that span, compared with the NHL average of 92.

They have been so bad for so long, and have so little to show for it, that they now serve as a cautionary tale for any franchise looking to go the scorched-earth route to rebuilding success.

Sometimes it doesn't work.

There's a lesson in that for the Toronto Maple Leafs as they head down a similar path.

The Leafs have not been a model franchise; they've simply been a mess in a different way. There was never a teardown with a focus on the draft in Toronto – the Leafs simply muddled along in an indeterminate, mediocre direction.

On Monday night in Edmonton, both teams met in a clash of the non-titans, a match-up of teams that had won a combined 10 games in regulation in the past three months. (One was a head-to-head meeting last month in Toronto.)

Neither team started the season attempting to tank; they both pictured a climb of some kind back in October. Both have since fired their coaches – to little effect – and have general managers on hot seats.

The big difference is the Leafs are only starting their intentional descent now, with no real hope of contention for years. What can they learn from the Oilers?

1. Don't rush the kids

This one should be written in all caps and stapled to the helmet of every youngster the Leafs draft in the coming years.

The problem with rushing every high draft pick into the NHL when they're 18 or 19 years old isn't necessarily that you "ruin" them, which is often the concern you hear the most about. The bigger issue that Edmonton has run into is they've put players such as Taylor Hall high in the lineup, had them rack up points on brutal teams, and then paid them handsomely right out of their entry-level contracts for racking up said points.

Building a team under the salary cap is as much about getting value as it is about getting talent, and paying young players big money to waste their prime years struggling on bad teams makes no sense.

2. Have a plan. Stick to the plan

The best way to avoid overplaying your kids is to improve the roster slowly and steadily around them. So you have to add talent in a variety of ways, and build up as you go.

The Oilers never really started the road up. They had 62 points in 2010; they are on pace for less than 60 this season.

The key is setting a target for when you're going to get better – whether it's two, three or four years away – and making most of your organizational decisions with that goal in mind. You can't build a foundation if you're living year-to-year, trading away useful players midseason for draft picks, and vaguely referencing the distant future.

At some point it has to coalesce into something, the way it has in Tampa Bay under Steve Yzerman, who took over a Lightning team in 2010 that was coming off three playoff-less seasons.

3. Whoever is in charge better be good

Ultimately, points No. 1 and 2 come back to this: You need someone who's open-minded, smart and unshakable in charge to set the tone for it all.

In a league that's getting progressively more complex, the Oilers have been an organization with a methodology rooted in their glory days of the 1980s, and the resulting mistakes have hurt them.

The responsibility for the Leafs' rebuild rests almost entirely with president Brendan Shanahan and on the skills of the people he puts in the front office and behind the bench.

That's not a long list, and it sounds easy. But it's not. Part of the difficulty for the Leafs will be the fact that so many other teams, such as Buffalo, are trying to go this same route. The other new wrinkle is that the NHL has revamped the lottery to make it more difficult for the lowest-ranked team to get the number-one pick, largely in response to what the Oilers have done.

Not only has Edmonton bungled its rebuild; it made rebuilding harder for everyone else.

But at least the Oilers showed how not to do it.

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