What if 'rebuild' has become one of the NRL's biggest excuses?
For years, the word has been used to explain why a team needs more time, why success cannot come immediately and why a poor season should be viewed as part of a longer-term plan.
Sometimes a rebuild is necessary. But somewhere along the way, it has also become a safety net, a way for clubs to lower expectations rather than simply getting the job done with the players they have.
The Newcastle Knights have just shown why that safety net needs to be thrown away.
Nobody expected Newcastle to be playing finals football in 2026, let alone reaching a preliminary final. After collecting the wooden spoon last year, there were genuine reasons to believe they needed a major overhaul.
Questions surrounded almost every area of their squad.
Was Kalyn Ponga still worth the salary-cap investment? Could their forward pack compete? Was Dylan Brown the right man to lead their halves, and had Newcastle spent too much on a player still finding his way as a halfback?
Then there were the departures of Leo Thompson and Jack Cogger, alongside questions over veterans such as Dane Gagai and Tyson Frizell.
The easy answer would have been to call it a rebuild.
Justin Holbrook could have arrived, pointed to the wooden spoon and asked everyone to be patient while he rebuilt the roster.
Instead, he backed himself and his new team.
The Knights went into 2026 without a safety net. Rather than treating the season as preparation for something better down the track, they decided they were going to have a crack now.
By Round 10, they had already matched their entire 2025 win tally. They have since doubled their try tally from last season and surpassed their 848 tackle breaks from 2025, sitting on 950, the most in the competition.
That isn't a team waiting for its rebuild to arrive. It is a team that decided to not buy into a victim mentality and make changes now.
And perhaps the best example of why that approach has worked is Phoenix Crossland.
Crossland made 879 tackles in 2025. This year, he leads the competition with 1,055.
Yet his attacking numbers have gone in the opposite direction, dropping from 905 run metres at an average of 39 per game last season to 291 metres at 12 per game in 2026.
That isn't regression. It is role definition.
Holbrook recognised that Crossland's greatest strength is his defence and stopped asking him to be something he wasn't. His job was to defend, while the attacking responsibility could be left to the players around him.
It sounds simple, but it represents a much harder coaching philosophy than simply replacing players who aren't performing in all areas.
Changing players doesn't automatically fix a team. Sometimes you have to change the way those players are being used.
That is what Holbrook has done.
The Knights didn't suddenly recruit a completely different squad that had high expectations or long-term hopes. Harrison Graham arrived with only 11 NRL games to his name, Trey Mooney had played just four games in 2025 and Dom Young was returning from a difficult season at the Roosters.
These weren't signings that magically solved every problem or young guns that could be the future with years of development. They were players Holbrook believed he could get more out of immediately.
That philosophy became even more important when injuries hit. Newcastle were without Dylan Lucas, Dylan Brown and Trey Mooney, while they had the sixth-most injuries in the competition, with $2,131,042 of their salary cap unavailable throughout the year.
Yet ‘rebuild' never became an excuse. They simply kept going.
And that is what makes Newcastle's season so significant.
Holbrook had every reason to ask for patience. He had just inherited a wooden-spoon, lost key players and still had enormous question marks surrounding his team.
Instead, he backed his coaching, trusted his juniors, gave Fletcher Sharpe a key role and trusted Crossland at hooker.
He didn't look at the roster and decide it wasn't good enough.
He looked at the roster and decided it was his job to make it good enough.
That is the mentality the rest of the NRL should be taking notice of.
Because “rebuild” has become too comfortable.
It can be genuine, but it can also become a convenient way of saying a team isn't ready yet. There is always another season to target, another recruitment window to wait for and another weakness to fix before a club can finally expect results.
The Knights have shown what happens when you remove that safety net.
You go for it.
You coach the players you have rather than constantly looking for the players you don't.
You trust your young players, improve the ones already in your system and accept that there is no guarantee the perfect roster will ever arrive.
Sometimes the answer isn't another three years of rebuilding. Sometimes you just have to stop waiting for the perfect team and get the best out of the one you have.
The Knights did exactly that.
They played without a safety net and now they are one win away from a Grand Final.
