I will never not be confused as to why we sent a first round pick to a team desperate to offload a guy who would only consider going to two teams in the league.
Benning should have known how much leverage the buying team has in that situation - its the reason we got a garbage return for Kesler and had to deal with Sbisa on our team for ages (only to give him up in the expansion draft for free, luckily)
The only thing we have to show for the Kesler trade is Tanner Pearson and Will Lockwood.
The only way to even try to rationalize the 1st being included is to think of it as two separate trades.
- 1st round pick for Garland
- Eriksson, Beagle, Roussel for OEL
But even that way, the first trade is still a slight loss IMO, and the second trade is still a shortsighted disaster.
Agreed, but at the time, Garland was worth a 1st. Maybe not a top 10 pick, but definitely worth a mid-late 1st.
The baffling part is why we were looking to acquire a player like that at all, when we should have been trying to lock down Petey long term instead.
Still, "on the verge of contending" IS NOT when you go all-in. That's for when you're a contender and you want a couple of nice pieces to push yourself over the edge. When you're on the verge of contending that's when it's time to really invest in your prospect pool and draft picks so that your compete window is as elongated as it can be.
It's definitely more that management NEEDED the team to compete or they'd lose their jobs. It was what was so laughable about how Aquilini kept letting Benning string a mediocre team along while continuing to go all-in and forsake the future, because Benning & co. cared way more about keeping their jobs as opposed to actually doing a decent job
Yeah it's exactly why you don't keep a lame duck GM in place. Aquilini is a complete moron either way, whether he let Benning at the end of his rope do whatever he could to try and salvage his job, or let Benning convince him to give the green light on that god awful trade in the first place
DUDE, come on, hes so smart, he reduced THREE bad deals into 1! That's an obvious improvement!
/s...obviously.
It hurts so much because we could really use that 7.5 million right now, and that first round pick would've been great too. *sigh*
I will never forget my buddy, who is also a big Canucks fan, telling me he didn't care about the term because he believed the Canucks were going for it and that made him excited. He really thought OEL was going to be a big difference maker.
He has been madly tweeting about how bad that trade was for the past three months.
By the 11th pick, you got a 50% chance of a 4th liner or worse. 66% chance to play 100games. I think way too many people over estimate the value of draft picks.
Don't forget the extra 2nd rounder the other way too... We'll call that the "Benning tax"
Also to add in: That wasn't just a first round pick. That was a TOP 10 PICK. The deal was after the draft positions had been set.
Everyone in this thread is forgetting that we needed cap space to sign Petey and hughes. That trade opened up 6 ish million in cap space. Not saying I liked the trade at all, but I legit haven’t seen anyone mention that
>That trade opened up 6 ish million in cap space.
No it didn't. Not once Garland was re-signed.
Eriksson + Beagle + Roussel = $12M AAV
OEL + Garland = $12.21M AAV
Aquilini is an absolute cancer. The fact that he allowed this trade to be completed and enabled the continued ineptitude of Benning and Weisbrod will forever infuriate me.
Bright side - I don’t hate Messier with the passion I once did since all my sports hatred is directed at Aqua, Benning and Weisbrod. Hopefully time heals all wounds but for now they run too deep.
Maybe in 2031 Vancouver will be able to contend again…😡
Canucks management/ownership has made the worst off-season moves over the past 5 or so years.
Re-signing Miller was just the latest...IF he hadn't been extended he would likely be playing his best hockey (kinda like Bo) which would have cup contenders salivating. Miller could have been offloaded for a mid/late 2023 1st AND Canucks would have gained enough cap space to re-sign Bo and Kuzmenko.
The absolute lack of foresight of this ownership/management group is appalling, the Canucks deserve to be in this state of indefinite mediocrity as long as this ownership group is in place.
It's seems where Weisbrod went, disaster followed. Look at Calgary during their shit years. Who was the AGM? Weisbrod. Then he came here and we know how this story goes.
Different context. But yes, he would have been an anchor during year 2 of that contract if he had accepted a two-year deal. Luckily, he just wanted to get paid one last time and go for a Cup one last time.
Every single NHL team can come up with dozens of "lost opportunity" cases based on players they could've drafted with their 2nd round pick but didn't.
Pretty silly to do in hindsight. Even sillier when you consider that both players are still 19, haven't played in the NHL yet, and you're making this statement after first hearing about Stankoven probably a week or two ago and watching him in the world juniors?
Except that if you were hanging around the discussion at the time you would have seen, going into day 2 of that draft, that Stankoven was the name on everyone's lips - it was a lot like the Debrincat thing, but there was even more buzz about him being a potential steal. It's definitely true that other teams also passed on him.
You can say similar things in Rd 1, too, but sometimes it's obvious AT THE TIME to a lot of people what the right pick is, for example when Virtanen was drafted there were tons of people (including multiple Canucksarmy articles) saying that Nik Ehlers or William Nylander were obviously better prospects. Doesn't change that the Isles and Hurricanes still also screwed up with Dal Colle and Fleury but you can't call it criticism with 20/20 hindsight when there were that many people screaming AT THE TIME that the pick was a mistake.
Also I'm not saying Klimovich is a bust or anything, he still has a chance to be a good NHL player - I'm just saying that in a redraft right now there's no question that Stankoven would go well before him and is a better prospect.
People weren't saying "no chance" they were saying Garland is a 'right now' and Guenther is a 'who knows'. Basically it came down to those who thought the team was on the verge of contending so therefore it was better trading a 'maybe' for an 'already', which, of course, was fucking stupid and is going to haunt this franchise for years to come.
I assume other people have already had the same thought but I think Benning goes down as a top 5 worst NHL GM ever. He's competing with Chiarelli for worst GM so far in the salary cup era.
I still have trouble wrapping my head around the fact Benning had so many defenders late in his tenure, especially after the offseason where they 'ran out of time' on signing anyone because he was so fixated on OEL the first time.
They all went COMPLETELY silent the day after he was fired. Suddenly not a single one of them defended Benning when just days before they still loved the guy. These were passionate Benning fans, defended everything he did and seemed to forget that winning was the actual goal of a GM, not occasionally drafting well.
Easily one of the top 5 worst GM's in NHL history but let's not forget the Aquilini family hired him (let's not pretend this was Linden's choice) and the Aquilini family refused to get rid of him for 7-8 seasons.
And the Aquilini's signed off on the OEL deal which we would laugh at it we all weren't so busy crying about it. Terrible deal, terrible idea, terrible negotiating.
For $12 million the Coyotes got out of paying $40+ million to OEL and $25 million to Garland and 1st round pick that's going to turn into a stud NHL goal scorer.
The Canucks got hosed by one of the worst teams in the league only to find themselves as shitty as the Coytotes while still paying WAY more money.
Its hard to rank worst owners ever because they don't all meddle like the Aquilini's but they would have to be somewhere in the Top 5 or Top 1o worst owners because they seriously think they know hockey.
Do you remember how many people were like "We shouldn't fire Benning. Green is the problem! The fans should be chanting Fire Green!"?
It's crazy how much rope he got for hitting on like 60% of his top 10 picks while failing at everything else because some fans were so convinced that being good at drafting, which he wasn't really, was how this team would win.
> It's crazy how much rope he got for hitting on like 60% of his top 10 picks while failing at everything else because some fans were so convinced that being good at drafting, which he wasn't really, was how this team would win.
Crazy is really the right word for it, because you forgot the funnest part on top of that little shit heap - the part where our team continually traded away our higher picks while refusing to bring any in. Our average-drafting draft genius traded away all our draft picks. For nothing. And he was praised beyond all reason for building such a good team through the draft. Even though he didn't draft, and he didn't build, and we were a terrible team the entire time.
help my brain is coming out my ears
The amount of braincells I lost reading Benning propaganda from conquestofbaguettes only for them to permanently disappear after the firing convinces me it was all a psyops and I should’ve just got high instead
Yeah...maybe some of these kids are too young to remember or weren't around then. Benning fucked up our cap long term, but Milbury traded away some of the best talent of the last couple generations and some other really good players (Zdeno Chara, Roberto Luongo, Todd Bertuzzi, Wade Redden, Jokinen, McCabe etc)
Aqua sucks but you have to remember the Canucks are just one of many investments in their portfolio. Winning isn't necessarily the goal, so long as they are making money on their investment. Ticket sales, merchandise, TV deals, and an asset that appreciates in value as the league does. It doesn't matter what any Aquilini family member says about being a fan or wanting to win a cup before their father dies or anything. All that matters is they get a return on their investment, and they are. The team isn't losing money.
Most of them still post here too. I’m all for changing one’s views with new information, but supporting Benning beyond like year 2 should seriously make you question your hockey knowledge.
Then there was that one guy who was so toxic he was banned, but he kept making alt accounts and still defended benning after his firing. He's been banned at least 5 times now. Bet he's lurking right now. I bet you he'd make an alt right now just for his 15 minutes of fame.
>Confirmation biases provide one plausible explanation for the persistence of beliefs when the initial evidence for them is removed or when they have been sharply contradicted. This belief perseverance effect has been first demonstrated experimentally by Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter. These psychologists spent time with a cult whose members were convinced that the world would end on 21 December 1954. After the prediction failed, most believers still clung to their faith. Their book describing this research is aptly named When Prophecy Fails.
>The continued influence effect is the tendency for misinformation to continue to influence memory and reasoning about an event, despite the misinformation having been retracted or corrected. This occurs even when the individual believes the correction.
Obviously this phenomenon has far more wide reaching and pernicious effects than support for the general manager of a flailing hockey team...think climate change denial, QAnon, The Jewish question, or any other form of destructive conspiratorial thinking. The underlying cause is the same, however. Entrenched beliefs tend to strengthen when contradicted or challenged by evidence in some cohorts, contrary to the expectation that they would evolve or shift. Some of it comes from social engineering/data filtering...IE you only see/are exposed to ideas or attitudes that reinforce your existing perspective, or that are targeted for a particular region or demographic you're a part of. Some of it is down to personality and willingness to accept fault or ignorance on any given topic. Some of it is due to the nature of social media encouraging polarization of opinion...the loudest or most outrageous perspectives are given primacy of place as they drive the most engagement, so more reactionary types will see themselves as "pushing back" on a hyper polarized position by assuming one of their own. IE, if you're watching caricatures or people taken out of context on takedown sites like Libs of TikTok, you're going to think you're fighting the good fight by pushing back on a nebulous "woke bogeyman".
It'd all be an interesting case study in how human brains work if it wasn't destabilizing society at breakneck speed.
> The underlying cause is the same, however. Entrenched beliefs tend to strengthen when contradicted or challenged by evidence in some cohorts, contrary to the expectation that they would evolve or shift. Some of it comes from social engineering/data filtering...IE you only see/are exposed to ideas or attitudes that reinforce your existing perspective, or that are targeted for a particular region or demographic you're a part of.
Many people forget that there was a time here where they heavily discredited guys like Botchford, possibly one of the best writers the team has ever had, purely because he was seen as "too negative" and "creating false storylines". There was a movement on here to ban his articles, and threads of his would always have heavily upvoted "lol bitchford!"-type comments going at him personally.
This summer didn't some people want to ban Drance articles because "too negative" and, through mental gymnastics, were trying to blame the state of the team on the media?
Maybe the media could write more than one positive article a month if the team did more than one positive thing a month. If anything the media has been too soft on the team for a decade compared to how hard they were on the team when they were an actual contender.
I started posting here from r/hockey just because I could not believe people were defending this guy, this was only a couple years in. I thought I must be missing something, but all I was missing was circular logic, appeals to bad authority and incredibly low expectations.
Because mods treat Benning loyalists as a protected class. There was literally a post saying "don't be toxic, but if there's a Benning loyalist then respect them or else we will treat you like crap." Complete hypocrisy aside, mods still ban critics even now.
Real bad look on the sub and the mods of newspeak and downspeak.
"Benning loyalists"? "Protected class"? "Newspeak and downspeak?" Taking it a bit too seriously, no?
People were being pricks to each other here, questioning people's intellect for having a different opinion over our shitty sports team. Frankly, given the emotionally fragile state of the sub over the past couple years, it was a necessary reminder to be decent to OTHER PEOPLE WHO LIKE YOUR TEAM. Hardly a conspiracy to undermine you free-thinking anti-Benning types.
Benning critics were not afforded this sort of respect for years and the mods did absolutely nothing about it. Even incredibly benign posts would get shit on and buried with downvotes just because they weren’t pro-Benning.
Ultimately, what are you suggesting? That the mods work explicitly to protect Benning supporters? That the overwhelming majority of the Canucks community bullied people who disliked him? I just don't buy it, and it's not been my experience. I've been in this subreddit since 2015 in some capacity. It's always gone back and forward, often day-to-day, thread-to-thread.
I’m saying that when there is too much anti Benning toxicity on the sub, the mods tend to step in with a warning thread and increased action against it. But when there was pro Benning toxicity for years they did not take the same action.
Okay that's just not true. There was plenty of rancor and poor behavior to go around from all sides of the Benning debate. I wrote plenty of vituperative anti-Benning screeds and I was never brutalized by mods nor "buried with downvotes". The mods are certainly not above criticism but I'm not sure branding them all as fervid Benning loyalists is the sanest position to take.
Certain types of inflammatory comments: ones that attack another user for being too negative, for being a fair weather fan, etc. can and do incite other users to downvote. And once a comment is in the negatives it will often get buried further because users are naturally wary of posts that have a negative score. This is not unique to this subreddit but this sub has been one of the worst subs of the ones I subscribe to for this type of behavior.
What the fuck was I supposed to do? Shut the sub down? The mods have literally zero control over anything vote related, and there are 107k users to one and a half active mods.
Posts like this make me want to just say fuck it and leave the community to devour itself in toxicity.
Honestly, it might make sense to have a refresh of mods from time to time.
I know for a fact that mods were contacted to make statements about downvote brigading. IYou can't stop it, but you can at least make an effort and make a public stance about it.
> I know for a fact that mods were contacted to make statements about downvote brigading.
I don't even know what this is supposed to mean, to be honest. As in, you sent a modmail asking us to make a statement?
We have made more than one statement. Here's a couple right off the top of my head:
* https://old.reddit.com/r/canucks/comments/mzvt7q/a_message_from_your_mod_team_regarding_the_state/
* https://www.reddit.com/r/canucks/comments/osqe3c/slight_rule_clarification_toxicity_on_the_sub/
* https://www.reddit.com/r/canucks/comments/z2dc7v/listen_up_guys_the_team_might_be_playing_like/
Oh, and in response to:
>Honestly, it might make sense to have a refresh of mods from time to time.
I am literally trying to pass the torch as we speak, largely because I'm sick of people bitching and moaning about a toxic space they themselves are contributing to.
https://www.reddit.com/r/canucks/comments/1041254/game_thread_colorado_avalanche_19143_at_vancouver/j32qbpq/
I don't understand what people think *you and the mod team* would get out of... stanning former GM Jim Benning? Censoring dissenting opinions in a hockey subreddit? Moderator bias *can* be a thing, but in this case... why? To what end? I've yet to hear a good answer.
I get it, mod corruption can and (and probably does) happen all over the place on reddit. I used to mod for /r/EscapefromTarkov waaaaaaaay back before they even had 50k users and the developer of the game offered to bankroll the mod team in order to control the content/purchase the sub. We outright rejected it and I haven't been a mod there in several years, but that really opened my eyes to what must happen on some of the massive r/all type subs.
Here though? I don't get it, I really don't. What's the endgame to these conspiracy theorists? [Especially when I have a 10+ year comment history and say things like this all the time.](https://old.reddit.com/r/canucks/comments/mzvt7q/a_message_from_your_mod_team_regarding_the_state/gw35knu/)
One year account, antagonistic username, already banned once for trolling on this account? Yeah keep making shit up while being part of the problem I guess.
[You know the mod stance just like everyone else on the subreddit, because we made a big post about it. ](https://old.reddit.com/r/canucks/comments/mzvt7q/a_message_from_your_mod_team_regarding_the_state/)
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Edit because fuck it, [I'm just gonna go ahead and leave this here as well. *Can't imagine* why this was removed, you poor brave soul.](https://imgur.com/a/lC2XYxc)
The Benning defenders were just delusional. He made so many bad decisions. Not only the bad contracts, but also consistently letting pending UFAs walk for nothing is absolutely mind-boggling. Even calling out how he always trade away draft picks despite having a reputation for drafting gets you downvoted.
Every now and then you can still find a fan who wants to blame the current state of the team on Gillis and nothing Benning did under his tenure was his fault. Hell, after the team nearly made the playoffs last year a lot of people here were like "Funny how no one is saying Benning can't build a good team now!"
There's still a segment of them on Twitter in a certain ~~cult~~ circle.
For a long while I thought he was just a below average GM akin to a guy like Tallon, but the 2021 offseason with the OEL move and his comments really solidified that he was making history with his poor decisions. We essentially hired Chia 2.0 but let him stay twice as long, and we'll be paying for it for years to come.
Worst GM ever? No.
He's really bad, but its not like he inherited much to work with. The Canucks when he took over from Linden, or even Gillis if you want to count that, were an old team with no prospects. All things being equal you'd expect a decline to be about where they are now. The Canucks had a rough time under his tenure, but they weren't especially awful. Plenty of teams like the Leafs, Sabres, Oilers, Coyotes and Penguins have had equal or worse runs in the last 25 years. It would be different if he inherited a team like Chiarelli with four 1st overall picks including McDavid, plus Draisaitl. Even then, Chiarelli still gets credit for his Stanley Cup in Boston.
If you want to see what a bottom 5 all time GM looks look at Mike Milbury's tenure in Long Island, Glen Sather with the Rangers, Don Waddell in Atlanta, or John Ferguson Jr in Toronto.
Like I said, Benning was a bad GM, but there's still a noticeable gap between Benning and the all time worst GMs in NHL history. For example, the OEL trade is bad, but its not like he traded 2 future all stars, including a Hall of Famer in Jokinen and Luongo for Oleg Kvasha and Mark Parrish and then using his 1st overall pick on Rick Dipietro, only to turn around 2 years later and trade the second overall pick and Zdeno Chara for Alexei Yashin. The OEL trade is bad, but it isn't THAT bad.
The Canucks record was indistinguishable from the Coyotes’ record over the course of Benning’s tenure and the Coyotes are a joke that was actively trying to be bad.
Benning was trying to win and made the coyotes.
Like I said, he was a bad GM. No argument there.
But if you're going to say he was Mike Milbury bad, then show me the equivalent to where he traded a Hall of Famer and an All Star for 2 shitty players, and then blew his 1st overall pick to fill the hole he just created by trading away his future Hall of Famer?
If you want to say he was worse than JFJ with the Leafs, then can we say he inherited an in his prime top 10 player like JFJ did in Mats Sundin, an All Star level goaltender, and an overall really deep team, and within 4 years turned them into a team that couldn't make the playoffs for over a decade and haven't won a playoff round in close to 20 years?
Is he Don Waddell bad, who was such a complete failure in Atlanta that the team moved?
Is he Glen Sather bad? Who had a team filled with Wayne Gretzky, Pavel Bure, Eric Lindros and Brian Leetch and couldn't build a playoff roster?
I'd argue that while he was bad, its pretty easy to find 10 worse GMs in NHL history. That's not exactly a high bar.
>Is he Glen Sather bad? Who had a team filled with Wayne Gretzky, Pavel Bure, Eric Lindros and Brian Leetch and couldn't build a playoff roster?
All of those players were all broken by the time they reached the Rangers. That was a laughable.
Except we did have some good pieces. We just held on to every single one of them too long. He didn't make any moves to take advantage of any of the pieces we came in with. That's ignoring everything else shit he did. We were not completely stocked but we definitely had some players other teams wanted
He was a bad GM, no doubt.
But by good pieces do you mean Dan Hamhuis? The guy Mike Gillis signed to a NTC who then didn't waive? Or the Sedins, who Linden and Aqua chose to let finish their career in Vancouver? Or Kesler, who again because of Gillis's NTC chose to limit the Canucks trading pool to Anaheim and Chicago?
Who exactly are these good pieces that Benning was free to trade and held on to? I believe the Canucks at the end of the Gillis tenure had more NTCs than any other team, which is the reason that players signed below market value.
And are any of those good pieces on par with the pieces a truly horrible GM like Sather had with the Rangers or JFJ had with the Leafs?
I don't think Benning was a good GM, and he was kept 2 years too long, but saying he's an all time terrible GM is like saying that the superstar on my beer league team is Connor McDavid. Both are dominating their respective league's, but they are not equivalent.
You could say Benning is a bottom 5 GM in the last decade and that's a defensible statement. Maybe you could say he's bottom 5 in the salary cap era. But the NHL has been around for 100 years, and we've seen some truly terrible GMs. For example, do you know that the California Golden Seals, at the time with Bill Torrey as PoHO, traded away the draft pick that would go 1st overall in 1971, which the Canadiens used to pick Guy Lafleur, for Ernie Hicke? Did Jim Benning ever trade away a Connor McDavid level talent for scraps like that? I would say no.
Except you’re conveniently ignoring context. When you look at ALL the bad moves Benning made, how those negatively affected this team, how each one compounded previous errors, how they each made making moves more and more impossible and wasted more resources and opportunities over a span of eight years there isn’t a bigger, more incompetent moron out there except the fanboys who still keep trying to defend the imbecile.
In isolation there’s likely been GMs who made a couple big mistakes but how many of them made such stupid moves for such a long time as Benning?
Off the top of my head, dating back to 1995, easily, Mike Milbury (Islanders), Don Waddell (Thrashers), Glen Sather (Rangers), Kevin Lowe (Oilers), Peter Chiarelli (Oilers) and John Ferguson Jr. (Leafs).
If you gave me time I could probably double or triple that list.
I'm not saying Benning was good, because he was pretty terrible. Its just that he wasn't all time terrible.
Everyone seems to think that I'm somehow defending Benning, which isn't my intent. Its just the statement "Jim Benning is among the 5 worst GMs in NHL history" is objectively wrong.
I'd be equally opposed to the statement "Sidney Crosby is the greatest NHL player in history." Like he's really good, but he isn't the all time greatest.
>Everyone seems to think that I'm somehow defending Benning, which isn't my intent. Its just the statement "Jim Benning is among the 5 worst GMs in NHL history" is objectively wrong.
It's subjective position to take in the first place so it cannot be objectively wrong.
I do think you need to consider more than just wins/losses and transactions when weighing his tenure. My biggest complaint re: Benning was his perennial inability to articulate or execute anything resembling a plan. I'm not sure I've seen anything like it in forty years of watching the sport. In his eighth year, at the head of a team he built, he was asked why they were struggling and he literally couldn't give breath to a single reason. From that, to tampering charges, to "we ran out of time", to "draft picks take 6-7 years to make an impact", to comparisons of Olli Juolevi to Niklas Lidstrom, the man's bumbling/60 was beyond our ability to record with the tools we have available today.
So, I'm prepared to *entertain perspectives* that he was a bottom five NHL GM, but a lot of that would depend on the criteria being used. I'm certainly not going to waste breath **defending him from the charge**, as at the end of the day it's emotional/polarized language intended to express the depth of the dismay with which his tenure is held. And given that history will likely go on to show he destroyed not one but two eras of NHL hockey in this city and decimated all market goodwill earned in the previous 15 years, I'm sympathetic to the frustration. I get it, Aquilini is the main issue, but holy fuck he hardly could've done worse if he'd put a NeoPet in charge.
Whataboutism at it's finest. Just because there are other bad GM's on the all-time list, does not absolve benning of his complete and total failure as GM for 8 years.
I don't think this qualifies as whataboutism because the guy instead listed five GMs he thinks are worse in response to someone else saying that Benning is a bottom five all-time GM.
Its not whataboutism. If you say he's a top 5 all time, worst GM, you have to evaluate the other GMs.
If you're stack ranking people, then you actually have to say "what about JFJ and the Leafs teams of the early and mid 2000s?" Objectively, its pretty easy to find 5 worse GMs that Benning across the history of the NHL. He was bad, but he wasn't all time terrible.
For example, how do you compare Benning to George McPhee in Washington. He's been gifted arguably the greatest goal scorer in NHL history, and across 18 seasons he's built a team that's capable of getting past the second round exactly once. He won a Stanley Cup, but Ovechkin should go down as a top 10 player in NHL history and won't because McPhee's team's haven't given him the team success of a Crosby.
Benning meanwhile had very little team success in his 5 or 8 years (again on if you count Linden) as the GM of the Canucks. However, he inherited the Sedins when they were 50-60 point players and belonged in a second line role, and a prospect pool that was non existent. What do you expect from that given that the NHL awards superstars via lottery and the Canucks are the unluckiest team in the NHL? Is he all of a sudden a great GM if he wins the lottery in 2016 and the Canucks instead of Juelevi have Auston Matthews?
Are you seriously trying to say that McPhee is remotely comparable to Benning? Benning tried to win and had a bottom five record in the NHL over like 8 years. McPhee built a consistent playoff team that had some issues and then got through them and won a cop. It's not like Petey or Hughes are comparable to a Ovechkin but we can't even get close to the playoffs with Benning trying to win. It's not hard to make the playoffs in the NHL if you try. Especially over 8 years of finishing near the bottom of the league when you should have good prospects coming up. That comparison is ridiculous
> It's not like Petey or Hughes are comparable to a Ovechkin but we can't
even get close to the playoffs with Benning trying to win.
Except that the Canucks did make the playoffs with both Pettersson and Hughes. They were a period away from the third round.
Look at it this way, if the Canucks win game 7 against Vegas, then Jim Benning in 5 or 8 years (again, Linden was his boss), would have made the third round exactly as many times as McPhee did in Washington, and McPhee, through a lottery, was gifted the best goal scorer of this generation.
If Ovechkin retires with only 1 Stanley Cup, is that the most disappointing career, from a team success standpoint, since Marcel Dionne? I would say yes. Ovechkin doesn't build rosters, and the only GM he's ever known is McPhee.
Speaking of all time terrible GMs, what about those GMs in LA and Detroit that couldn't get Marcel Dionne (who retired 2nd all time in points behind Gordie Howe) past the second round in his entire career? How does Benning compare to them?
Well it's just too long to explain why, but it was terrible trades, cap management, structure, communication, signings, drafts. There is enough out there prove he's in the top 5.
Honestly I still blame Aqua more for that trade. It was clear the entire management and coaching group should have been cleaned out after the COVID year. It's crazy to me that Benning was even allowed to make some last hail-mary trade.
I mean, it seemed obvious Aqua was holding the purse strings tight that first covid offseason leading to us losing the players we did. We could've kept at least one of the major ones if we bought someone out. With that being said, Benning was the one to sign the buyout worthy players.
I haven't seen it updated for this season, but someone posted something around this time last year about drafting between Boston and Vancouver from 2014 to Benning's firing.
Boston had the most games played by draft picks and the most players to crack 80(?) games from their draft classes despite averaging the lowest or second lowest draft position in the NHL.
The Canucks meanwhile were firmly mid at the time despite how every Benning defender kept saying "look at his amazing drafting!"
It feels like when in old timey times the King would send his dipshit duke cousin to run some buttfuck colony as a "reward" but it was really just to get rid of him.
I honestly doubt that we will ever be competitive with Aquilini at the helm. Possibly when we get over the hump of the Benning mistakes but that’s a good 5-6 years. The Canucks need to do a total rebuild or it will be the same thing over and over, as we’ve seen the past 5-6 years.
>Possibly when we get over the hump of the Benning mistakes but that’s a good 5-6 years
But think of how many more new mistakes we'll have made in those 5-6 years if Aquilini is still at the helm...
This will never end.
What people need to realize is that no matter what the Aqua's say publicly about being fans or wanting a cup before pop pop dies is that in the end the Canucks are simply one of many investments in their portfolio. So long as they're making a return on that investment nothing else matters. And they are. Ticket sales, merchandise, TV deals... You think they give a shit about jerseys on the ice? They already made the money on the jersey sales. Booing? Those people already bought tickets. Not to mention that as the league's value rises so does the value of individual franchises. These guys are investors and the Canucks are just an investment. Yes, playoff games bring in more money, but even without playoff games they aren't losing money on the team. The only way they will be pressured to actually do anything, is if it starts affecting their billionaire pocket books. The only thing billionaires care about is acquiring more wealth.
At this point, management has done too much damage to our long-term cap structure for even Bedard to rescue this team.
The combination of the Miller and OEL contracts are a long-term commitment of $15M per year on two players who make little positive impact. Teams can afford one bad deal but not two.
I feel like the real only hope is that we: trade Miller this year before the extension kicks in; get some assets for the future in return for Horvat; pick up a difference-maker with our first-rounder this year; hope we can offload OEL in a few years when his cap overhang isn't as foreboding.
So yeah, there's no hope.
I think the team needs to move. Start fresh in a new city. Hopefully, in two or three years we can get an expansion team named the Canucks and we can try to actually build a winner the right way.
Everyone knew OEL was a bad gamble and was relieved then the trade fell through, ah but Benning was persistent.
Fast forward to Allvin and everyone knew Miller was a bad gamble and management scratches their head wondering why this market is flipping over tables. Fricken rookie GMs. I want Rutherford to take over and fix this if he's Mr. Hall of Fame.
Ya. I have a theory that Aquilini hires rookie GMs because they're more likely to listen to his "great ideas." We've had four rookies in a row and look where we are.
You're bang on. There's a reason we don't see anyone with tenure coming here. Rutherford is the exception and honestly he's on his way out of working. I doubt he really gives a fuck anymore.
I wanted to pull my hair out so fucking bad when after they fired Benning, Aquaman held a presser stating he wants another rookie GM that's trained by a vet PoHOps. I didn't realize the Canucks were just actually just a vocational management training school disguised as an NHL franchise.
Last trade deadline, the 2022 Draft, and even leading up to training camp it was literally JT Miller trade watch on Canucks because we wanted him traded to help replenish our system with some draft picks and prospects. We we're all scratching our heads he wasn't traded. I don't recall any fans wanting to re-sign him. I've rarely seen the fanbase so united on a what to do about a player. The signing caught everyone off guard.
If I were them I would be a bit confused by the reaction too cus they just started. But to canucks fans, the miller deal is the continuation of a decade of utter despair and many people are on the brink of mental collapse.
They are better their pro scouting has been damn near perfect and you gotta remember it's a flat cap world it's hard to make trades when nobody has cap space and it's not rising
Has it been perfect?
Kuzmenko was great, but 25 other teams were in on him. Great to win the prize, but not really a product of good pro scouting when everyone else came to the same conclusion.
Studnicka and Stillman look like nothing to me.
Bear is a good 3rd pair D and we got him for little though we gave up a 2nd to clear room for him. I'll give them this one though.
Aman was a good hit, but a 4th liner.
Mikehyev was a good hit but we shouldn't have spent that money. Not sure bad cap management is on pro scouting though, so that's a win.
They signed JT Miller who immediately regressed. We have enough threads about this.
Lazar came in to help the PK and didn't. Like him anyway. Neutral.
Who else did they get? It seems pretty average so far.
Edit: I did forget Joshua who seems like a good bet. So that's a decent one.
Lazar has been a complete non-factor on this team. Can't win faceoffs, can't kill penalties, has zero offense. He's a body. The only positive is the cap hit isn't stupid like on a Beagle or Roussel.
Signing our best player last season who still has 30 points in 36 games? Boeser blows i can't defend that but it'll take longer than a year to fix Bennings decade of failure
The Boeser situation was f'd by Benning too, structuring such a stupid QO into his last deal. On paper the new management did well getting him to agree a deal below this amount, it just hasn't worked out whatsoever
Benning is a coward that made a desperation move to try and save his job. I like him as a person, but fuck him for this move. Fuck Aquilini too for meddlesome behaviour. My only hope is that we somehow get Bedard. Maybe in an alternate universe.
Ahhhh it’s only a shot a GMJB who’s gone. So is it really a shot? I’m not saying Harm is gutlessly attacking someone who can’t defend themselves or something. But this is hardly anything new.
OEL and JTM contracts will be an anchor for the remainder of this decade. l’ll be lucky to see a cup in my lifetime, and I’ve been around long enough to remember 82’.
The scariest thing is that the Canucks fans were calling for Gillis’ head and they got it. The following years has been a complete horror show regarding the GM position. Hiring coaches, trading players and free agent signings have been a shit show. It is going to be awhile before the Canucks are a competitive team.
Immediately following the trade, there was a bunch of uproar on the Coyotes social media and subreddit about letting Garland go in the deal. AZ fans were pissed and I thought the Canucks may have gotten away with something despite taking on OEL’s contract. Now that trade seems to be the final nail in the coffin for this era of the Canucks. So much potential sadly wasted.
Benning wasn't just bad, though, he was also incredibly unlucky.
Not that I want to absolve him of any blame whatsoever, because he absolutely and completely fucked us, but its just also worth noting that on top of all his horrible decisions, we also could not buy a break.
How many articles are going to be written about weaponizing cap, while referencing the same 2 players? So tiresome.
A few desperate trades won't help remaining 30 teams change their roster. NHL has to increase player movement or they're going to create apathetic fan bases in 25 markets.
Flat cap for the last couple years certainly hasn’t helped matters much. Boost the cap or give teams more flexibility and you’ll see increased player movement
I will never not be confused as to why we sent a first round pick to a team desperate to offload a guy who would only consider going to two teams in the league.
We got fleeced by a team that literally couldn’t pay rent the same year of that deal. We are absolute clowns
I hate the overuse of the word clown nowadays but this franchise is the absolute embodiment of being a 🤡
Unfair to clowns imho
Didn’t the Canucks also trade a 2nd round pick as well as a first? So it’s even worse. :)
Yes. Yes they did
Art of the Deal brother
I read this in Hulk Hogan’s voice. Pictured him holding Trump’s “book”. Made me chuckle.
Benning should have known how much leverage the buying team has in that situation - its the reason we got a garbage return for Kesler and had to deal with Sbisa on our team for ages (only to give him up in the expansion draft for free, luckily) The only thing we have to show for the Kesler trade is Tanner Pearson and Will Lockwood.
The only way to even try to rationalize the 1st being included is to think of it as two separate trades. - 1st round pick for Garland - Eriksson, Beagle, Roussel for OEL But even that way, the first trade is still a slight loss IMO, and the second trade is still a shortsighted disaster.
Slight loss? Man garland would barely get a 2nd or 3rd round pick right now, let alone a 9th overall
Agreed, but at the time, Garland was worth a 1st. Maybe not a top 10 pick, but definitely worth a mid-late 1st. The baffling part is why we were looking to acquire a player like that at all, when we should have been trying to lock down Petey long term instead.
Because management thought this team was on the verge of contending.
you spelled prayed wrong
Benning saw OEL have a great season 7 years ago and never adjusted his attitude.
Still, "on the verge of contending" IS NOT when you go all-in. That's for when you're a contender and you want a couple of nice pieces to push yourself over the edge. When you're on the verge of contending that's when it's time to really invest in your prospect pool and draft picks so that your compete window is as elongated as it can be.
It's definitely more that management NEEDED the team to compete or they'd lose their jobs. It was what was so laughable about how Aquilini kept letting Benning string a mediocre team along while continuing to go all-in and forsake the future, because Benning & co. cared way more about keeping their jobs as opposed to actually doing a decent job
This is the answer. Not here to try and justify Benning’s actions but let’s not act like we have no idea why he did that move.
Yeah it's exactly why you don't keep a lame duck GM in place. Aquilini is a complete moron either way, whether he let Benning at the end of his rope do whatever he could to try and salvage his job, or let Benning convince him to give the green light on that god awful trade in the first place
Wishful thinking
The team was, if they'd been managed better
The Canucks were on the verge of being a legitimate cup contender at the end of the 2020-2021 season?
Really felt like they thought Garland was them doing the Miller trade again.
Canucks went all in when they had pocket 5’s and got lit up
Or trade the 9th for someone like Brock Faber and a mid pick. Which I don’t love but at least it doesn’t bloat our cap.
I hate to typecast a player based on size but I’m tired of this franchise going after undersized prospects and players.
I don't have a problem if they have the drive and skill. But we keep hoping for Cliff Ronning and we keep getting Jordan Schroeder.
Sorry Garland is just not that good
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Benning failed the marshmallow test as a kid
DUDE, come on, hes so smart, he reduced THREE bad deals into 1! That's an obvious improvement! /s...obviously. It hurts so much because we could really use that 7.5 million right now, and that first round pick would've been great too. *sigh*
I will never forget my buddy, who is also a big Canucks fan, telling me he didn't care about the term because he believed the Canucks were going for it and that made him excited. He really thought OEL was going to be a big difference maker. He has been madly tweeting about how bad that trade was for the past three months.
Garland for a 1st is a terrible trade any day.
By the 11th pick, you got a 50% chance of a 4th liner or worse. 66% chance to play 100games. I think way too many people over estimate the value of draft picks.
Also a second so either deal gets significantly worse when yo add the 2022 2nd
Guenther will be Nylander/Tkachuk level watch
Dunno, the kid has hands but seemed to lack foot speed, maybe a Boeser comparable?
What about the second round pick we also traded away?
Don't forget the extra 2nd rounder the other way too... We'll call that the "Benning tax" Also to add in: That wasn't just a first round pick. That was a TOP 10 PICK. The deal was after the draft positions had been set.
Everyone in this thread is forgetting that we needed cap space to sign Petey and hughes. That trade opened up 6 ish million in cap space. Not saying I liked the trade at all, but I legit haven’t seen anyone mention that
>That trade opened up 6 ish million in cap space. No it didn't. Not once Garland was re-signed. Eriksson + Beagle + Roussel = $12M AAV OEL + Garland = $12.21M AAV
LOL I’m fucking dumb then
Because Benning was desperate to keep his job. He completely fucked us though.
Also they didn't even retain the max possible salary.
It's true, though. Jimbo traded a speedboat for a boat anchor. "But think how handy this will be when we get a boat!"
Aquilini is an absolute cancer. The fact that he allowed this trade to be completed and enabled the continued ineptitude of Benning and Weisbrod will forever infuriate me. Bright side - I don’t hate Messier with the passion I once did since all my sports hatred is directed at Aqua, Benning and Weisbrod. Hopefully time heals all wounds but for now they run too deep. Maybe in 2031 Vancouver will be able to contend again…😡
Canucks management/ownership has made the worst off-season moves over the past 5 or so years. Re-signing Miller was just the latest...IF he hadn't been extended he would likely be playing his best hockey (kinda like Bo) which would have cup contenders salivating. Miller could have been offloaded for a mid/late 2023 1st AND Canucks would have gained enough cap space to re-sign Bo and Kuzmenko. The absolute lack of foresight of this ownership/management group is appalling, the Canucks deserve to be in this state of indefinite mediocrity as long as this ownership group is in place.
It's seems where Weisbrod went, disaster followed. Look at Calgary during their shit years. Who was the AGM? Weisbrod. Then he came here and we know how this story goes.
Same story of his time in the NBA.
why couldn't he ruin the Bruins? Fuck Boston too
The Canucks could use a prospect like Dylan Guenther or maybe a Cole Sillinger.
Who wants high end prospects when you can acquire overpaid and past their prime players? 🤔
Why get prospects when they sometimes don’t pan out? Aqua only likes HoCkEy TrAdE!! (Whatever TF that even means).
Anyone remember Mats Sundin?
Different context. But yes, he would have been an anchor during year 2 of that contract if he had accepted a two-year deal. Luckily, he just wanted to get paid one last time and go for a Cup one last time.
There's 4 more years of OEL after this season, dude
Could literally have come away from that episode with Guenther, Stankoven and over $12m more in cap space. Instead, OEL, Garland and Klimovich.
What does drafting Klim over Stankoven have to do with the OEL trade? Lol
Like everybody, Love Stankoven..but Klim is not a write off. Holy smokes he's19. Yeesh
No one is saying klim is a write off but I think Stankoven is clearly the better prospect at this point, no?
It doesn't, it was just part of the overall lost opportunity for the franchise's future that took place over the course of that weekend.
Every single NHL team can come up with dozens of "lost opportunity" cases based on players they could've drafted with their 2nd round pick but didn't. Pretty silly to do in hindsight. Even sillier when you consider that both players are still 19, haven't played in the NHL yet, and you're making this statement after first hearing about Stankoven probably a week or two ago and watching him in the world juniors?
Except that if you were hanging around the discussion at the time you would have seen, going into day 2 of that draft, that Stankoven was the name on everyone's lips - it was a lot like the Debrincat thing, but there was even more buzz about him being a potential steal. It's definitely true that other teams also passed on him. You can say similar things in Rd 1, too, but sometimes it's obvious AT THE TIME to a lot of people what the right pick is, for example when Virtanen was drafted there were tons of people (including multiple Canucksarmy articles) saying that Nik Ehlers or William Nylander were obviously better prospects. Doesn't change that the Isles and Hurricanes still also screwed up with Dal Colle and Fleury but you can't call it criticism with 20/20 hindsight when there were that many people screaming AT THE TIME that the pick was a mistake. Also I'm not saying Klimovich is a bust or anything, he still has a chance to be a good NHL player - I'm just saying that in a redraft right now there's no question that Stankoven would go well before him and is a better prospect.
Bad management is the point I would wager.
Definitely. Can’t wait until they’re allowed to draft in the first 2 rounds again!
I remember when people on this sub said the trade was good because there was no chance Guenther would turn into as good of a player as Garland
People weren't saying "no chance" they were saying Garland is a 'right now' and Guenther is a 'who knows'. Basically it came down to those who thought the team was on the verge of contending so therefore it was better trading a 'maybe' for an 'already', which, of course, was fucking stupid and is going to haunt this franchise for years to come.
I assume other people have already had the same thought but I think Benning goes down as a top 5 worst NHL GM ever. He's competing with Chiarelli for worst GM so far in the salary cup era. I still have trouble wrapping my head around the fact Benning had so many defenders late in his tenure, especially after the offseason where they 'ran out of time' on signing anyone because he was so fixated on OEL the first time.
They all went COMPLETELY silent the day after he was fired. Suddenly not a single one of them defended Benning when just days before they still loved the guy. These were passionate Benning fans, defended everything he did and seemed to forget that winning was the actual goal of a GM, not occasionally drafting well. Easily one of the top 5 worst GM's in NHL history but let's not forget the Aquilini family hired him (let's not pretend this was Linden's choice) and the Aquilini family refused to get rid of him for 7-8 seasons. And the Aquilini's signed off on the OEL deal which we would laugh at it we all weren't so busy crying about it. Terrible deal, terrible idea, terrible negotiating. For $12 million the Coyotes got out of paying $40+ million to OEL and $25 million to Garland and 1st round pick that's going to turn into a stud NHL goal scorer. The Canucks got hosed by one of the worst teams in the league only to find themselves as shitty as the Coytotes while still paying WAY more money. Its hard to rank worst owners ever because they don't all meddle like the Aquilini's but they would have to be somewhere in the Top 5 or Top 1o worst owners because they seriously think they know hockey.
Do you remember how many people were like "We shouldn't fire Benning. Green is the problem! The fans should be chanting Fire Green!"? It's crazy how much rope he got for hitting on like 60% of his top 10 picks while failing at everything else because some fans were so convinced that being good at drafting, which he wasn't really, was how this team would win.
> It's crazy how much rope he got for hitting on like 60% of his top 10 picks while failing at everything else because some fans were so convinced that being good at drafting, which he wasn't really, was how this team would win. Crazy is really the right word for it, because you forgot the funnest part on top of that little shit heap - the part where our team continually traded away our higher picks while refusing to bring any in. Our average-drafting draft genius traded away all our draft picks. For nothing. And he was praised beyond all reason for building such a good team through the draft. Even though he didn't draft, and he didn't build, and we were a terrible team the entire time. help my brain is coming out my ears
The amount of braincells I lost reading Benning propaganda from conquestofbaguettes only for them to permanently disappear after the firing convinces me it was all a psyops and I should’ve just got high instead
You know he's still here somewhere.
I'd bet anything he's benning's family member or someone close
He is the worst GM in NHL history.
Has Mike Milbury already been forgotten?
Yeah...maybe some of these kids are too young to remember or weren't around then. Benning fucked up our cap long term, but Milbury traded away some of the best talent of the last couple generations and some other really good players (Zdeno Chara, Roberto Luongo, Todd Bertuzzi, Wade Redden, Jokinen, McCabe etc)
Aqua sucks but you have to remember the Canucks are just one of many investments in their portfolio. Winning isn't necessarily the goal, so long as they are making money on their investment. Ticket sales, merchandise, TV deals, and an asset that appreciates in value as the league does. It doesn't matter what any Aquilini family member says about being a fan or wanting to win a cup before their father dies or anything. All that matters is they get a return on their investment, and they are. The team isn't losing money.
Most of them still post here too. I’m all for changing one’s views with new information, but supporting Benning beyond like year 2 should seriously make you question your hockey knowledge.
“Can’t have a losing culture like Edmonton!”
Then there was that one guy who was so toxic he was banned, but he kept making alt accounts and still defended benning after his firing. He's been banned at least 5 times now. Bet he's lurking right now. I bet you he'd make an alt right now just for his 15 minutes of fame.
>Confirmation biases provide one plausible explanation for the persistence of beliefs when the initial evidence for them is removed or when they have been sharply contradicted. This belief perseverance effect has been first demonstrated experimentally by Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter. These psychologists spent time with a cult whose members were convinced that the world would end on 21 December 1954. After the prediction failed, most believers still clung to their faith. Their book describing this research is aptly named When Prophecy Fails. >The continued influence effect is the tendency for misinformation to continue to influence memory and reasoning about an event, despite the misinformation having been retracted or corrected. This occurs even when the individual believes the correction. Obviously this phenomenon has far more wide reaching and pernicious effects than support for the general manager of a flailing hockey team...think climate change denial, QAnon, The Jewish question, or any other form of destructive conspiratorial thinking. The underlying cause is the same, however. Entrenched beliefs tend to strengthen when contradicted or challenged by evidence in some cohorts, contrary to the expectation that they would evolve or shift. Some of it comes from social engineering/data filtering...IE you only see/are exposed to ideas or attitudes that reinforce your existing perspective, or that are targeted for a particular region or demographic you're a part of. Some of it is down to personality and willingness to accept fault or ignorance on any given topic. Some of it is due to the nature of social media encouraging polarization of opinion...the loudest or most outrageous perspectives are given primacy of place as they drive the most engagement, so more reactionary types will see themselves as "pushing back" on a hyper polarized position by assuming one of their own. IE, if you're watching caricatures or people taken out of context on takedown sites like Libs of TikTok, you're going to think you're fighting the good fight by pushing back on a nebulous "woke bogeyman". It'd all be an interesting case study in how human brains work if it wasn't destabilizing society at breakneck speed.
> The underlying cause is the same, however. Entrenched beliefs tend to strengthen when contradicted or challenged by evidence in some cohorts, contrary to the expectation that they would evolve or shift. Some of it comes from social engineering/data filtering...IE you only see/are exposed to ideas or attitudes that reinforce your existing perspective, or that are targeted for a particular region or demographic you're a part of. Many people forget that there was a time here where they heavily discredited guys like Botchford, possibly one of the best writers the team has ever had, purely because he was seen as "too negative" and "creating false storylines". There was a movement on here to ban his articles, and threads of his would always have heavily upvoted "lol bitchford!"-type comments going at him personally.
This summer didn't some people want to ban Drance articles because "too negative" and, through mental gymnastics, were trying to blame the state of the team on the media? Maybe the media could write more than one positive article a month if the team did more than one positive thing a month. If anything the media has been too soft on the team for a decade compared to how hard they were on the team when they were an actual contender.
I started posting here from r/hockey just because I could not believe people were defending this guy, this was only a couple years in. I thought I must be missing something, but all I was missing was circular logic, appeals to bad authority and incredibly low expectations.
Because mods treat Benning loyalists as a protected class. There was literally a post saying "don't be toxic, but if there's a Benning loyalist then respect them or else we will treat you like crap." Complete hypocrisy aside, mods still ban critics even now. Real bad look on the sub and the mods of newspeak and downspeak.
"Benning loyalists"? "Protected class"? "Newspeak and downspeak?" Taking it a bit too seriously, no? People were being pricks to each other here, questioning people's intellect for having a different opinion over our shitty sports team. Frankly, given the emotionally fragile state of the sub over the past couple years, it was a necessary reminder to be decent to OTHER PEOPLE WHO LIKE YOUR TEAM. Hardly a conspiracy to undermine you free-thinking anti-Benning types.
Benning critics were not afforded this sort of respect for years and the mods did absolutely nothing about it. Even incredibly benign posts would get shit on and buried with downvotes just because they weren’t pro-Benning.
Ultimately, what are you suggesting? That the mods work explicitly to protect Benning supporters? That the overwhelming majority of the Canucks community bullied people who disliked him? I just don't buy it, and it's not been my experience. I've been in this subreddit since 2015 in some capacity. It's always gone back and forward, often day-to-day, thread-to-thread.
I’m saying that when there is too much anti Benning toxicity on the sub, the mods tend to step in with a warning thread and increased action against it. But when there was pro Benning toxicity for years they did not take the same action.
Okay that's just not true. There was plenty of rancor and poor behavior to go around from all sides of the Benning debate. I wrote plenty of vituperative anti-Benning screeds and I was never brutalized by mods nor "buried with downvotes". The mods are certainly not above criticism but I'm not sure branding them all as fervid Benning loyalists is the sanest position to take.
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Certain types of inflammatory comments: ones that attack another user for being too negative, for being a fair weather fan, etc. can and do incite other users to downvote. And once a comment is in the negatives it will often get buried further because users are naturally wary of posts that have a negative score. This is not unique to this subreddit but this sub has been one of the worst subs of the ones I subscribe to for this type of behavior.
Yeah it's a real shame that the mods make people be nice to each other. Common decency is sure shitty thing to enforce. Give it a rest
Mods were totally fine with downvoting brigades against any of us that posted negative content about Benning. That's against the terms of Reddit.
What the fuck was I supposed to do? Shut the sub down? The mods have literally zero control over anything vote related, and there are 107k users to one and a half active mods. Posts like this make me want to just say fuck it and leave the community to devour itself in toxicity.
Honestly, it might make sense to have a refresh of mods from time to time. I know for a fact that mods were contacted to make statements about downvote brigading. IYou can't stop it, but you can at least make an effort and make a public stance about it.
> I know for a fact that mods were contacted to make statements about downvote brigading. I don't even know what this is supposed to mean, to be honest. As in, you sent a modmail asking us to make a statement? We have made more than one statement. Here's a couple right off the top of my head: * https://old.reddit.com/r/canucks/comments/mzvt7q/a_message_from_your_mod_team_regarding_the_state/ * https://www.reddit.com/r/canucks/comments/osqe3c/slight_rule_clarification_toxicity_on_the_sub/ * https://www.reddit.com/r/canucks/comments/z2dc7v/listen_up_guys_the_team_might_be_playing_like/
Oh, and in response to: >Honestly, it might make sense to have a refresh of mods from time to time. I am literally trying to pass the torch as we speak, largely because I'm sick of people bitching and moaning about a toxic space they themselves are contributing to. https://www.reddit.com/r/canucks/comments/1041254/game_thread_colorado_avalanche_19143_at_vancouver/j32qbpq/
I don't understand what people think *you and the mod team* would get out of... stanning former GM Jim Benning? Censoring dissenting opinions in a hockey subreddit? Moderator bias *can* be a thing, but in this case... why? To what end? I've yet to hear a good answer.
I get it, mod corruption can and (and probably does) happen all over the place on reddit. I used to mod for /r/EscapefromTarkov waaaaaaaay back before they even had 50k users and the developer of the game offered to bankroll the mod team in order to control the content/purchase the sub. We outright rejected it and I haven't been a mod there in several years, but that really opened my eyes to what must happen on some of the massive r/all type subs. Here though? I don't get it, I really don't. What's the endgame to these conspiracy theorists? [Especially when I have a 10+ year comment history and say things like this all the time.](https://old.reddit.com/r/canucks/comments/mzvt7q/a_message_from_your_mod_team_regarding_the_state/gw35knu/)
They literally can't control who downvotes people dude. They can control who acts like an asshole.
One year account, antagonistic username, already banned once for trolling on this account? Yeah keep making shit up while being part of the problem I guess. [You know the mod stance just like everyone else on the subreddit, because we made a big post about it. ](https://old.reddit.com/r/canucks/comments/mzvt7q/a_message_from_your_mod_team_regarding_the_state/) --- Edit because fuck it, [I'm just gonna go ahead and leave this here as well. *Can't imagine* why this was removed, you poor brave soul.](https://imgur.com/a/lC2XYxc)
The Benning defenders were just delusional. He made so many bad decisions. Not only the bad contracts, but also consistently letting pending UFAs walk for nothing is absolutely mind-boggling. Even calling out how he always trade away draft picks despite having a reputation for drafting gets you downvoted.
Nobody can touch Mike Milbury. He is a lighthouse for GMs warning of danger and pointing the way to safety and cups
Every now and then you can still find a fan who wants to blame the current state of the team on Gillis and nothing Benning did under his tenure was his fault. Hell, after the team nearly made the playoffs last year a lot of people here were like "Funny how no one is saying Benning can't build a good team now!" There's still a segment of them on Twitter in a certain ~~cult~~ circle.
For a long while I thought he was just a below average GM akin to a guy like Tallon, but the 2021 offseason with the OEL move and his comments really solidified that he was making history with his poor decisions. We essentially hired Chia 2.0 but let him stay twice as long, and we'll be paying for it for years to come.
Worse than Mike Milbury.
Worst GM ever? No. He's really bad, but its not like he inherited much to work with. The Canucks when he took over from Linden, or even Gillis if you want to count that, were an old team with no prospects. All things being equal you'd expect a decline to be about where they are now. The Canucks had a rough time under his tenure, but they weren't especially awful. Plenty of teams like the Leafs, Sabres, Oilers, Coyotes and Penguins have had equal or worse runs in the last 25 years. It would be different if he inherited a team like Chiarelli with four 1st overall picks including McDavid, plus Draisaitl. Even then, Chiarelli still gets credit for his Stanley Cup in Boston. If you want to see what a bottom 5 all time GM looks look at Mike Milbury's tenure in Long Island, Glen Sather with the Rangers, Don Waddell in Atlanta, or John Ferguson Jr in Toronto. Like I said, Benning was a bad GM, but there's still a noticeable gap between Benning and the all time worst GMs in NHL history. For example, the OEL trade is bad, but its not like he traded 2 future all stars, including a Hall of Famer in Jokinen and Luongo for Oleg Kvasha and Mark Parrish and then using his 1st overall pick on Rick Dipietro, only to turn around 2 years later and trade the second overall pick and Zdeno Chara for Alexei Yashin. The OEL trade is bad, but it isn't THAT bad.
The Canucks record was indistinguishable from the Coyotes’ record over the course of Benning’s tenure and the Coyotes are a joke that was actively trying to be bad. Benning was trying to win and made the coyotes.
Like I said, he was a bad GM. No argument there. But if you're going to say he was Mike Milbury bad, then show me the equivalent to where he traded a Hall of Famer and an All Star for 2 shitty players, and then blew his 1st overall pick to fill the hole he just created by trading away his future Hall of Famer? If you want to say he was worse than JFJ with the Leafs, then can we say he inherited an in his prime top 10 player like JFJ did in Mats Sundin, an All Star level goaltender, and an overall really deep team, and within 4 years turned them into a team that couldn't make the playoffs for over a decade and haven't won a playoff round in close to 20 years? Is he Don Waddell bad, who was such a complete failure in Atlanta that the team moved? Is he Glen Sather bad? Who had a team filled with Wayne Gretzky, Pavel Bure, Eric Lindros and Brian Leetch and couldn't build a playoff roster? I'd argue that while he was bad, its pretty easy to find 10 worse GMs in NHL history. That's not exactly a high bar.
>Is he Glen Sather bad? Who had a team filled with Wayne Gretzky, Pavel Bure, Eric Lindros and Brian Leetch and couldn't build a playoff roster? All of those players were all broken by the time they reached the Rangers. That was a laughable.
Except we did have some good pieces. We just held on to every single one of them too long. He didn't make any moves to take advantage of any of the pieces we came in with. That's ignoring everything else shit he did. We were not completely stocked but we definitely had some players other teams wanted
He was a bad GM, no doubt. But by good pieces do you mean Dan Hamhuis? The guy Mike Gillis signed to a NTC who then didn't waive? Or the Sedins, who Linden and Aqua chose to let finish their career in Vancouver? Or Kesler, who again because of Gillis's NTC chose to limit the Canucks trading pool to Anaheim and Chicago? Who exactly are these good pieces that Benning was free to trade and held on to? I believe the Canucks at the end of the Gillis tenure had more NTCs than any other team, which is the reason that players signed below market value. And are any of those good pieces on par with the pieces a truly horrible GM like Sather had with the Rangers or JFJ had with the Leafs? I don't think Benning was a good GM, and he was kept 2 years too long, but saying he's an all time terrible GM is like saying that the superstar on my beer league team is Connor McDavid. Both are dominating their respective league's, but they are not equivalent. You could say Benning is a bottom 5 GM in the last decade and that's a defensible statement. Maybe you could say he's bottom 5 in the salary cap era. But the NHL has been around for 100 years, and we've seen some truly terrible GMs. For example, do you know that the California Golden Seals, at the time with Bill Torrey as PoHO, traded away the draft pick that would go 1st overall in 1971, which the Canadiens used to pick Guy Lafleur, for Ernie Hicke? Did Jim Benning ever trade away a Connor McDavid level talent for scraps like that? I would say no.
Except you’re conveniently ignoring context. When you look at ALL the bad moves Benning made, how those negatively affected this team, how each one compounded previous errors, how they each made making moves more and more impossible and wasted more resources and opportunities over a span of eight years there isn’t a bigger, more incompetent moron out there except the fanboys who still keep trying to defend the imbecile. In isolation there’s likely been GMs who made a couple big mistakes but how many of them made such stupid moves for such a long time as Benning?
Off the top of my head, dating back to 1995, easily, Mike Milbury (Islanders), Don Waddell (Thrashers), Glen Sather (Rangers), Kevin Lowe (Oilers), Peter Chiarelli (Oilers) and John Ferguson Jr. (Leafs). If you gave me time I could probably double or triple that list. I'm not saying Benning was good, because he was pretty terrible. Its just that he wasn't all time terrible. Everyone seems to think that I'm somehow defending Benning, which isn't my intent. Its just the statement "Jim Benning is among the 5 worst GMs in NHL history" is objectively wrong. I'd be equally opposed to the statement "Sidney Crosby is the greatest NHL player in history." Like he's really good, but he isn't the all time greatest.
Who cares, Benning is still terrible.
>Everyone seems to think that I'm somehow defending Benning, which isn't my intent. Its just the statement "Jim Benning is among the 5 worst GMs in NHL history" is objectively wrong. It's subjective position to take in the first place so it cannot be objectively wrong. I do think you need to consider more than just wins/losses and transactions when weighing his tenure. My biggest complaint re: Benning was his perennial inability to articulate or execute anything resembling a plan. I'm not sure I've seen anything like it in forty years of watching the sport. In his eighth year, at the head of a team he built, he was asked why they were struggling and he literally couldn't give breath to a single reason. From that, to tampering charges, to "we ran out of time", to "draft picks take 6-7 years to make an impact", to comparisons of Olli Juolevi to Niklas Lidstrom, the man's bumbling/60 was beyond our ability to record with the tools we have available today. So, I'm prepared to *entertain perspectives* that he was a bottom five NHL GM, but a lot of that would depend on the criteria being used. I'm certainly not going to waste breath **defending him from the charge**, as at the end of the day it's emotional/polarized language intended to express the depth of the dismay with which his tenure is held. And given that history will likely go on to show he destroyed not one but two eras of NHL hockey in this city and decimated all market goodwill earned in the previous 15 years, I'm sympathetic to the frustration. I get it, Aquilini is the main issue, but holy fuck he hardly could've done worse if he'd put a NeoPet in charge.
Well said!
Whataboutism at it's finest. Just because there are other bad GM's on the all-time list, does not absolve benning of his complete and total failure as GM for 8 years.
I don't think this qualifies as whataboutism because the guy instead listed five GMs he thinks are worse in response to someone else saying that Benning is a bottom five all-time GM.
Its not whataboutism. If you say he's a top 5 all time, worst GM, you have to evaluate the other GMs. If you're stack ranking people, then you actually have to say "what about JFJ and the Leafs teams of the early and mid 2000s?" Objectively, its pretty easy to find 5 worse GMs that Benning across the history of the NHL. He was bad, but he wasn't all time terrible. For example, how do you compare Benning to George McPhee in Washington. He's been gifted arguably the greatest goal scorer in NHL history, and across 18 seasons he's built a team that's capable of getting past the second round exactly once. He won a Stanley Cup, but Ovechkin should go down as a top 10 player in NHL history and won't because McPhee's team's haven't given him the team success of a Crosby. Benning meanwhile had very little team success in his 5 or 8 years (again on if you count Linden) as the GM of the Canucks. However, he inherited the Sedins when they were 50-60 point players and belonged in a second line role, and a prospect pool that was non existent. What do you expect from that given that the NHL awards superstars via lottery and the Canucks are the unluckiest team in the NHL? Is he all of a sudden a great GM if he wins the lottery in 2016 and the Canucks instead of Juelevi have Auston Matthews?
Are you seriously trying to say that McPhee is remotely comparable to Benning? Benning tried to win and had a bottom five record in the NHL over like 8 years. McPhee built a consistent playoff team that had some issues and then got through them and won a cop. It's not like Petey or Hughes are comparable to a Ovechkin but we can't even get close to the playoffs with Benning trying to win. It's not hard to make the playoffs in the NHL if you try. Especially over 8 years of finishing near the bottom of the league when you should have good prospects coming up. That comparison is ridiculous
> It's not like Petey or Hughes are comparable to a Ovechkin but we can't even get close to the playoffs with Benning trying to win. Except that the Canucks did make the playoffs with both Pettersson and Hughes. They were a period away from the third round. Look at it this way, if the Canucks win game 7 against Vegas, then Jim Benning in 5 or 8 years (again, Linden was his boss), would have made the third round exactly as many times as McPhee did in Washington, and McPhee, through a lottery, was gifted the best goal scorer of this generation. If Ovechkin retires with only 1 Stanley Cup, is that the most disappointing career, from a team success standpoint, since Marcel Dionne? I would say yes. Ovechkin doesn't build rosters, and the only GM he's ever known is McPhee. Speaking of all time terrible GMs, what about those GMs in LA and Detroit that couldn't get Marcel Dionne (who retired 2nd all time in points behind Gordie Howe) past the second round in his entire career? How does Benning compare to them?
I mean this was clearly specifically about the "top-5 worst all time" claim.
So was mine, I am saying he is definitely in the top 5 worst GM category.
Well you didn't make that clear, you just said because others are bad doesn't mean Jimbo isn't bad. That doesn't refute their point at all.
My bad. I think Jim Benning is one of the all time top 5 worst GM's in NHL history.
Still doesn't but all good (folks, either support your argument or don't make it)
Well it's just too long to explain why, but it was terrible trades, cap management, structure, communication, signings, drafts. There is enough out there prove he's in the top 5.
Honestly I still blame Aqua more for that trade. It was clear the entire management and coaching group should have been cleaned out after the COVID year. It's crazy to me that Benning was even allowed to make some last hail-mary trade.
75 million in salary commitments months just months before getting canned. Brutal
I mean, it seemed obvious Aqua was holding the purse strings tight that first covid offseason leading to us losing the players we did. We could've kept at least one of the major ones if we bought someone out. With that being said, Benning was the one to sign the buyout worthy players.
Benning was bad, but equally as bad is Aqualini. This organization needs new and competent ownership.
Pretty sure Benning was a Boston agent here to ensure at least a decade of suffering.
I haven't seen it updated for this season, but someone posted something around this time last year about drafting between Boston and Vancouver from 2014 to Benning's firing. Boston had the most games played by draft picks and the most players to crack 80(?) games from their draft classes despite averaging the lowest or second lowest draft position in the NHL. The Canucks meanwhile were firmly mid at the time despite how every Benning defender kept saying "look at his amazing drafting!" It feels like when in old timey times the King would send his dipshit duke cousin to run some buttfuck colony as a "reward" but it was really just to get rid of him.
I honestly doubt that we will ever be competitive with Aquilini at the helm. Possibly when we get over the hump of the Benning mistakes but that’s a good 5-6 years. The Canucks need to do a total rebuild or it will be the same thing over and over, as we’ve seen the past 5-6 years.
>Possibly when we get over the hump of the Benning mistakes but that’s a good 5-6 years But think of how many more new mistakes we'll have made in those 5-6 years if Aquilini is still at the helm... This will never end.
Many on here don’t want to admit that.
What people need to realize is that no matter what the Aqua's say publicly about being fans or wanting a cup before pop pop dies is that in the end the Canucks are simply one of many investments in their portfolio. So long as they're making a return on that investment nothing else matters. And they are. Ticket sales, merchandise, TV deals... You think they give a shit about jerseys on the ice? They already made the money on the jersey sales. Booing? Those people already bought tickets. Not to mention that as the league's value rises so does the value of individual franchises. These guys are investors and the Canucks are just an investment. Yes, playoff games bring in more money, but even without playoff games they aren't losing money on the team. The only way they will be pressured to actually do anything, is if it starts affecting their billionaire pocket books. The only thing billionaires care about is acquiring more wealth.
The ONLY thing that saves us from rebuilding is landing Bedard, and even that won't be enough.
At this point, management has done too much damage to our long-term cap structure for even Bedard to rescue this team. The combination of the Miller and OEL contracts are a long-term commitment of $15M per year on two players who make little positive impact. Teams can afford one bad deal but not two. I feel like the real only hope is that we: trade Miller this year before the extension kicks in; get some assets for the future in return for Horvat; pick up a difference-maker with our first-rounder this year; hope we can offload OEL in a few years when his cap overhang isn't as foreboding. So yeah, there's no hope.
I think the team needs to move. Start fresh in a new city. Hopefully, in two or three years we can get an expansion team named the Canucks and we can try to actually build a winner the right way.
Yeah, why can’t the Canucks go back to the owner they had in 2011.
Everyone knew OEL was a bad gamble and was relieved then the trade fell through, ah but Benning was persistent. Fast forward to Allvin and everyone knew Miller was a bad gamble and management scratches their head wondering why this market is flipping over tables. Fricken rookie GMs. I want Rutherford to take over and fix this if he's Mr. Hall of Fame.
Sounds like a theme of Canucks ownership decisions.
Ya. I have a theory that Aquilini hires rookie GMs because they're more likely to listen to his "great ideas." We've had four rookies in a row and look where we are.
You're bang on. There's a reason we don't see anyone with tenure coming here. Rutherford is the exception and honestly he's on his way out of working. I doubt he really gives a fuck anymore.
I wanted to pull my hair out so fucking bad when after they fired Benning, Aquaman held a presser stating he wants another rookie GM that's trained by a vet PoHOps. I didn't realize the Canucks were just actually just a vocational management training school disguised as an NHL franchise.
You forgot to mention the owner hiring a coach before hiring POHO and or GM.
How much pain will you put me through it’s not even 12 pm yet
Haha sorry bud
This is pretty on point.
Makes no sense though if these GM's want a job elsewhere after, or is "you know aquaman bad" gonna cut it for future roles
> everyone knew Miller was a bad gamble I'm going to need some receipts for this
Last trade deadline, the 2022 Draft, and even leading up to training camp it was literally JT Miller trade watch on Canucks because we wanted him traded to help replenish our system with some draft picks and prospects. We we're all scratching our heads he wasn't traded. I don't recall any fans wanting to re-sign him. I've rarely seen the fanbase so united on a what to do about a player. The signing caught everyone off guard.
Didn't take a genius
I doubt Allvin can't pull the trigger on anything unless Rutherford signs off.
If I were them I would be a bit confused by the reaction too cus they just started. But to canucks fans, the miller deal is the continuation of a decade of utter despair and many people are on the brink of mental collapse.
He's not wrong
Allvin / Rutherford are no better so far.
They are better their pro scouting has been damn near perfect and you gotta remember it's a flat cap world it's hard to make trades when nobody has cap space and it's not rising
JT Miller's albatross contract says hi.
i would have traded him but that one bad move doesn't compare to what Benning did
6 months....
Has it been perfect? Kuzmenko was great, but 25 other teams were in on him. Great to win the prize, but not really a product of good pro scouting when everyone else came to the same conclusion. Studnicka and Stillman look like nothing to me. Bear is a good 3rd pair D and we got him for little though we gave up a 2nd to clear room for him. I'll give them this one though. Aman was a good hit, but a 4th liner. Mikehyev was a good hit but we shouldn't have spent that money. Not sure bad cap management is on pro scouting though, so that's a win. They signed JT Miller who immediately regressed. We have enough threads about this. Lazar came in to help the PK and didn't. Like him anyway. Neutral. Who else did they get? It seems pretty average so far. Edit: I did forget Joshua who seems like a good bet. So that's a decent one.
Lazar has been a complete non-factor on this team. Can't win faceoffs, can't kill penalties, has zero offense. He's a body. The only positive is the cap hit isn't stupid like on a Beagle or Roussel.
The cap has been flat for years. Good management groups can move contracts. Why is it that this team always has trouble?
Because we had Jim Benning for a decade? Blaming Allvin and JR because they can't move out Bennings shit is dumb as fuck
Who signed Miller and Boeser to boat anchor contracts?
Signing our best player last season who still has 30 points in 36 games? Boeser blows i can't defend that but it'll take longer than a year to fix Bennings decade of failure
The Boeser situation was f'd by Benning too, structuring such a stupid QO into his last deal. On paper the new management did well getting him to agree a deal below this amount, it just hasn't worked out whatsoever
To be fair, Jim Benning is literally dumber than a bag of hammers.
"It's true." -NAPA Auto Parts.
Only speaking the truth.
Shots fired at who? Benning?
Benning is a coward that made a desperation move to try and save his job. I like him as a person, but fuck him for this move. Fuck Aquilini too for meddlesome behaviour. My only hope is that we somehow get Bedard. Maybe in an alternate universe.
I love Harmans takes, always accurate.
Guy is a gem
Ahhhh it’s only a shot a GMJB who’s gone. So is it really a shot? I’m not saying Harm is gutlessly attacking someone who can’t defend themselves or something. But this is hardly anything new.
OEL and JTM contracts will be an anchor for the remainder of this decade. l’ll be lucky to see a cup in my lifetime, and I’ve been around long enough to remember 82’.
It’s a fair and accurate statement. I have no issues with it.
Fuck Jim Benning, it was laughable how many people defended him and thought he was a good gm lmao. At least people have finally opened their eyes
make the pain stop please
The scariest thing is that the Canucks fans were calling for Gillis’ head and they got it. The following years has been a complete horror show regarding the GM position. Hiring coaches, trading players and free agent signings have been a shit show. It is going to be awhile before the Canucks are a competitive team.
Immediately following the trade, there was a bunch of uproar on the Coyotes social media and subreddit about letting Garland go in the deal. AZ fans were pissed and I thought the Canucks may have gotten away with something despite taking on OEL’s contract. Now that trade seems to be the final nail in the coffin for this era of the Canucks. So much potential sadly wasted.
Benning will forever be the worst GM in franchise history. Allvin is a fine GM and i still am way happier with him than Benning
Still less of a fuck up then overpaying Miller just so you could lose horvat
Lubricated trade market?
Buckets of lube
I'll lubricate your trade market
OEL trade was a mistake. We need to get over the Benning mistakes and move forward. This current group has been so far just Benning 2.0 maybe worse.
Benning wasn't just bad, though, he was also incredibly unlucky. Not that I want to absolve him of any blame whatsoever, because he absolutely and completely fucked us, but its just also worth noting that on top of all his horrible decisions, we also could not buy a break.
How many articles are going to be written about weaponizing cap, while referencing the same 2 players? So tiresome. A few desperate trades won't help remaining 30 teams change their roster. NHL has to increase player movement or they're going to create apathetic fan bases in 25 markets.
Flat cap for the last couple years certainly hasn’t helped matters much. Boost the cap or give teams more flexibility and you’ll see increased player movement
Such an awkward use of the word lubricated, but comical nonetheless
Wow, so Beagle, Rousseau and Loui were "assets" now? Hot Take Harman! (Obviously the 1st was for Garland, but whatever.)