Re-booted SKYO approved pipe dreams and trade ideas

[Blob Mckenzie]

Lol the Dude is getting crushed in this thread.

[Chef Boi RD]

Lol the Dude is getting crushed in this thread.

I’m like the straw stirring the drink. The punch bowl has been a little to calm this summer. It was time to take a big belly flop into the bowl.

You may chuckle at this, but my points are valid.

[Tciso]

Lol the Dude is getting crushed in this thread.

I’m like the straw penis stirring the drink. The punch bowl has been a little to calm this summer. It was time to take a big belly flop into the bowl.

You may chuckle at this, but my points are valid.

[Tciso]

2017-18 Canucks Roster Stats

Can we get this scrubbed from the internet? I am a life long Canuck fan, but jeeze, those stats are fricking nightmarish. We'd have done better on Play Station ffs.

[Chef Boi RD]

[Chef Boi RD]

That doesn't mean that Linden was a good hire...

He was hired for PR reasons and when it came to managing the team he couldn't sell his vision or his abilities to pull off his plan and once he decided to dig his heels in he was gone would be my guess...

Not sure why you are so dug in supporting Linden?

Take care...

I’m not supporting Linden or anyone else involved in that circus. I’m just analyzing that moment as an “outsider”. Again, PR move or not, both Linden and Gillis had zero experience managing an NHL club prior to being hired for the position of - President of Vancouver Canucks Hockey Operations. In fact one could argue that Benning had much more experience as an executive for an NHL Team prior to his hiring here than Gillis and Linden - Player Scout (Buffalo), Direct of Scouting (Buffalo) Assistant GM (Boston). If you ask me all three were failures, mistakes. But for me the whole mess points directly at our lame ass ownership.

All being said, one cannot argue against Linden suggesting for the proverbial “we” be a little more “patient” with the “building” of the team at the time?

[Cousin Strawberry]

Lol the Dude is getting crushed in this thread.

I’m like the straw penis stirring the drink. The punch bowl has been a little to calm this summer. It was time to take a big belly flop into the bowl.

You may chuckle at this, but my points are valid.

Hahaha!!!

Is it Blobs drink he's stirring? (While he's in the shitter?)

[Madcombinepilot]

I doesn't take a lot of speculation to think Benning said things in his interview that appealed to the Aqualinis, and then he executed. One takes a bit of speculation is Linden's role in the first place -- Presidents range from the real power positions (consider JR or Shanahan) in hockey ops to those primarily concerned with non hockey ops side of the house to those who are figureheads. It wouldn't surprise me if Linden was hired to be one type and fancied himself another (and not without reason).

Owners can can impose some parameters on individual player moves which may make things more difficult for a GM to maneuver, but it doesn't cut off the possibility for success because there are many ways to succeed (or fail). I presume either Benning pitched or ownership made clear that the club was not moving the Sedins. But beyond that, I suspect that it was Benning who pitched the initial plan he implemented.

That plan was this: the club was entirely without (good) prospects or young players (outside Horvat). The club could concentrate on concentrating assets in two or three future drafts (i.e., load up in the early rounds as we've seen some teams try) or it could look for ways to replace the drafts it missed out on (by bad drafting and trading picks) by acquiring B tier prospects and hope a couple outperform. Current and future assets would be used to deploy this strategy, but the current assets would being back draft assets such that there would still be valuable draft capital moving forward, just not extra capital. This was, I suspect, Benning's pitch, and that's what he executed.

And so he brought prospect forwards in Baertschi, Granlund, Vey, Etam (though he barely counts). He used draft capital/recent draftee capital that he acquired in dispensing some of the vets (e.g., Kesler Garrison, Bieksa) to make the plan work. With no defense in the system and only Edler and Tanev on the main roster, he also used those assets to try and build a top 4 by targeting early-to-mid 20s defensemen with high draft pedigree who were only 4-5 defensemen at the time through trade (Sbisa, Gudbrandson), hoping they'd develop.

I wrote a very long post one summer (I think in the posts that were lost to history) showing how this strategy was suboptimal, but wasn't nearly as bad as people claimed it to be in terms of probability of success -- mostly because people overvalue late first round, 2d and 3d round picks as compared with the assets who were acquired.

The "retool" didn't work; it didn't allow the Sedins to end their careers on a team that was at least fighting for a playoff spot. But the good news was that after Twitchy's first season (the Sedins last playoff appearance), it worked so poorly that the Canucks were in the bottom quarter of the league year in and year out -- one season finishing with the league's second worst record. But they had no lottery luck, and more than that, they missed too many times in the draft and maximizing draftee and asset value.

And tjhis, not the boogeyman of Aqualini, is where Benning failed. It was individual decisions more than the initial plan that held the Canucks back. None of the non-draft personnel decisions in Benning's first 4/5 seasons really worked out better than might be reasonably expected and some failed entirely.

The "Seas of Granlunds" produced a decent second line quality player in Baerstchi who was done in by injury and a coach that didn't trust his game (despite the fact he wasn't nearly as bad a 200' player as Greene thought). It also produced Granlund, who was a swiss army knife type nearly every team could use at his peak, but no team could build around. Vey was a bust. Etam was already a long shot. Put otherwise, Baertchi and Grandlund reached their reasonable projections, but neither exceeded and one failed to reach the reasonable projection. What if one of these players exceeded their expectations?

Then, the end of the Sedin-era assets are moved with Burrows and Hansen -- and again, the return is already drafted prospects. Goldobin was ready for the NHL but failed, thanks in no small part to the small-minded man coaching the team. Dahlen wasn't the viking his dad was, couldn't mentally deal with being in North America without a guaranteed shot at the NHL, and was turned into Linus Karlsson -- a guy that still might help the Canucks, and if nothing else, helped make Abby a place where prospects learned how to win.

The defense acquisitions failed. Sbisa never got above a 4-5, and though he really wasn't a terrible player, he had a hard ceiling, exposed to the best players (and got exposed in the expansion draft and became a Golden Knight....). Gudbrandson went from young flashing top 4 potential with the Panthers to a 6-7 caliber player being given top 4 minutes because there was no other choice. Trading a young forward for a young D wasn't a bad concept, but it ended up being the wrong D acquired and the wrong young forward traded (McCann instead of Virtanen).

If Sbisa has become a 3-4 and Gudbrandson a 2-3, the entire arc changes. What is a Forsling experiment had been run not a Hutton experiment -- and the Canucks showed patience with Forsling (which the Blackhawks didn't....)

Kesler-dividend, the slow-footed-but-smart Bonino and a second turned into younger speedy defensively responsible third-line center (and a third) who was an ironman and had shown flashes of goal scoring ability in Pittsburgh while not being deployed for those purposes. Maybe there was more?

Result: Years in the infirmary. Thus, an entire waste of a fairly decent asset. Wrong to go after a player of Suter's value, age, skill-set for that price? Not ex ante. Not a plan problem, and not really foreseeable. But it left the Canucks scrambling for sub-optimal replacements and then no asset to deal for value when the team was closer to competitive.

Then, there are the draft picks. The Canucks didn't overload their assets (because they implemented the plan above), but they also didn't trade away their prime draft assets until Miller (good trade!) and were beyond the initial plan. The record here is not bad, IMO, but it was one player short of what the Canucks needed. Just one!

Look at the obvious (in hindsight) misses from the pre-Miller trade days: Virtanen, Juolevi, Podkolzin (who's draft was the very end of the initial cycle). Impact players thought to be potential impact players were on the board. The hits all outperformed reasonable expectations IMO (Hughes, Pettersson, Boeser, Demko) -- even if there were other guys that would have also been good (except Hughes, he is the best player from that draft)). But what if one more of those misses had been a hit? What if McCann not Virtanen was moved? What if Virtanen was moved after his 19 goal season for Sam Bennett (a deal rumored to have been on the table).

On top of all this, Benning hired coaching that was somewhere between mediocre and bad. Greene had more things going for him than Twitchy, but I just can't believe how awful he was with young skill with warts in their game and what a weird boner he had for Josh Leivo (not young skill with warts in their game).

Now, despite missing all of these personnel decisions, the Canucks still were close to hitting a wave after the Miller acquisition. That's how good Boeser, Hughes, and Pettersson were above expectations, that's how good the goaltending was, that's the stability Tanev helped provide, that's the Miller bump. One more hit to this group from the draft; one more hit in the intial plan.... Imagine it.

What ultimately did Benning in was the unforced errors filling the roster for a million too much and a year too long for several players and the OEL acquisition that was going for two in the bush when there was one in the hand. Those year too long million too much moves -- Eriksson, Dorsett (who was LTIRed before we would ever see the folly, and thus he's a cult hero), Roussel, Beagle, Schaller -- the thing is, these moves were ancillary to the initial plan, and they were moves some form of which would be made whether personnel hit or didn't, but Benning was so bad at valuations that he was fighting the cap and needing sweetners move.

And the point of all of this is owners might influence the plan, but the plan wasn't the main problem. It was the personnel decisions. Some of that is luck as it always is. But some of it is on Benning, and very little of Benning's personnel misses can or should be laid at ownership's feet unless I am missing the story where OEL was Aquilani's folly and not Benning's white whale.

If ownership is to be blamed for something, it is not firing Benning sooner -- not because of the plan, but the execution.

Excellent post.

[Madcombinepilot]

I would agree with this. It too bad, I think Trev was the one who picked JB for the job in the 1st place. We had the draft genius in position, yet ownership didn't have the patience and wanted a quick retool.

The ‘games played by draft position’ article that was on Canucks Army a while back suggests that Benning was only a little above average.. and only a little bit.

He was decent at resigning guys on the team but was horrrible in trades and UFA signings.

Spades are spades.

[Chef Boi RD]

Lol the Dude is getting crushed in this thread.

I’m like the straw penis stirring the drink. The punch bowl has been a little to calm this summer. It was time to take a big belly flop into the bowl.

You may chuckle at this, but my points are valid.

Hahaha!!!

Is it Blobs drink he's stirring? (While he's in the shitter?)

Listen, this is probably nothing new for Blob, it’s safe to assume that our friend - the mayor of titty city, has done some dastardly things

https://youtube.com/shorts/4XdE8qzVJ2k? ... e8fzdKeVDE