The Great Jim Benning Debate! (And personal insult thread)

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Re: The Great Jim Benning Debate!

Post by Strangelove »

Uncle dans leg wrote:
Jim Benning doesn’t know what a seller’s market is
And other scary things from Thursday’s interview on TSN 1040.

DANIEL WAGNER / VANCOUVER COURIER

FEBRUARY 17, 2017 11:18 AM


Jim Benning is confused

The moment in the interview that left me flabbergasted comes at 8:38. Blake Price asks Benning, “Would you agree that it is still a seller’s market?”

There is a long awkward pause, then Benning says, “Well, the problem is there’s not a lot of teams selling right now.”

Yes, Jim. That is the definition of a seller’s market.

Jim Benning, the General Manager of an NHL franchise worth an estimated $700 million, apparently doesn’t know what a seller’s market is.

You have the supply, meager though it may be. The other teams in the NHL, the ones that are actually good and in the playoffs or at least in the hunt, they have the demand. With so few teams selling, there’s more demand than there is supply. It’s a seller’s market! This isn’t complicated!

It’s almost as if a team that was aware of this could take advantage of it and drive up the price of their tradeable assets. But that’s crazy talk: why should the General Manager of a hockey team be aware of the basic principle of supply and demand?
UMMMMM let's look at the full quote in context shall we? :scowl:

Benning: “Maybe during the 5-day break we’ll have conversations with certain players.”
Price: “Would you agree that it is still a seller’s market?”
Benning: “Well, the problem is there’s not a lot of teams selling right now because y’know there are so many teams that are still in the hunt so I think teams wanna wait right until the deadline before they decide whether they’re gonna be buyers or sellers.”

Obviously Jimmy knows what a "seller's market" is. :roll:

Jimmy is saying that NO ONE KNOWS YET if this year's deadline market will shape up as a "seller's market".

(the interview was from 9 days ago btw)

Bedwetter, you started peeing one-third of the way through his sentence

... and you haven't stopped yet!

YOU STINK!!
Bedwetter wrote: it’s not the only moment in the interview that left me shaking my head.

According to Benning, the Canucks are going to be using every game possible to evaluate where they’re at:

“Including tonight’s game we’ve got five more games before the trade deadline, so I think we still have some time. We want to see where we’re at going into the deadline and then, like I’ve said all year, we’ll talk to players and find out what their thoughts are and go from there.”

First of all, that’s not what you’ve said all year.
So?

GMs lie, part of the job, get over it.

Another part of his job is to minimize distractions for players. :idea:
Bedwetter wrote: What you said earlier this season was that you wouldn’t trade players with no-trade clauses. Not even that you wouldn’t ask them to waive them or discuss it with the players and let them make the decision, but that you simply wouldn’t trade them.
Bedwetter is surely one of the loudmouths who crucified Jimmy for saying he won't try to trade those guys.

Now he's crucifying Jimmy for saying he will try to trade those guys!

Bedwetter: "WAAAH YOU LIED!!" :cry:

A bigger man would have apologized for crucifying him for what turned out to be a pleasant lie.
Bedwetter wrote: Sure, you’ve backtracked on that since, but don’t pretend like you’ve been saying the same thing all year.
Benning: "Okay I lied.... happy Bedwetter?"
Bedwetter wrote: Second of all, do you really need those five games to evaluate where the Canucks are at? You've had 58 games to evaluate this team! Guess what? They're not very good! Even if the Canucks made up ground in the playoff race heading into the trade deadline, that wouldn't change the fact that they're not very good. The Canucks could win their next four games and it wouldn't change the fact that they're not very good.

Are the Canucks seriously going to make the choice of whether to be a seller at the trade deadline based on five games? Have they seen this team? They're not making the playoffs and even if they do by some miracle, they'll get slaughtered in the first round. This is readily apparent to even the most optimistic homer.
:crazy:

All that... remember... from this Benning comment:

Benning: "We want to see where we’re at going into the deadline and then... we’ll talk to players and find out what their thoughts are and go from there.”

They are NTC players, meaning they get to decide if/where they might get traded.

Jimmy did not say he'd "make the choice of whether to be a seller at the trade deadline based on 5 games"!

The voice you heard Bedwetter must have emanated from your own weak bladder, you are "confused"!

Benning: “Maybe during the 5-day break we’ll have conversations with certain players.”

Remember? :hmmm:
Bedwetter wrote: Next, Price asks a question about the expansion draft and whether there’s market out there for players that are eligible to be exposed, using Matt Bartkowski signing with the Calgary Flames as an example. Benning responded:

“We’re covered, all of our players have played the games to meet the criteria for the expansion process. We haven’t gone through it too much with the other teams. That’s an exercise that we’ll do at the end of the year going into the expansion draft, where I think you’ll see a lot of trades being made for those specific reasons. But we’re more concentrated on the trade deadline and just trying to figure out if there’s teams that might have a surplus of wingers and maybe we have some depth on defence that it’s a match, so we can improve our team here for the long term.”

First off, the Canucks concerns when it comes to the expansion draft shouldn’t have anything to do with being “covered.” It’s about who they’re going to have to expose. They’re not going to be able to protect Brandon Sutter, Jannik Hansen, Sven Baertschi, and Markus Granlund.

That speaks to the second issue: they have to be thinking about this now, heading into the trade deadline. It is inexcusable to wait until the end of the season to worry about the expansion draft, when that may be too late. If they determine that they need to trade Jannik Hansen or risk losing him to Las Vegas, they’ll likely get significantly better value in a trade now, as teams load up for the playoffs, than in the off-season.
Obviously Bedwetter misunderstood the question:

Next, Price asks a question about the expansion draft and whether there’s market out there for players that are eligible to be exposed, using Matt Bartkowski signing with the Calgary Flames as an example.

This question is basically:

"Jim, is there a market for players like Gaunce/Boucher/Chaput/Dorsett/Sbisa/Biega?"

(players who meet the criteria to count as the 2 fwrds/1 dee each team is required to expose)

(if a team only has one fwrd meeting criteria, they might trade for Chaput so they can expose him)

Obviously Jimmy understood the question but Bedwetter did not... oh the irony!

Who's the schmuck now Bedwetter, who's confused now!! :lol:
Bedwetter wrote: But this has been a constant refrain of this management group: an inability to focus on more than one thing at a time.
IRONY!!! SCHMUCK!!! :lol:
Bedwetter wrote: Next, Benning was asked if he’d talked to any of the Canucks about the trade deadline. He hasn’t.

“We haven’t had any conversations with any of the players, my thinking on it is we want them to concentrate on these games, we’ve got three games coming up before the break that are important games for us, so I’m just letting them think about hockey and trying to do everything that we can to win these games and then we’ll see where we’re at. We have a five-day break and maybe during that time we’ll have conversations with certain players.”

Argh! The trade deadline is less than two weeks away and Benning is going to wait until the week before the deadline to talk his players about waiving no trade clauses or providing a list of teams.

Am I crazy to think that this is a conversation he could have initiated weeks ago? And that it’s less distracting to have that conversation and get everything out on the table than to have all this uncertainty until literally a week before the trade deadline?
Yes, you are absolutely crazy to think that would have been "less distracting". :mex:
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Re: The Great Jim Benning Debate!

Post by Blob Mckenzie »

Sorry Lumpy. Benning got punched the fuck out in a bar fight and you responded with a couple of cat scratches :D
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Re: The Great Jim Benning Debate!

Post by Strangelove »

Blob Mckenzie wrote:Benning got punched the fuck out in a bar fight and you responded with a couple of cat scratches :D
Fake news.
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Re: The Great Jim Benning Debate!

Post by nuckster »

Strangelove wrote:
Blob Mckenzie wrote:Benning got punched the fuck out in a bar fight and you responded with a couple of cat scratches :D
Fake news.
Jeeesus Doc, thats something Trump would say.
cc oldtimer
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Re: The Great Jim Benning Debate!

Post by Strangelove »

President Trump.
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Re: The Great Jim Benning Debate!

Post by Topper »

Strangelove wrote:President Trump.
Lord Jim
Over the Internet, you can pretend to be anyone or anything.

I'm amazed that so many people choose to be complete twats.
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Re: The Great Jim Benning Debate!

Post by Blob Mckenzie »

Topper wrote:
Strangelove wrote:President Trump.
Lord Jim
More like Lemnie Small
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Re: The Great Jim Benning Debate!

Post by ESQ »

Hmm, wonder what Dan Wagner makes of the burrows trade...we should all be grateful that he took the time to explain to Benning what a seller's market is! :lol:
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Re: The Great Jim Benning Debate!

Post by Cousin Strawberry »

ESQ wrote:Hmm, wonder what Dan Wagner makes of the burrows trade...we should all be grateful that he took the time to explain to Benning what a seller's market is! :lol:
I did read some mocking that they could actually lose a trade with the canucks :lol:
In fairness...if he can pull off moves like he did today then all the hacking on him will go away in a hurry. Credit where it is due today
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Re: The Great Jim Benning Debate!

Post by Ronning's Ghost »

From the Willie D deathwatch thread:
RoyalDude wrote:
Ronning's Ghost wrote:
RoyalDude wrote:Again - devestating no trades that set this organization back centuries
Almost ! Three and half posts without referencing the previous management group.

The trouble with citing the impact of no-trade clauses is that one of your favourite examples of a bad Gillis signing, Jason Garrison, had a no-trade clause, and was moved anyway early in Benning's tenure.
So are we just choosing to ignore here that Kesler exercised that right by only waived to one team - Anaheim? Bennings fault?
Personally, I have never before complained about the return in Kesler trade, because the circumstances were, admittedly, difficult. However, since you bring it up, let us revisit one of Benning's first tests as a GM. It was plainly clear at that point to Kesler, at least, that the Canucks' window had closed, and if he wanted to win it all, he would have to do it somewhere else. If it was clear to Kesler, arguably it should have been clear to Benning, as well. So, if Benning had a free hand in the composition of the team -- a debatable point, but so far none of his staunchest advocates have used that defence -- and it was clear the window had closed, he should have focused on a longer-term rebuild in preference to a retool-on-the-fly effort.

The defence of the Kesler trade results, at the time, was that Benning was at least showing decisiveness, and not letting the uncertainty weigh on the team. It should by now be clear to everyone, including Benning, that Canucks wins that season were an impediment to their long-term success anyway, so it was more important to focus on getting maximum return for the asset than to try to manage the team's psychological state in the short term. Benning should have played hardball with Kesler and let him sit until Kesler expanded his list of teams enough to give Benning some trading leverage, so that he could have gotten more in return.

Yes, the no-trade clause that Gillis gave Kesler made the circumstance more difficult, but since Gillis is not the GM anymore, most of the board has lost interest in debating the quality of his performance. We are interested in how well Benning is, and has been, doing. The circumstances he inherited were what they were, and we are only assessing how well he did in the circumstances. With the advantage of hindsight (a minor advantage to compensate for the fact that I am a mere hack hockey board poster, and not a high-paid NHL executive and purported hockey genius), it seems that while Benning did not completely flub the trade, he might well have done better with another approach, and the long-term rebuild that was needed from the the start of his tenure might have been farther along.
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Re: The Great Jim Benning Debate!

Post by Strangelove »

Ronning's Ghost wrote: If it was clear to Kesler (that the window had closed) arguably it should have been clear to Benning, as well. So Benning... should have focused on a longer-term rebuild in preference to a retool-on-the-fly effort.
IMO it was always "a longer-term rebuild".

The "retool-on-the-fly" bullshit was just that.

"A GM's gotta say what a GM's gotta say"
Ronning's Ghost wrote: It should by now be clear to everyone, including Benning, that Canucks wins that season were an impediment to their long-term success
I disagree with you about wins being an impediment and I like Brock Boeser. :mex:
Ronning's Ghost wrote: it was more important to focus on getting maximum return for the asset than to try to manage the team's psychological state in the short term. Benning should have played hardball with Kesler and let him sit until Kesler expanded his list of teams enough to give Benning some trading leverage, so that he could have gotten more in return.
Disagree on playing hardball with Kesler...
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Re: The Great Jim Benning Debate!

Post by Ronning's Ghost »

Strangelove wrote:
Ronning's Ghost wrote: If it was clear to Kesler (that the window had closed) arguably it should have been clear to Benning, as well. So Benning... should have focused on a longer-term rebuild in preference to a retool-on-the-fly effort.
IMO it was always "a longer-term rebuild".

The "retool-on-the-fly" bullshit was just that.

"A GM's gotta say what a GM's gotta say"
Fair enough, and I have conceded that deception is an important tool for a GM in tough straits. But did he have to hire expensive free agents to sell the bullshit to the fans ?
Strangelove wrote:
Ronning's Ghost wrote: It should by now be clear to everyone, including Benning, that Canucks wins that season were an impediment to their long-term success
I disagree with you about wins being an impediment and I like Brock Boeser. :mex:
Better than every other player available in that draft ?
Strangelove wrote:
Ronning's Ghost wrote: it was more important to focus on getting maximum return for the asset than to try to manage the team's psychological state in the short term. Benning should have played hardball with Kesler and let him sit until Kesler expanded his list of teams enough to give Benning some trading leverage, so that he could have gotten more in return.
Disagree on playing hardball with Kesler...
Because...you think Kesler would have sat the whole season ?
Because...you don't think a deal was out there is Benning had more potential trading partners ?
Because.....?
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Re: The Great Jim Benning Debate!

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Ronning's Ghost wrote: Fair enough, and I have conceded that deception is an important tool for a GM in tough straits. But did he have to hire expensive free agents to sell the bullshit to the fans ?
Y U P
Ronning's Ghost wrote: Better than every other player available in that draft ?
As good as any other player Canucks were likely to get with a few more losses...
Ronning's Ghost wrote: Because...you think Kesler would have sat the whole season ?
Because...you don't think a deal was out there is Benning had more potential trading partners ?
Because.....?
Why would Kesler sit out? :eh:

Kesler would have played out his last 2 seasons and walked as a UFA, nice asset management, nice rebuild.

Kesler took a pay cut for that NTC (he also asked other players to take pay cuts).

Kesler is the kind of guy who would have taken a stand on dat dere.

Also not good to create a toxic environment for the kids during a rebuild.

Think of the children!!

Benning did the right thing IMO, it was a decent return all things considered, pull trigger, move on.

Now if you'll excuse me I'm about to join the wife in a bottle of wine...
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Re: The Great Jim Benning Debate!

Post by Mickey107 »

It was a chaotic time for sure, but; I don't think Kesler should have been moved at all, at least not at that particular time.
Kesler wasn't being very professional and let too much crap get inside his head.
Had he had the summer to think things through, I'm pretty sure he would have chilled out some.
Look at the circumstances leading up to his demand.
Spends two weeks in Russia with his American, "Rah, Rah", buddies, not the least of which included Patrick Kane,
a person with a REAL big mouth and a REAL, REAL hatred for the Canucks and so on. A whole lot different than playing for your Country but at the same time doing it in your home team building me thinks.
And then there was Torts, another American hockey supporter. What "was" his agenda here?
I still don't really know. If it was a game just to confuse everyone, well, it did that. What a mess.

Should have just waited till the next year. By that time I don't think or buy that Kesler would have gone out of his way to be a big dressing room distraction...
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Re: The Great Jim Benning Debate!

Post by Topper »

Strangelove wrote:IMO it was always "a longer-term rebuild".

The "retool-on-the-fly" bullshit was just that.

"A GM's gotta say what a GM's gotta say"
all the way back to Tortorella saying, "You have to stop thinking about 2011."
Over the Internet, you can pretend to be anyone or anything.

I'm amazed that so many people choose to be complete twats.
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