No, drafting doesn’t outweigh 2/3rds of his job. These are mutually dependent factors serving the same goal: Rebuilding.
If you find better talent through trade/FA, you don’t have to draft as well. On the flip side, a poor performance at pro scouting creates that much more pressure at the draft table. In other words, drafting became that much more important because Benning was poor everywhere else. He didn’t even help himself at the draft table by getting more picks. Does someone who emphasizes the draft do this?
But back to the main question: What is your baseline? I would like to know what you would have expected another GM to do at the draft table? Per stats markers posted here before, Benning has been decidedly average at the draft table. Do you have a different analysis?
I think he has a point, though. Given where the franchise was, the most important goal the GM had was to build a new young core for the team going forward. I dont plan on doing some kind of larger meta-analysis of the make-up of teams that do well and where they acquired their core from, but just anecdotally it feels like a majority of them do it through the draft. So, it follows that drafting would be the most important factor, beyond things like pro scouting, in a rebuild.
Now, naturally, there are other factors to consider, that can expedite a rebuild exponentially; in particular, good asset management can really help you turn around a franchise in rapid fashion, as we've seen with teams like NYR (granted we haven't seen the results of this scorched earth rebuild process yet), and I'm not going to pretend whatsoever that Benning is good at asset management. Failing to leverage the assets he had (although its worth considering the context of each of those assets. He wasn't getting anything for the Sedins, for instance.), and targeting poor pro players have been his two biggest faults easily.
I do have to question the validity of any analysis that evaluates the the drafting acumen of GMs based on such recent drafts. Boeser has been in the league for two years, Pettersson for one. Juolevi still hasn't played a game in the NHL. We wont see the results of the Podkolzin draft for another two years or so. Demko is just starting to work his way into the league. It's still pretty early to evaluate the careers of talent drafted within the past 5 years.
It's also worth considering that while the Canucks have been the worst team next to Buffalo over the past four years,
they haven't drafted like it. And I dont mean that in a derogatory fashion towards Benning, I mean that literally the draft position of the Canucks has
regularly dropped from where they finished in the standings due to the lottery. Speaking of analysis, I vaguely remember a draft analysis that speculated that the success of a pick drops off exponentially in regards to draft position: i.e. picks 1-3 are far better than 4-10. The Canucks, despite their abject failure over the past 4 seasons, have drafted, at the lowest, at 5.
Considering that, I find it hard to put much objective merit to the sentiment of "well of course the Canucks have a good young core, they've been the worst team in the league over the past 4 seasons. Anyone could luck into that kind of core." When you consider the context of the draft position of that core and the opportunities the Canucks were presented to draft with in the first place, it becomes pretty obvious that the Canucks did at the very least a somewhat admirable job at the draft table.
