The Canucks had one of the best AHL defencemen at the time they traded for Clendening. Instead of trying Sanguinetti for even one game the Canucks traded for a comparable talent with much worse skating. It was a bizarre move short term and long term.
Forsling was first in goals amongst dmen at the WJC last year and seventh in points. Unlike most for Sweden's defence he didn't look lost in his own zone. He was named the Swedish Junior player of the year last season, so it's not just HF hyping him.
Yup. Made absolutely zero sense and still does. What a terrible move, and terrible scouting.
I have no dog in this fight but people here have been insulting Benning because of the way he sounds in interviews from the beginning of his tenure in Vancouver. The anger started with the decision not to re-build and Benning became the scapegoat who took the brunt of that because of his job title. Then after Benning was hired every move he made that didn't align with a re-build just increased the anger until the insults became a meme in the online hockeysphere. Just be honest guys, you didn't like him from the start because he wouldn't implement a re-build.
I didn't want a rebuild. I agreed with his 2014 plan to re-tool and felt it could be done with competent management.
However, he's done such an utterly disastrous job of it that a rebuild is now really the only option.
And he deserves to take heat for the way he sounds and the lack of intelligent content to what he says. He's the representative for a massive corporation attempting to explain the direction of that organization to hundreds of thousands of customers. It's a huge part of his job.
If the head of Apple held a press conference to explain a new product and was like, 'Uh, this is our new iphone, and uh, it does, uh, lots of cool stuff real good. We, uh, hope you buy it' that person would be eviscerated for it, and rightly so.
Benning sounds stupid. Says stupid things. Does stupid things. And makes stupid move after stupid move. He's stupid. If it walks like a duck ...
I think time and the previous regime destroyed anything we had left.
Luongo, Schneider, Kesler, Malhotra, The Sedins, Hamhuis, Burrows who am I missing? All either squandered by Gillis or else old balls now. The only piece left worth anything is Edler and he is constantly **** upon by so called fans... par for the course.
Also notice how the guys that are old now but still here have contracts that severely limit Bennings ability to do anything with them.
What?
Almost every quality part of this team is left over from Gillis. Tanev, Edler, Hutton, Sedins, Hansen, Horvat, Markstrom. Even the Virtanen pick was essentially inherited.
Benning has surrounded that core with complete and utter garbage. And the crippling contracts are Benning's not Gillis'.
