Management Thread - Read OP

[Jyrki21]

more scummy news about the aquilini family:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/aquilini-canucks-tax-court-1.5183787

At least now we know why Aquilini has been keeping Benning around – he needs to tank the team’s book value to offset his capital gains.

 

[Jyrki21]

Harman Dayal has finally gotten around to posting the draft-value analysis that he teased right before Botchford's passing.

Behind the Numbers: An analysis of every NHL team’s recent...

I'll excerpt liberally, but this is still only a small part of the whole article. If you're reading this, Athletic people, and want me to take it down, just say the word.

In short, the Canucks have been underperforming versus expected value, but in part that's just because Pettersson hasn't played long enough in the league to bump them up:

Once you turn it into per-game value, the Canucks improve, but it still boils mostly just down to Pettersson and Boeser.

Vancouver owned the fifth highest expected pick value during this time and has capitalized by returning the sixth most value — most of that coming from Elias Pettersson and Brock Boeser, although Jared McCann who’s now with the Penguins also seems to be coming along quite nicely. There’s no doubt that the Canucks have done some good work at the draft under Jim Benning, but I wouldn’t say they’ve been excellent and their performance falls short by some margin when compared to say the Winnipeg Jets in the first four years of their rebuild.

Winnipeg is a good comparable for the Canucks because, for the first five years of their rebuild, they too failed to win the lottery for a top-3 pick. The Jets should be seen as the gold standard for building through the draft as they hit a home-run on every first-round pick during this span (Mark Scheifele, Jacob Trouba, Josh Morrissey, Kyle Connor) and supported that by picking up excellent depth pieces in Adam Lowry and Andrew Copp. The same can’t be said for Vancouver who has missed on grabbing the best player available with both their Virtanen and Olli Juolevi picks. As such, you can see that the Canucks have yielded roughly half the immediate value as the Jets did from their picks, with the gap closing, but remaining at a not insignificant margin when accounting for games played.

As many of us know, the vaunted envy-of-the-league prospect pool is pretty much a myth, as the Canucks just temporarily had better players from being bad, just like everyone else does.

With an r^2 of 0.39, there’s clearly an inverse relationship with winning and having a strong prospect pool (the more your team wins, typically the weaker your prospects are), which shouldn’t come as much of a surprise.

[...]

Even after including the uber-talented Quinn Hughes, the Canucks place with the 20th ranked NHLe. Olli Juolevi still has second-pairing upside, while Jett Woo and Tyler Madden had a solid draft plus one season, but frankly, almost every pool has prospects of this calibre. Simply put, with Hughes graduating, it’s hard to imagine many needle movers from this pool providing impact within the next couple of seasons.

This is partly in due to the failure of the draft guru to extract much value beyond the first round:

There are eight teams that have yet to draft above replacement level talent during this span: Colorado, Detroit, Edmonton, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Vancouver and Winnipeg. Out of this list, the Jets earn some slack because of how excellent they were at the draft table under the same management in years past. Vancouver, meanwhile, has gotten 281 games played outside of the first-round which can’t be ignored, but it hasn’t translated to much value yet because all of Nikita Tryamkin, Gustav Forsling and Adam Gaudette are still below replacement level. How the Canucks look with respect to their drafting outside the first round under Benning will depend heavily on the development of Gaudette and Thatcher Demko.

In sum: Boston and Tampa are likely the only teams that can even pretend to be "drafting gurus", and even then this is just because of a couple more hits, and the evidence leans pretty heavily in favor of @Melvin's view that this isn't really a thing.

 

[timw33]

So we don't need to be held hostage by the notion that Benning makes us an elite drafting team and only he can build a winner?

 

[Frankie Blueberries]

Free agency is going to be scary.
Benning is going to sign players based on need to save his job + Aquilini just wants to make the playoffs = the perfect sh*t storm. Add in Chia because why not?

Benning's going to sign someone like Ferland (we suck LW) and/or a defenceman like Gardiner/Myers. They will play well for 2-3 seasons and then be overpaid trash.

 

[ProstheticConscience]

So...this amazing prospect pool might be *gasp* exactly what we always said it was?! NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[mossey3535]

An r^2 of 0.39 is pathetic and he shouldn't even have mentioned it in the piece. Just argue the clear downward trend. This analysis probably doesn't deserve a regression in the first place.

Advanced stats is invaluable but some of these guys need to learn which stats to use and when.

 

[Addison Rae]

Harmon Dayal is a genius and a NHL team should hire this kid.

I did an interview with him as well and he’s is extremely intelligent and well spoken.

 

[PuckMunchkin]

The idiot has out done him self again.

 

[Mr Plow]

"Management" is such a misnomer for this thread. I'm surprised Benning manages to find his way back to the office everyday.

 

[SeawaterOnIce]

Numb. Just numb. I could care less if they said they are moving the Vancouver Canucks franchise to another city.

Start anew. Bring a new franchise in 2025 or something. Just get rid of this pathetic ass franchise. 50 years of bullshit.

 

[PG Canuck]

We have way too many forwards - somethings gotta give.

 

[Breakers]

Wow Wow I dont know how you could look at these team results and say "All in"
A) 35-36-11 (Below .500)
B) -30 goal differential
C) 10 points out of a playoff spot

To me the record is most telling. Trading away future 1st's when you are currently a below .500 team is insane.

 

[Foundational Player]

JT Miller.......ha! Gonna make all the difference.

Potential first rounder in 2021, you just know the team will miss the playoffs and the Lightening will win the draft lottery. How could you give up a first rounder for a top 9 winger?

It's all about formulating a plan and executing such plan.

Brisbois had a plan, exploit naive and desperate GM when in a position of weakness (team at the cap ceiling) and turn any leverage Benning may have had into a great trade for the Lightening. All the while shedding salary and picking up a potential lottery pick in 2021. Oh and a high 3rd round pick!!!!!!!!!

Jim Benning has never had a plan and yet he is the General Manager of the Vancouver Canucks?

Am I missing something here?

I am sick and tired of this gong show............... the dark days are still here Francisco!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Can we get that billboard going again.................., what a disappointing day for this team.

 

[Melvin]

What has essentially happened is that last year we had for most of the season an absolutely terrible Western Conference, which allowed the Canucks to stay in the race a bit longer than expected and helped push the narrative that they've improved and that they are on the brink of contention. The facts of the matter are they still finished 10 points out of a spot despite picking up a metric f***-ton of OT points and are basically as bad as they've ever been. But this is one of those cases where the narrative has run amok of the facts.

So you have a team that went 22-36 in games decided in regulation that has convinced itself that it is a bubble team and will surely be in the playoffs next year because they "feel" like they were close this past year and are banking on all of their young players to improve and on players to be healthier because that is always what they bank on.

And so JT Miller becomes the final missing piece. Because of course what we've needed for years was a middle-six winger.

It honestly reminds me of 2 years ago when Arizona traded their first for Derek Stepan and Antti Raanta, a similar "we're ready to win" kind of move. That pick was 7th overall and it's interesting that I don't really remember it being panned on here like this one has been.

 

[Hit the post]

We have way too many forwards - somethings gotta give.

I was told this was our biggest weakness. Harder to get wingers than nondepth D as been said.

 

[Melvin]

We have way too many forwards - somethings gotta give.

So yeah, let's talk about this.

Wingers under contract:

Loui Eriksson 6M
JT Miller 5.25M
Tanner Pearson 3.75M
Sven Baertschi 3.36M
Ryan Spooner 3.1M
Antoine Roussel 3.0M
Tim Schaller 1.9M
Jake Virtanen 1.25M

RFA's:

Tyler Motte
Josh Leivo
Nikolay Goldobin
Markus Granlund
Brock Boeser

Basically they need to cut 4 of these players.

I honestly cannot believe they didn't buy out Schaller. That seemed like the most no-brainer obvious thing that was going to happen. Spooner also probably should have been bought out.

Granlund and Motte cannot possibly be qualified but who TF knows. Green seems to be infatuated with Motte and we all know the deal with Granlund who seemingly will never go away.

 

[TruGr1t]

How they've managed to screw up the salary cap so badly without signing any actual star players (I guess you can sorta count Horvat, but not really) is insane. At least Toronto and Edmonton blew it up on legit stars. Our structure is just horrendous in terms of cap management.

We are going to be a team that has to give up additional picks to move salary. Possibly as soon as this summer.

 

[RealityCheck22]

The comments to those twitter threads are astonishing.

Im almost speechless trying to comprehend what kind of complete imbeciles can follow the team and see what's happening and come out thinking Benning is good, at all.

And then use the dumb argument that we have a few good young players but then ignore the fact that many other teams have equal or better young cores while finishing higher in the standings.

Exactly. I like that the Canucks have a decent under 25 year old talent pool. It's been a long time since it's been this good. The problem is, check out a team like Colorado, or Toronto and their young talent base. You don't build a team in a vacuum. You actually have to beat other teams.

 

[RandV]

If we max out our cap by adding a UFA like Meyers to the mix next year is going to be interesting as well. As things currently are you have Spooner and Schaller coming off the books, but Markstrom and Tanev are UFA's then Stecher, Virtanen and Gaudette RFA's.

 

[Seattle Totems]

Seriously why the hell is there still analysis in this thread. It is a total waste of time. We know that this management is completely incompetent.

It is time to cut the bullshit Canuck fans. Say it loud on social media and every media outlet.

#FireBenning

 

[WTG]

#FireBenning is trending in Vancouver

 

[Bertuzzzi44]

How do they plan on addressing the forward log jam?

Miller-Pettersson-Boeser
Pearson-Horvat-Leivo
Baertschi-Gaudette-Virtanen
Ericksson-Beagle-Sutter
Roussel*/Goldobin/Motte
Spooner/Granlund/Schaller
+ prospects fighting for a chance

 

[thecupismine]

So yeah, let's talk about this.

Wingers under contract:

Loui Eriksson 6M
JT Miller 5.25M
Tanner Pearson 3.75M
Sven Baertschi 3.36M
Ryan Spooner 3.1M
Antoine Roussel 3.0M
Tim Schaller 1.9M
Jake Virtanen 1.25M

RFA's:

Tyler Motte
Josh Leivo
Nikolay Goldobin
Markus Granlund
Brock Boeser

Basically they need to cut 4 of these players.

I honestly cannot believe they didn't buy out Schaller. That seemed like the most no-brainer obvious thing that was going to happen. Spooner also probably should have been bought out.

Granlund and Motte cannot possibly be qualified but who TF knows. Green seems to be infatuated with Motte and we all know the deal with Granlund who seemingly will never go away.

To quote the late Botchford, that's a sea of Granlund right there, and that's not even considering Sutter + Beagle. A lot of these guys are going to be a lot easier to move out next summer, but there's no realistic hope for next season.

Best case scenario the young guns continue to improve but our record stays about the same as we don't get an obscene amount of OT wins and goaltending regresses back to the mean.

My bet is Benning is fired around the trade deadline when it becomes obvious we aren't making the playoffs.

 

[SillyRabbit]

Harmon Dayal is a genius and a NHL team should hire this kid.

I did an interview with him as well and he’s is extremely intelligent and well spoken.

Lots of Vancouver area guys have been hired by NHL teams due to their incredible hockey knowledge.

You’d think with them being in our own backyard and providing insight on the Canucks, they’d find themselves with jobs working for the Canucks.

Under Gillis, we pursued and employed some of these guys.

With Benning, we’re seeing them being ignored and then snatched up by other franchises.

It pains me to watch homegrown talent help other teams succeed instead of us.

 

[Melvin]

How do they plan on addressing the forward log jam?

Miller-Pettersson-Boeser
Pearson-Horvat-Leivo
Baertschi-Gaudette-Virtanen
Ericksson-Beagle-Sutter
Roussel*/Goldobin/Motte
Spooner/Granlund/Schaller
+ prospects fighting for a chance

Most logically, Motte and Granlund are not given a qualifying offer, Spooner is sent back to the AHL and, God, maybe you somehow find a way to dump Eriksson and Sutter.