Why call them "clowns" when you believe in their vision?
facetious comment, if that wasn't apparent to begin with.
"Sweating the details during the transition"... Any GM would kill to work in such an environment:
And is that a bad thing? Giving a GM a great opportunity to actually shape a team in their mold is somehow a
bad thing?
- Screw up on trades? Don't worry, he's getting rid of 'not his guys'.
That's part of change. You want to build a team of "your guys", sometimes the league-wide "value" on the guys you don't want, is going to be crappy - probably for a lot of the same reasons they aren't guys you want to keep. Weird how that works...
- Pay a premium for marginal assets? Don't worry, he's getting 'his guys' and his building 'a real team'.
Make some gambles in that transition period with fringe players and low rent picks? Yeah...some of them are going to come up bust. That's not a catastrophe...that's...normal and predictable.
- End up with a marginal product in the end? Don't worry, it was the 'transition phase'.
If it ultimately
ends up with a
marginal product then no...that's not okay. But the "ends" isn't one year out, it takes time to reorganize an organization. That's years and years out. You can derisively quotation "transition phase" all you want...but it's the reality of a cap and parity NHL. And especially true, when moving from one head of state to another, and yet more true and apparent when the philosophy of these subsequent GMs is so radically different as it was from Gillis to Benning.
- Keep screwing up for 4 years? Don't worry, you have to give a GM 5 years before you finally judge him.
You seem to scoff at this idea of giving a GM 5 years to really build "their team". I don't understand this notion at all. You don't just turn a team around overnight...especially one in this unavoidable and undeniably declining middleground of the Canucks right now.
Benning is walking into a radically different situation than Gillis did. The latter was handed the core of a cup team, and did a pretty great job of filling in some pieces around them to get them ever so close that one year. He took what was there, and filled it out pretty well. Benning on the other hand...inherited a team in which Gillis had managed to add approximately...2 core players (Bo and Tanev?), with his former "Cup Core" on the wrong side of 30 as a group...and tasked with producing a "New Core" for "The Future". That's a massively more difficult and long-term task.
coax a cup-calibre core to the finals vs completely rebuild a team. different.
If i'm a GM taking on a job, i definitely want to know that i'm going to get my 5 years to build "My Team", not just tweak the last dude's blueprint and be condemned a year out despite delivering a pretty solid team that made the playoffs comfortable after being a bottom-10 team the year before. It's a good deal of time to commit to a GM, but if you're not willing to commit that time to
their vision of a team, then honestly, why bother? Why even fire Gillis, if all you want is "more Gillis doings"?
5 years is a long time, but in organizational development terms...that's a very reasonable window. That's a reasonable window to justify a completion of a GM's contributions on. Gillis got his 5 years...he done good. But when his 5th was regression, and his 6th was an unwatchable turd of a season, that's not fickle...that's a guy who couldn't seem to bring the results in the seasons where it's completely and totally "Your Team".
"rebuilding" isn't an instant process. Putting together a completely new "core" for a team outside of Horvat and maybe Tanev...that's a crazy tall task. That's starting from scratch...with a team that under competent coaching, still has a shot at the playoffs.
But in reality, as we see the media and fans turn on him so quickly into his tenure, there are knowledgeable fans in this market that will express their displeasure. That's already happened - and it will get worse if Benning does not improve.
It's not "knowledgeable" fans. It's fans who read a lot of "advanced stats" stuff. It's a fickle and superficial fanbase who ticket-wise, are already bailing like mad. Forum-wise here, are jumping from the bandwagon because it's no fun if the team isn't dominant, or dominantly rebuilding. It's knowledge of Corsi results, HERO charts, and "advanced stats", and the portrayal of them by the media.
It's a fanbase building their consensus on fundamentally...how many shots for/against the team had. Which is completely insane. You call it "Corsi" and people abide by this like its the law. You call it...shots for/against, and it's the most goofy thing to base a fundamental impression of a team around. Yet that's what it is...it's as "advanced" as the much derided "Zone Time" statistic...probably even less advanced, as it is fundamentally a rough approximation of the latter Zone Time stat by other means.
Knowledgeable is not the same as "reads a lot of press", "follows them blogs", and "can go to corsi providing sites on the internet".
