clunk
Registered User
Yeah, not even close honestly. The Messier situation was pretty overrated imo. He was a dick for asking for Maki's number, sure, but I also feel like he had the right to ask for his number, since it was essentially his brand. I don't feel that he purposely 'played bad' (didn't even play that bad, just regressed imo). Nor do I feel that he 'demanded' the captaincy (Trevor gave it to him). Suing the Canucks shouldn't draw any vitriol from Vancouver fans. Does the average person really care if the Canucks' owners lose a few million dollars? Literally makes no difference to anything. I honestly didn't mind him that much at all. It's all overblown, imo. I didn't like him when he was on the Rags, but I didn't think he was a terrible player for us. Trevor didn't have to give him the captaincy and the Canucks didn't have to offer him big money to come here.oh I was having a nice day away from the Internet yesterday, and somebody texted this to me. I thought it was a joke. As pointed out earlier in this thread, nobody should be confused as to who's in charge of the day to day operations of this team.
And the current situation is much, much worse than the Keenan-Messier era.
Messier's time here actually had fantastic future results. The Linden trade was an amazing haul for the Canucks long term, and many take issue with the fact Messier and Keenan 'pushed him out', but it had great results for us. Keenan was a prick, but he was NOT worse than Jim Benning. Not one trade Benning has made even comes close to the value we got for Linden. A lot of the hate for Keenan comes from his little feud with Trevor Linden, and publicly calling him out (and his time with the Rags of course, but i dont feel that's a valid reason to vilify him).
I feel like the personality cult of Trevor Linden has stirred up this Messier hate much more than what Messier did himself, and I feel a lot of people, especially on /r/Canucks, use it as a way of signalling that they are 'true Canucks fans' or something, who have 'braved the worst years' etc. I guarantee a lot of them weren't even following the team or alive when Messier was here, which makes it all that much more ridiculous.
This Jim Benning era is absolutely the worst in organizational history. Nothing comes close.
I feel like if Canucks fans lost their hard on for Trevor Linden (his time here as president definitely helped), the Messier years won't seem nearly as bad as what we're going through now.