gameburn

But signing Holtby "for the same term he offered Markstrom" just suggests how poor Benning is at assessing talent and the future of his team. Holtby is paid way too much for a team that has no cap space and couldn't keep Toffoli or Stecher. And he is here for 2 years! Either Holtby is a back up or Demko was to be traded/lost to Seattle. If Holtby is a backup (and Demko is protected in the expansion draft) then Holtby is here for too long and too much money. On the other hand if Demko is actually the backup, then Holtby is not good enough, and Demko should have been moved/traded for assets asap. It's this weird indecision on the goalkeeping that makes me think that the CDC faction that thinks Benning isn't that good at assessing talent may be right. (I was always on the other side, as Benning came in with a stellar reputation for assessing talent.)

If, the young core puts up with this. There were hints at the start of this season that they didn't appreciate how this was unfolding. I got the impression from Horvat -- who is pretty diplomatic -- that they were all a bit surprised at the scale of the turnover. Which suggests that Benning may not have talked with the key 4 or 5, or asked their opinions. Athletes are partners, not fodder. Psychologically, saying we'll be good in 2 years is not ideal to say the least. Saying "next year" might be tolerable, but 2 years? This is a LONG time in sports. Or any workplace. And Benning just said as much, it's not just us on the forums who can see a brighter future in 2 years. He should be doing better, saying better than you and I can do looking at the contract mess. Re: Eriksson, Beagle etc.: these guys were too old to be signed long-term, better GMs don't do this, at least for complementary pieces. Even Benning knows this now, as he didn't re-sign Tanev or Markstrom, or even try very hard to do so. If I thought that Benning had learned a great deal from these years and was making amends I might say he should be kept, but he still managed to screw up re-signing Stecher. And remember the Ekman-Larsson fantasy? That pursuit took up a lot of time and energy... and he was I believe the 5th highest cap hit for D in the NHL at the time... how would we have paid for that? lol. 3 weeks spent on that I think, not on Stecher, not on Leivo, not on talking with the young core. Pettersson spent the off-season here... I would have thought they'd have talked to him about the coming year/issues. No indication they did.

We didn't have to wait 2 years. Better planning would have allowed us to build on last year's playoff run, not fall off a cliff. I agree that Markstrom and Tanev were probably impossible or at least unwise to re-sign. That's not my complaint. My complaint is with not dealing with the Eriksson mess (Higgins was dealt with, and he was a stalwart guy) and with overpaying Beagle. And with signing free agents in general. Teams who are rebuilding generally don't do that, and they don't do it I think because they are building, giving opportunity, getting draft picks (something Benning didn't do well), making money available for the rare find that really could be picked up. Not 3rd and 4th line fringe players who "will create a winning culture", or "provide support to our young players," (where support means killing penalties, taking defensive zone faceoffs and allowing the stars a rest.) 3rd and 4th line players can contribute to the driving of play, to actually scoring. Not taking penalties lol, nor just being time fillers until the real hockey players get on the ice. The truth is: there has been a huge upswing in the talent level of players available in the last 4 or 5 years and this team has not been able to take advantage of it because of old contracts and old thinking. Stecher was not old, and would have been easy to keep. Certainly a better guy for the future than Edler or for that matter Benn, lol.

I think we got a bit of a hint with Michaelis the last game that most of our bottom 6 is expendable, Beagle included. An almost unknown mid-20s player is as good as Roussel and most of the bottom 6. Hawryluk was pretty good too. If you look at the teams that have winning records against us they all have much better 3rd and 4th lines -- and generally much younger. Beagle is useless. I'm sorry but a forward who scores 10 points a year and is getting 12 to 15 minutes a night is not good enough -- and his faceoff success is under 60%, we're not talking Doug Jarvis here. Also, pk doesn't matter: teams give up fewer penalties every year, and increasingly the best teams kill those penalties with guys who have offensive skills (Marner?) If your team takes less than 3 penalties a game on average, you don't need pk specialists who can't play the rest of the game. You can't afford to keep them, is what I mean. Just like you can't afford to keep an enforcer when neither fighting nor unaccountability of players is an issue anymore. Edler: Edler, not a fan of his game at all. He would not be in the top 5 of most teams, and wouldn't be here if we'd been a little better at keeping/managing/drafting D here. And like the above bunch, he is wildly over-paid. The penalties he takes are unforgivable and they come directly from his inability to keep up with the play. He doesn't have it anymore. It was a mistake to re-sign him 2 years back and would be even more outrageous if re-signed again. Every team seems to have a guy that evades accountability, they just look like franchise guys. But they aren't. I have no idea why he doesn't get benched or sat after his goofs and poor play. Letting him retire in place like the Sedins: another waste of an asset, another abuse of the no-trade clause. He is not now, and has not been a part of this core for a long time. No idea why he gets the pass that he does. Virtanen and Pearson: we need scoring and players with flexibility, both have this. Good deals for the money, especially compared to Roussel, Beagle, Sutter etc. Eriksson should have received the Higgins treatment last year, probably be off in Europe by now. "But this would send the wrong message", I hear people say. What message does it send to Horvat, Pettersson, Hughes and Boeser when a guy like Eriksson is humored while guys like Tanev, Stecher and Toffoli can't seem to be re-signed? Says that you don't really want to win, that you don't think the core group is worth supporting. Why do you think team morale was so poor to start the year? A quarter of the team was allowed to walk because they couldn't seem to figure out how to deal with contracts, money and the Eriksson debacle. Throw in Luongo and Baertschi and you have a sense of doom/failure all around.

Save the same money on taxi squad? Didn't know that. Still, might be useful to have in Utica in the hopes he might consider tearing up the contract? I know it's cruel, but...

I hope that circumstances decide this, that it will be obvious to everyone when we have gone from being a playoff team on the rise, to a dumpster fire with a 2-year put out date. It's kind of obvious now. And might be even more undeniable at the end of this season. If you think things are bad now, wait til next year when Beagle, Roussel, Eriksson, Sutter (due for another injury) and Edler are all a year older. They are all coming back. This circus will carry on exactly as it is, barring some kind of major change, which I think we have just been told is not going to occur. Even if Podkolzin gets here and wins the Calder, we still will have the above names filling spots, taking up valuable opportunities and minutes. I'm old enough to remember the Harold Ballard years in Toronto. Stellick as GM lol, the players wanting out, Ballard not really caring much about winning.

This seems like a pretty good summary of where we're at now.

Benning himself said that he ran out of time to sign Stecher, which suggests if not laziness then poor management skills. Stecher vs. Chatfield or Benn... that's what Benning did to the D. Not sending Eriksson to Utica to save some money (as the team did with Baertschi)... suggests something similar. For that matter we all thought Eriksson should have been sent to Utica last year. (It might have inspired him to move on somewhere else, maybe Europe. That was a discussion point last year here on the forums.)

It would only send the wrong message to the team (i.e., young core) if there was a good chance they could still make the playoffs. Do we really believe that's possible now, with half the season gone? You would agree that if the team doesn't go on a huge winning streak over the next 2 weeks then they would be wise to be a seller?

The way that Toffoli and Stecher ended up leaving suggests that you may have it exactly right. Toffoli wanted to stay -- buds with Pearson I think, among other things -- and Stecher was homegrown and wanted to stay. Will Boeser and Hughes want to stay after seeing this stuff? If I were the owner, I'd remember McDavid being excited (willing to stay?) because new, better management came in.

The one that gets me is losing Stecher. He wasn't Hughes, but he wasn't Hutton either, he was a genuine top 4 D on this team. Certainly up there with Myers and probably ahead of Edler. Gone for nothing. He would have signed for money comparable to Benn, more or less I'm guessing, maybe a million more? The other one that gets me is not having Linden or at least someone in management above Benning and between him and the owner. I think it would be easier for everyone to move on from Benning before the trade deadline if there was someone who was tracking this stuff. This can't go on like this can it? Promising a good team in 2 years? What's wrong with this year? Or at least next year. Why is Eriksson still here taking up this cap space? The problems with money have been facing them for months/years on end now -- everyone saw this coming. Half of the people on this forum have been talking about exactly this stuff for 18 months.

vs. And.. Edler... he got a key assist last night, got a terribly ill-timed penalty (again) and looked out of place when the speedier players were up against him... except when he defended well and made some interceptions... This is the problem with Edler... best and worst on the team consistently, lol. Imo, he fails the classic eye test miserably (except when he makes that key offensive play or hit, lol) while looking better on the stats tests (except when you total up his injury and penalty minutes, lol) He has to be the most polarizing player in years.

I may have lumped a bunch of Benning's decisions into one heap and then suggested it was all bad. That there was an obvious pattern when maybe there isn't. You may be right about the Sedins: they would have had to agree, I suspect you're right about that. You may be right about Beagle too. The problem is that Sutter and Roussel ADDED to Beagle seems to restrict our 3rd/4th line evolution at the moment. The question of which one to keep now is interesting. I'd assume that the one to keep is Sutter, but you may have a case re: Beagle. Re Edler: he was not good 2 or 3 years back, I think it was 3 years back when he just couldn't seem to concentrate or make good decisions, and he was beginning to slow. He is even slower now, but he doesn't seem to make as many bad decisions. The penalties though: I'd love to see a statistic on the liability of players' penalty minutes. He just seems to kill the team every second or third game with an opposition power play. Tanev never took penalties, he wasn't as physical, but I'm not sure physical play is as important for D as it used to be. Even the thing of pushing people out from the front of the net seems to be handled differently now. Edler has one strength only Hughes has and maybe Myers and Schmidt on a good day: he has a good feel for when to go on the offense and make the decisive set up play. Like he did last night. My only complaint is with his footspeed and his general slowness, which I think has been the factor in his taking so many penalties. I think hockey is increasingly a young man's game, and Edler isn't getting any younger.

The training in boxing is incredible. Has to have the best athletes, bar none. My father was a boxer (amateur only) but he always said that he burned an incredible number of calories in training. He loved the sport because it had proper weight classes, made it available to everyone. I'd always thought of Tyson as a kind of bully brawler, I'll have to go look at the old footage. You've reminded me that Tyson was super quick and hugely respected in his early days -- the star, really, biggest since the days of Ali. So easy to dismiss the guy now. Every sport seems to produce the spark plug type guy that can use his whole body to overcome bigger players -- Horvat is like that now, as is Hoglander I think. The amazing thing is that they seem to get fewer injuries in spite of the work rate and commitment. Technique, I guess. Maybe that's the best way for a kid to choose their sport: which essential technique of each sport suits them best, is most pleasurable, yields the best results. And is sustainable without overuse injuries. Re: MMA, I was just suggesting that Tyson may have been way ahead of his time. Partly because he seemed to figure out how best to box in a way that suited who he was and could be. Should a fight be an ordeal or a match, short as possible? Tyson seemed to be the best fighter for the professional game. Ranking fighters: boxing is amazing because a person really can imagine a fight between a Marciano and a Foreman or an Ali or even Tyson. No fiberglass sticks, no super advanced training changes to make the athletes not comparable. No changes in the size of the field or the lightness of the ball. Just 2 people in a ring.

Interesting. No one has commented on this, except you, to the best of my knowledge. What would the team look like if Miller became a regular at that position? Pettersson return to wing, or would we have three topline centers? It would make sending Sutter and Beagle to the trade block easy enough.

What a difference personality/likability makes. Ali was originally controversial, but always clever and approachable... Tyson ended up being seen as little more than a mentally challenged rapist. In their primes though: man I wouldn't want to be facing Tyson. I remember fights where very good opponents were simply frightened, unable to execute whatever their plan was. The challenge was to survive the first half of the first round! Lennox Lewis was the kind of fighter who could survive Tyson... but who else? To the best of my recollection, Holyfield didn't face the Tyson we saw early on. In theory, Tyson should have changed boxing: eliminated the feeling out round, brought back stocky inside fighting, ended long fights with controversial decisions, made it more like mma really, when I think of it. Fast, memorable short fights.

Bad system. At its worst when the team defending is tired or outnumbered for some reason. The 5-person penalty kill look. I can't believe there aren't better alternatives. Edler still gets beat to the puck regularly, it just lets the other team retain possession way too easily. If some of the D over the years had stayed/worked out, I'm sure that the team would never have re-signed him most recently. He's being paid a lot of money to stand around and take a penalty every game. They talk about Eriksson's legacy, what about Edler's? He was a great player once. What I find odd is the team/media's quiet acceptance of this.

You're right: he was probably worse overall. I'd forgotten about that period. Part of the tank period. He had some just awful games. It's the decline in skating that's really bad now, which makes it look especially bad.

They need to address the problems on defense, but Juolevi isn't really part of the problem. Edler has been awful -- worst by far in his career. I don't see how he doesn't retire a week after the season is over. Just can't keep up. Which means taking penalties. He consistently allows the quicker players easy access into the defensive zone and then seems unable to figure out what to do when the cycle ramps us. Benn was bad most of the first half of the games, Hughes is a shell of last year's player, at least defensively. Schmidt has only started playing better in the last 8 games. They miss Stecher and Tanev obviously. And Edler has aged markedly. Chatfield wasn't able to do it, should have moved him back to the NHL much sooner. Throw in the hopeless play of Beagle, Roussel and Gaudette and you have pretty much the answer to why the Canucks look so different from the team that won games in the playoffs. Losing Toffoli isn't even the worst of it, nor Markstrom even, there is so much that is worse than last year's team. This is all on Benning, not Green's fault at all. Nor the fault of Schmidt or any of the new arrivals.

The Leafs have matured, they really have gotten better. We did too last year. But this year is a real set back for us. Breaks my heart. I hate to say it, but the management in Vancouver has been too nice, too generous. A less nice bunch would have parked Eriksson in Utica last year so that he'd have moved on by now, probably re-signed somewhere else in the past summer. Still don't know why the team paid Edler so much to come back for two last years. Edler has been just terrible. Cannot skate to save his life. Looks lost and passive every time fast players start buzzing around him. A less nice bunch would not have re-signed him. A more honest management would have parked him in the seats with Eriksson by now, so that the younger D could get a chance. They can at least defend against the rush. A more ruthless management would have found ways to move Tanev and Markstrom well before their UFA deadlines. And found a way to pay Beagle and Roussel less and for less years. For that matter, a less sentimental bunch would have moved the Sedins for picks while they still had value. I used to think that being nice and fair was the way to go in any management system, but I don't know now...

If this was last year, absolutely. But the post-game interview with Matthews I saw the other day, suggests this is a really mature, confident, smart team. Leafs 3-2 regular time. (And don't watch the next game: 9-3 Leafs, Green and Benning gone the next morning.)

We have players like that, but they suck at the hockey part -- Roussel comes to mind. Lots of sandpaper, no wood. That 2011 team pre-dates the modern salary cap system. The salary cap system seems to kill team-building. You keep your key 3 players, maybe as many as 5, and the rest are fillers. It might be possible to have as many as 7 or even 10 players signed for longer durations, but it seems unlikely so far. Your core doesn't want to get hurt, and your fillers are journeyman or young fodder who can't afford to rock the boat much. No place for a Torres in particular. But even your cranky 2nd centers and key 2nd tier D are hard to find or keep. Also, what is left of the enforcer system is a "no hitting our stars" system. I.e., our core is literally untouchable. The Keslers and Torres types would actually have a harder time now, as would Lapierre and even Hamhuis: they all would actually have the audacity to hit the other team's stars, which was a big part of the push back system that let a team change momentum, or take initiative in the first 5 minutes of a game. There could be other kinds of pushback than physical, for sure, but they require rare players backed by even rarer coaches. The real problem is that teams cannot be held together over time sufficient to create a second tier of players who have an incentive to give a damn.

I agree. The key is that the core is young enough to have some very good years ahead. Maybe as much as 4 years or even 5. Boeser is looking like a real hockey player now, and Pettersson and Hughes are learning to play through some uneven (actually pretty bad) stretches. The real learning has to be in management though. How to keep a core together with as many other good players as you can find, without breaking the bank or over-committing to the likes of Eriksson and Beagle (or even Holtby for 2 years at 4 plus million.) Basically, it looks like a 2-tier NHL with some room for maneuver: Make sure you can get your McDavids and Draisaitls signed and in leadership mode (Boeser, Horvat, Pettersson and Hughes in our case) and figure out the rest of the team within a real budget. The best thing that could ever happen for the Canucks would be to spearhead a move to destroy the salary cap system in favour of a more free-wheeling system like they have in European soccer. But, barring that... they are going to have to get management that doesn't need to learn at such a costly pace. The other fantasy is that we devolve back to a type of hockey where you need smaller teams, more like Rugby, the way hockey used to be. A team of 2 goalies, 5 D, and 7 forwards. Less about sprinting around, no more on-the-fly line changes, the way hockey was. A team would make the same revenues but be able to meet the payroll without all these bizarre machinations we have today.

I still wonder why Linden left. Rumors were that he wanted a real down-to-the-bones rebuild. (Moving out the likes of Edler, not signing so many older UFAs, maximizing the number of draft picks, etc.?)

Some of the fan base is thinking a lot about the GM's future and the team's future in general. It's only natural given what we've seen so far this year.