To be honest I do believe it was how the whole situation was handled that makes me think it was part of the reason he was fired. NYR also under preformed last year but I wonder how much of their loaded division helped with that.
Would’ve loved Jeff Gorton as our Pres / leader of hockey opps. The guy built a solid NYR team in a short amount of time and then his star player gets beat up by Wilson and he gets canned.
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result.”
- A quote the Canucks staff has never seen.
Edit: Ownership too
If you’re debating on firing either the Coach or GM I would not let the potential fired GM pick the new coach. Benning is now the 9th longest tenured GM in the league and has achieved what? He tried to overextend the old cores time by loading up veteran depth to larger contracts only to screw the new core by being tight to the salary cap. Competent teams have competent management from the top down. Stop changing the tires if the motor is broken.
I’m willing to bet he knows someone very close to him that had a negative reaction to the vaccine. Might be why no one in the media has really touched this one and was allowed his time off. Seems like every anti vaxx player has been exposed by now with some sort of quote minus Hamonic.
Gut feeling is they tried to sneak him into the AHL and always feared he would get claimed. It was a big waiver day and with what little game time and opportunity he had, I think they made a gamble and lost.