Provost

The KHL rinks have actually been mostly NHL sized or Finnish size for a while now and not Olympic sized. The Finnish size rink is only slightly wider than the NHL one/

It is not hinting at that at all. It is literally what I said in the OP... whether we should actively be trying to make trades and shuffle the roster... or whether we just stay with what we have and see where the chips fall. There was no hint at trying to lose or gutting the roster. Just like any year, you only look at sending out pieces at the deadline if you are already out of contention and the focus moves to making sure you are better in the future... like moving out veterans on expiring contracts for picks. That is also about winning... just accepting math and moving your sights to the next season and the future.

Just like coaching staff get old, so do GM's. Benning is one of the longest tenured GM's in the league and also one with the worst results in his tenure. There is no active GM with a longer tenure than Benning with a worse overall winning % during their tenure. This is a year old... but the numbers remain about the same (aside from more GM's being fired since): https://www.si.com/hockey/news/the-nhls-31-general-managers-who-they-are-when-they-started-how-theyve-done Benning was also rated dead last (of only 28 since the newest ones didn't have enough track record yet) in a GM ranking recently: https://nhl.nbcsports.com/2020/11/30/nhl-power-rankings-ranking-the-nhl-general-managers/ There are some reasons for that as we had just gone through a great winning window and needed to restock the cupboards... but that buys you 2-4 years of goodwill and we are now 7 seasons in. Other GMs have turned around teams a lot faster. I honestly think he is done. His chance to undo his mistakes were this past offseason and he wasn't able to exit the bad money which cost us too many efficient players. I see losing Tanev and Markstrom as business decisions on how much term and money to spend on aging vets... but losing Toffoli and Stecher for the prices they commanded elsewhere was just collateral damage from overpaying on bad contracts. Both were overperforming their cost and brought great value. That is also ignoring the lost opportunity of signing actual upgrades if we had the cap space available. We currently have over $10 million in cap dollars invested in players not good enough to be on our (or any) NHL roster. We have an additional many millions spent on a bottom 6 that is one of the worst and most inefficient values in the league. Non of those are legacy players at this point from previous regimes. He is hitting 500 with his top 10 picks, doing pretty well with later round picks, doing terribly with UFA signings, and about average on trades (some great with Miller and Schmidt... some bad, and lots of picks given away that could have turned into players for us by playing into his drafting strength). He managed to get rid of dissenting opinions so any successes or failures have to rest on him and Weisbrod now. I didn't like the demeanor of Gillis and the way he came across as thinking he was always the smartest guy in the room... but also I kind of thought he may have been the smartest guy in the room. I had no doubt that between he and Gilman, they had considered every angle and every outside the box creative solution to each issue. I don't feel the same way about Benning... he isn't a dumb guy, but he has shown himself to be a pretty straightforward thinker and hasn't done a lot that folks would think of as creative. A few games in is too early to pull the trigger on any changes, but if we are well outside the playoff picture approaching the trade deadline I think he needs to be fired and let a new GM start clearing the decks at the deadline with a new vision. Folks can have different opinions of him, but it is a results league and he hasn't gotten any. Nothing in his record indicates he should have any job security. Green's lack of a contract could just be as much about ownership wanting to keep the door open for a possible new GM to hire their own guy as much as it is a statement on the current economic realities.

Luke is a big kid already... he will probably play at 6’3 and 200Lbs by the time he is done growing.

Probably... on the radio they did mention he also wanted to be on a much bigger stage where hockey matters more. I guess Winnipeg fits half that, they care about hockey but it is another small market team. I don’t mind the trade happening because Winnipeg would spend two weeks without any of the players involved due to quarantine and maybe that would help us.

Those are ridiculous statements. I guess from your post that you make your judgements on players based on one or two games.... most of the rest of us don’t. We tend to look at the sum of their available history. We are into our 6th year of Jake and it has been the same story the entire time, except for a 6 week stretch in the middle of last season. On the other side, we know that Petterson and Hughes are playing uncharacteristically bad. Gaudette isn’t suited for the role he is in on our team and could be swapped as well. I don’t know if he will ever become to solid 2 way player.

I could see it happening and a really even more pissed off Dubois. If you think Columbus sucks... spend a few years in Winnipeg...

I have a problem with a player that scores 18 goals but costs 30 goals against when he is on the ice and disappears for weeks at a time when he decides he doesn't feel like playing. If Jake would be Kassian I would be happy... he is nothing like that though. He is a less offensively prolific and less physical Taylor Pyatt. Not good enough offensively for a top 6 role and not good enough or a two way player for the bottom of the lineup.

Yep, and I don't even disagree with signing veterans to help shelter the kids and teach them to be pro's. Those types of guys are also available for cheap 1 year contracts that can be flipped at the deadline for picks... you don't have to pay big bucks and term. There are Vrbata types left looking for a job every summer who are solid and can mentor kids.

Yep... if you take away Petterson, Hughes, Horvat, Miller, Demko, Boeser, Hoglander, and Podkolzin from the offerings it gets pretty unlikely.... but that is what we can really afford and not mess up the core. On the other side, they are going to want to move him far away and if I were Montreal I wouldn’t give up much for him... they already did their work and are looking great.

Yep... if you take away Petterson, Hughes, Horvat, Miller, Demko, Boeser, Hoglander, and Podkolzin from the offerings it gets pretty unlikely.... but that is what we can really afford and not mess up the core. On the other side, they are going to want to move him far away and if I were Montreal I wouldn’t give up much for him... they already did their work and are looking great.

He will get probably get exposed during expansion and not taken. That is all you need to know.

Actually I produce films and they do buy licences for specific countries separately. It is easy for them to buy just the US and/or global (except Canada) rights. If you look a the Netflix US library for example, it is much different than the Netflix Canada library.

Ummm no... that is not how it goes at all. It is a small hockey community, no team hires a new coach two weeks before they fire their existing one. It has never happened that way ever. You don't give two weeks notice and have the fired coach continuing behind the bench. At most, teams have had discussions regarding a specific guy's availability before firing their current coach. Going so far as to hire one quietly without telling anyone is way offside/over the line.

Hmmm. it did seem like the plan was to have several rights holders including NBC for games.... I guess this will make one less bidder. I am really interested to see if one of the streaming giants is going to take a swing at a sports league. It really seems like a good fit. They need to have a way to keep subscribers, so they keep needing new content. It would mean local Broadcast deals would have to accomodate having games shown on the streaming service as well.... or the streaming service has to be able to geoblock their content by broadcast market and if they are showing a New York - Philly game, they may need to geoblock it out of one of those markets due to other broadcasting rights.

Hehe... you just said if we win 3 of the next 4 games to argue that we can get back to 500 (which isn't even close to playoff level). That is kind of a nonsense type of logic, especially since the same thing can be said of any team in the league this early in the season. If you win enough going forward of course you have a better record.... that is no sort of solace, it is just math. We are the 3rd worst team in the league right now in terms of winning %. We are the among the worst in many statistical categories. We have one regulation win this season. The only thing making us look remotely respectable in the standings is that we have played more games than any other team. The rest of your post is really just wishful thinking/making optimistic predictions as far as how players will turn out. Weirdly, you put blame on Demko when really all the expected goal metrics suggest he and Holtby are doing fine and giving us average goaltending. I have mentioned repeatedly, that the entire difference last season being a bubble playoff team and a lottery team was Markstrom and his elite goaltending. He was responsible for more than 5 wins on his own above replacement. Give us just average goaltending last year and we have 10 less points. Demko isn't bad at all, he just isn't elite and that is showing the warts that were there all along with the defensive play.

Sure.... if you fire the coach it is because you are terrible. You just make an assistant the interim coach for a couple weeks and the new guy does some Zoom calls to tell his staff about some changes to systems he is looking at so they can prep. If you are switching a coach because of just a two week window that would have stabilized anyways, then that is a bad decision to start with.

Yep... if it is brought to a crisis point can Columbus really just keep him benched for a long time? It is certainly going to be the "ask" lowering and not the offers being raised. The other complication is that no team knows if he will extend with them because you can't negotiate a new contract with him. How much can you give for a guy that you don't know will just pull a snit in a year and a half because he really only wants to play in one place. I just wish we had the pieces to make that move. We just don't though. Assume we can't give up this year's 1st round pick... what is the biggest package you can give that doesn't just trade one of our best players for another good player?

Not just a couple even... 5 of the top 7 picks are D. It is pretty clear what we need, so it isn't the worst year to be terrible. We have 2 top 4D and a bunch of 3rd pairing/depth D. On the downside, we also don't want to be negotiating extensions with a depressed Petterson and Hughes who only see their careers wasting away in losing despair. Making some big moves to show them we are "all in" could also have some value to us in the future. I don't see Green in the hot seat quite yet, but Benning has to be feeling it. There isn't any way around the fact that he has had a lot of years to turn the team around and it still has a ton of work to do, mainly because of previous bad decisions to give term and money to guys who wouldn't crack the roster of many other teams in the league right now. If we are near the bottom of the league near the end of the season is that it for Benning? There are only 9 NHL GMs who have been around longer than him with their clubs, and many other teams have turned over more than one guy in that time. Most of the ones who have a longer run have had a lot more success in that time. Hey, maybe we roll out 5 wins in a row and look great in a couple weeks... but there aren't any great signs of it, especially with an AHL defence playing most of that time.

The simulator is a joke (kind of)... The question is whether we think we should try to fix anything this season or just let the chips fall where they may. Lots went right for us to be a bubble team last year, it seems like maybe not everything is going right so far this year. We are already over 10% through the season and another 5 games playing poorly puts us in a tough uphill battle to even make the playoffs. Should Benning make a couple trades for cheap but legit NHL D or should he give all the kids some time to see if they can sink or swim. Should he grab a cheaper veteran like Grabner to help the PK? Should we cut bait on Virtanen or anyone else who might have some residual value? Also, any trade even made today may take a couple weeks to get the player due to quarantine, so if he plans on doing anything it needs to be right away.

He may be OK, had a pretty bad game overall. Certainly worse than Chatfield’s debut game. I said months ago that we need to pump the brakes on expectations for this guy. He is an older player who had a great AHL season, he isn’t a 19 year old prospect with a bunch of upside. He would have actually been a good trade chip to help ditch dead cap space in the offseason. We don’t really have any top 4 D in the pipeline coming soon. Maybe Rathbone eventually, but that is a ways off. The rest of the guys we are hoping they reach the heights of 6-8th D who can actually play meaningful minutes for us.

I am just going to “believe” that unlike the lessons that I have learned from the sum total of Canucks history... this is going to end up as a good thing! We will catch lightning in a bottle where both Chatfield and Rafferty show they are legit NHLers right off the bat and their success means we can move on from more expensive veterans. Dare to dream.

I wouldn’t take that as great news yet. It may just mean they don’t know the extent yet. LTIR can be done retroactively if needed or they get more info that it will be longer term. I guess at least it isn’t immediately obvious that he will miss most of the season...

Well this is going to be quite an adventure... 3 of their defenceless added together have a sum total of 8 NHL games. Virtually no experience on the back end. I wonder what the pairings will be. Will they spread out the experience on 3 pairings... or get one solid pair and ride them into the dirt? Hughes-Chatfield Schmidt-Rafferty Juolevi-Myers Hughes-Myers Schmidt-Chatfield Juolevi-Rafferty

Well Toronto has already lost a couple wingers to injury, depending on duration they could pick up another cheap guy for depth. Probably a few teams thinking about it, some will be assigning kids who aren’t ready to the AHL and could add a veteran as a replacement.