Puck Lists: Jim Benning's best and worst decisions as Canucks GM
The official party line out of Rogers Arena is to blame Mike Gillis for the team’s ills. And while Gillis certainly deserves his share of derision for the work he did in his final year or two at the helm, Jim Benning has routinely shown himself to be among the worst general managers in the league.
Which is why you often see stuff like this:
as expected, @DarrenDreger confirms on @tsn1040 that other GMs are circling and asking #Canucks Benning about Boeser & Juolevi
— Jeff Paterson (@patersonjeff) November 8, 2016
GMs know Benning is in over his head and they’re circling him like teens on mopeds. They know he’s a pushover and they’re trying to get high-end young players out of him as he pursues a stillborn playoff run.
So as a public service announcement, here’s a rundown of some of the best and worst decisions Benning has made since taking over the Canucks’ GM job. You’ll note that there are a lot more bad than good.
Obviously Eriksson hasn’t started out very well, but he’s a good player who should age in a manner not unlike the Sedins. Not that anyone should expect him to be as good as Daniel or Henrik are at age 37, but having a good two-way player to help shepherd you through a rebuild isn’t a bad idea. And hell, it’s a lot better than giving even more money to Milan Lucic, which is what Benning wanted to do in the first place.
But then again he signed Loui Eriksson because he thought he’d help the team make the playoffs.
Good: Traded Kevin Bieksa’s rights for a second-round pick
GMs who have players on expiring contracts and have no inclination toward — or perhaps you’d say “hope of” — re-signing them should always trade the player’s rights. Dumping anyone, let alone an aging, no-longer-good defenseman like Bieksa, a day early for a second-round pick is just good asset management, especially for a team that’s heading into a rebuild.
Brandon Sutter is demonstrably not very good, and certainly not as good as Nick Bonino, who himself is only-okay. Clendening you can leave or take, too.
Bad: Immediately gave Sutter a five-year contract with a retroactive no-trade clause a year before his contract expired despite his having played zero games for the Canucks
This one just doesn’t even begin to make sense. Sorry. In theory, it was made because the Canucks wanted to get better down the middle, which they did not, and tougher, which doesn’t matter.
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Bad: Traded Gustav Forsling for Adam Clendening
Now see this is the thing, right? Forsling is currently playing pretty okay for Chicago, a good team he made as a 20-year-old. Now, Chicago has problems of its own, especially on the back end, but they don’t really compare to Vancouver’s. Moreover, Benning gave up a promising young player for a guy he traded away six months later.
Bonino, too, wasn’t really in Vancouver very long before he got traded — just one season in which he wasn’t particularly good. Now, you could have seen the Bonino thing coming, and maybe you say it was nonetheless wise to get out from under whatever contract Kesler was going to ask for the following summer. Plus, hey, you got a late first-round pick out of it. And Luca Sbisa.
Bad: Gave Luca Sbisa three years at $3.6 million AAV
Luca Sbisa is not an effective defenseman at this price point. Much like Kris Russell, he’s a bottom-pairing guy who got inexplicably hyped up for a while, and someone was willing to pay an awful lot of money for him.
Bad: Used the first-round pick from the Kesler trade to draft Jared McCann
Bad: Traded Jared McCann, a second-round pick, and a fourth-round pick for Erik Gudbranson and a fifth-round pick
Okay if you don’t like McCann that quickly, maybe there’s something wrong with him. Or maybe the Canucks hustled him into the league and were disappointed when, as a 19-year-old, he “only” produced 9-9-18 in 69 games on a rotten team. Tough to say, really.
As for Gudbranson, well, time will tell on that deal, but we can already presage what it’s going to say: “Not great.”
Bad: Also in the 2014 first round, drafted Jake Virtanen No. 6 overall
Virtanen was the inspiration for this list because he, of course, got sent down to the AHL on Thursday And fair enough, he had no points in 10 games, and only 7-6-13 in 55 when he also made the Canucks as a 19-year-old.
Are you seeing a pattern here?
So why did the Canucks draft Virtanen and get him into the league as a teenager? Well, to paraphrase a recent episode of Real Good Show, he’s from Abbotsford and he’s 230 pounds. Because his junior numbers weren’t, like, jumping off the page in the first place. Moreover — and this kind of thing is usually something I’m loath to do, but this was the sixth pick in the draft so it’s a little more warranted here — the Canucks took him ahead of guys like William Nylander (eighth), Nik Ehlers (ninth), and Dylan Larkin (15th).
The 2014 draft was basically Benning’s first act as GM of the Canucks, and he’s already traded two of the players he got from it (McCann and Forsling), demoted another (Virtanen), and healthy-scratched a fourth into near-oblivion this season (Nikita Tryamkin).
Benning also already traded Hunter Shinkaruk, a 2013 first-rounder, and let a promising D called Frank Corrado go on waivers. The former isn’t necessarily a bad move in and of itself, but it’s generally not wise to trade multiple first-round picks in the space of a few years if your team is, y’know, not good.
Bad: Traded 12(!) picks in three years, only got nine back
It’s no wonder, then, why GMs are trying to pry 2015 and 2016 first rounders Brock Boeser and Olli Juolevi out of Benning now: They know the guy is eager to make trades to improve his NHL roster, and that he’s bad at it. So if he can be enticed into taking a 25-year-old middle-six center or middle-pairing defenseman for, say, I don’t know, maybe something like a high-end prospect.
He’s proven time and again that he’s very amenable to this kind of trade, and that he is incapable of learning any lessons.
Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.
