Start with the Canucks president of hockey operations Jim Rutherford tightrope walking along the NHL tampering line with public comments this past April regarding the acquisition of Quinn Hughes’s brothers from the New Jersey Devils, to urgently prioritizing the building of a roster around Hughes, to trading him eight months later.
Hughes is the latest enormous asset desperate to leave town under their watch.
To be fair, part of the reason head coach Rick Tocchet didn’t stick around this past summer was because he knew “Huggy” wasn’t planning on coming back.
Former number-one centre J.T. Miller is a whole different story. No offence to you Victor Mancini fans, but the Canucks apparent desperation at the time of Miller’s January 2025 trade essentially led to them getting fleeced in the deal with the New York Rangers, picking up damaged goods in hypothetical second line centre Filip Chytil, who remains out of the line-up with ongoing concussion issues.
That decision and injury started this season’s snowball rolling downhill.
It was reminiscent of former GM Jim Benning signing the final-piece-of-the-puzzle for the blueline when he added similarly impacted defenceman Tucker Poolman to a four-year deal in July of 2021. Oops, forgot about that due diligence.
Back to the current regime.
The general manager Patrik Allvin went from downplaying the use of the word “rebuild” during a Hockey Night in Canada “After Hours” interview this early November, to stuttering and flip-flopping through “rebuild” and “re-tool” terminology during interviews on Friday night after trading his second captain in 11 months.
Oh! So a rebuild it is, considered the return for Hughes is a 1st-round pick, a 20-year-old D-man with excellent offensive tools, a 24-year-old 2nd or 3rd line centre, and a sturdy, Swedish, 21-year-old maybe-bottom-six winger. “Wait and see” would be the appropriate cliché.
The real reward, and the focus of management’s prayers, would be winning, or coming close to winning, next summer’s NHL Draft Lottery. Their odds will be pretty good.
For all of the praise regarding the club’s playoff run in 2024, one game short of a conference final, remember that this is a management group that screwed over beloved head coach Bruce Boudreau before replacing him with Tocchet in late January 2023.
Boudreau, aka “Gabby”, aside from being hung out to dry as his team suffered through a slump, has since described more than once how management avoided calling up players who could help, and apparently made life as difficult as possible, which helped bring about the coach’s demise.
The transaction list is pretty hefty since Rutherford joined the Canucks organization on December 9th, 2021. For every surprising gem like Kiefer Sherwood, a pending unrestricted free agent who’s also likely out the door, there’s been a failed acquisition in a Vinnie Desharnais or a Nikita Zadorov.
Again, to be fair, Zadorov was a bit overzealous in his contract demands to stay in Vancouver.
Presently, four of the top five Canucks scorers are carry-overs from the Benning administration. Oops, sorry, make that three out of five.
Benning drafted Hughes 7th-overall in 2018, albeit an accidental gift from Red Wings GM Ken Holland, who screwed up by not taking the Michigan Wolverines D-man one pick sooner.
Benning must be just as shocked today to hear of this deal as he was sitting at that draft table in Dallas.
It might be time for “Trader Jim”, “Loose Lips” Rutherford to pack it in. As for his Swedish mentee, overseeing a roster that’s been jokingly referred to as the Vancouver Penguins, that decision is up to higher powers.
It appears we might be getting close to our next every-few-years cameo from Canucks owner Francesco Aquilini.
The mojo inside this franchise, in many more ways than one, is tainted.
Earlier Canucks:
— Canucks Lose Yet Again; Sabres Win 3-2
