Should fans buy the rebuilding plan?
Team’s pool of young talent has been upgraded but management has made many glaring errors
Despite incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, one thing is apparent after watching and listening to the Vancouver Canucks account for this past season. Both players and management are true believers in The Plan.
“When I look at where we are today, I’m a lot more optimistic than anytime since I’ve been here,” team president Trevor Linden said.
“There are a lot of good, positive signs from the young guys and I think that’s why fans should be positive,” Daniel Sedin said Tuesday.
“We’re adding a lot of good young pieces to the lineup,” said Bo Horvat. “I think we’re going to be good in years to come.”
And that’s how it should be. If the players and management aren’t on board with The Plan, then the Canucks truly are damaged beyond repair.
The organization also seems to have its messaging right. Finally. The Canucks now have a future vision for the team. They’ll promote a reimagining of the organization.
“We recognize where we are and where we need to go,” Linden said, directing attention to the bright new day that’s surely dawning.
But what Linden, Sedin and Horvat believe really isn’t the issue for this organization. The bigger job is selling The Plan to a fan base that has watched their team collapse over the last two seasons, and that’s a challenge.
Put it this way. It’s one thing to get the message right. It’s another to deliver on everything else and, after 29th- and 28th-place finishes, it’s still unclear if the Linden-Jim Benning management team are capable of lifting this club out of the mire.
Looking over the brain trust’s first three years, only the most churlish would deny the improvements to the talent pool. The cupboard was largely bare when they took over. They’ve since accumulated, according to TSN’s Craig Button, four of the top 50 prospects in the game, the eternal Jake Virtanen, a topfive pick this year and a young core consisting of Horvat, Markus Granlund, Sven Baertschi, Troy Stecher, Ben Hutton and Nikita Tryamkin, all age 25 or under next season.
That group, moreover, will be the central plank in the Canucks’ marketing campaign for the next two, three seasons, and the kids create some reason for optimism. But it’s also impossible to know exactly what the Canucks have with their future.
Horvat is the jewel and he, at this point in his career, doesn’t project as a front-line centre.
Brock Boeser is their top-rated prospect. He has a goal scorer’s instincts, but his skating needs work.
Beyond those two, you run into a lot of maybes. There isn’t a top-pairing defenceman in the mix. Boeser is the only forward with 30-goal potential. Their thinner than a supermodel at centre.
Now, it’s entirely possible that two or three of those kids will develop into game-changers for the franchise. In the meantime, Benning has had two prime opportunities to add elite talent. While the jury is still out on Virtanen and Olli Juolevi, the early returns aren’t encouraging.
The 2014 draft — in which the Canucks took Virtanen over, among others, William Nylander and Nik Ehlers, then took Jared McCann over 30-goal-scorer David Pastrnak — is shaping up as a watershed moment in this rebuild. As it is, the Canucks urgently need Virtanen to emerge as an NHL power forward and Juolevi, who was picked ahead of half a dozen elite prospects, as a top-pairing defenceman.
If that happens, you can start believing in The Plan. If it doesn’t, the Canucks better get lucky in the draft lottery.
There have been other decisions made by the Linden-Benning team that haven’t had the desired effect.
Trades for Luca Sbisa, Brandon Sutter and Erik Gudbranson were supposed to deliver foundational players that would make the Canucks competitive. You can look at the standings to see how that turned out.
Loui Eriksson was signed to a sixyear, US$36-million contract to help jump-start the Canucks this season. He had 11 goals in 65 games before he was shut down with a knee injury.
OK, every administration can point to any number of wins and losses on their ledger sheet, but you just can’t afford to make those glaring, irreparable mistakes when you’re rebuilding. Linden and Benning have made too many to inspire unconditional confidence.
Will that change? Well, they have a plan for the future that sounds appealing. And who knows? Maybe in two years the Canucks hit on a couple of lottery picks, all their pieces come together and the past two seasons become a distant memory.
That’s a beautiful thought. And isn’t that the beautiful thing about selling the future? Until they start keeping score, it can be whatever you want it to be.