The Canucks lost again Thursday night, extending their recent run of futility to 2-5-3 in their last 10 games, the worst such run in the NHL. They're a disaster right now -- it's like a hockey season directed by Roland Emmerich.
Incredibly, they remain a point shy of the Arizona Coyotes for the Pacific Division's last playoff spot, but after watching this team over the past month or so, even that one-point gap in the standings seems downright insurmountable.
What's the solution? No one seems to know. The team is seeking solutions. So are the fans. They don't appear to be readily available.
Fortunately, there's still something we can do. When casting for answers fails, the next step is casting blame. It's way easier, which is why everyone's doing it right now. Who broke the Canucks? Let's take a look at some of the suspects.
Mike Gillis
Maybe the Canucks are bad because Mike Gillis left them in bad shape? It's a stretch, especially midway through Jim Benning's second year as GM. He's had enough time to replace every centre save Henrik Sedin, so it's hard to claim this is Mike Gillis's team.
But I'm not the one pointing a finger at Gillis. That's Benning, who tried to quietly lay this at Gillis's feet during a recent conversation with Iain MacIntyre.
“We got this older group … that they’ve had success with over the years," Benning told Iain MacIntyre. "These guys are signed to (long-term) contracts and there was a stretch there, because they had good teams, maybe we didn’t develop players as we should have or draft as good as we should have. So we’ve had to keep some younger players to get them up and going and develop them into the next core group."
Jim Benning
Unsurprisingly, Tony Gallagher was having none of this. An unrepentant Mike Gillis supporter ("I am a buddy of Gillis just like iMac is a buddy of the other guy," the former Province columnist said on TSN 1040 Friday), Gallagher rushed to Gillis's defence.
“It’s all dodging the fact that this regime’s player acquisition hasn’t been very good," Gallagher said of Benning and company, per a Jason Botchford transcription. "You’re going to make mistakes but that’s an awful lot in a year-and-a-half.”
“This regime has 10 holdovers, and the story tries to make out like the 10 holdovers are the problem. The 10 holdovers are the best players they got."
Gallagher has a point. Many of Benning's moves have left us scratching our heads. Guys like Luca Sbisa, Derek Dorsett and Brandon Sutter are playing prominent roles on the Canucks now. That didn't seem like an improvement when Benning pitched it to us; it really doesn't seem like one now. And before you defend Sutter's inclusion in this list since he's injured right now, consider: if your team misses Brandon Sutter this much, your team probably isn't very good.
The players
Of course, there's a possibility that this isn't a front-office problem, but an on-ice problem. Who beyond the Sedins (and Jannik Hansen, when with them, conveniently) has done much of merit lately? You can give the youngsters a bit of a pass, since they're still trying to piece it all together, but how about the veterans at the top of the lineup? Aren't they supposed to be more reliable than this? Aren't they supposed to find a way, as hockeyspeak so often claims? Unless the missing prepositional phrase in that old saw is "to lose comically", they're not doing their jobs.
But when your players aren't playing to their potential, you look at the guy hired to wring that potential from them. Maybe it's Willie's fault? Is Willie all wet? Is he a wet Willie?
While I still think it's too early to blame Desjardins, the team does look woefully disorganized, unready to play at times, unable to close out games, inept in three-on-three overtime where as many points are up for grabs as the 60 minutes that preceded it, timid and easily pushed around, all too willing to give up the blueline with speed, and occasionally poorly-coached. So the detractors may have a point.
Time
Not the magazine, which isn't relevant at all, either to this discussion or, these days, the popular culture it claims to serve. And just like time eventually got Time, you could argue it's getting the Canucks right now.
It's been difficult to watch the likes of Radim Vrbata, Dan Hamhuis, and Alex Burrows at moments this year without thinking they were on the decline. Hamhuis's defensive coverage Thursday night versus the Dallas Stars wasn't just uncharacteristically poor -- it was sad, like watching an old man wait for a bus that's not coming. Of course, then the bus did come, and Hamhuis stepped aside while it drove up the gut and beat Ryan Miller for the game-winner.
You can rebuild on the fly. It can be done, just like you can change on the fly. But one gets the sense that, sometime this offseason, the whistle went, and the veteran core doesn't have the legs to get going again.
No one -- this is just what a rebuild looks like
Or maybe it's just possible that, when you're trying to develop a new generation of players so they can be core players, you're going to have to accept stretches like this, where the team just can't put it together. If that's the case, this is both everyone's fault and no one's. The team is bad because time finally caught up to it, the past regime didn't prepare well for this moment, the new regime isn't managing the crisis as smoothly as they like, they're getting some bad luck, the coach is having a sophomore slump so the players are as lost as he is, and as the veterans slow and the youngsters try to get up to speed, the Canucks are mired in that middle ground where they're bound to be completely overmatched by teams a little further along in the process.
That's just one idea, though, and it doesn't let you fire anybody. So let's just say it's the coach's fault.
