It’s the off-season. What should we talk about? How about Aqua and Benning?? That’s always fun! (because we haven’t beat that dead horse enough yet, right?)
It’s no secret the past decade triggers rage, resentment, contempt, or whatever other adjective we choose to use to describe our feelings. So I ask, where does it all stem from? It’s certainly a messy past and not one specific thing, but a mountain of things that require unpacking.
People believe (myself included) that there were far better, more ideal ways to rebuild this hockey club than the path they ultimately chose.
So, let’s explore what the organization did vs. what many believe they *should have* done:
#How to “properly” rebuild a hockey team:
(not an exhaustive list)
**Don’t** spend to cap every year limiting yourself from becoming a dumping ground for expiring contracts to gain assets.
**Don’t** try to win games. Get blown out every night, tank as hard as possible. Get high picks, as many picks as possible.
**Don’t** trade picks or prospects for players in order to have a better product in the now, and certainly
**Don’t** build a team that is ‘competitive’ in the interim
If you find yourself agreeing with any of the above, you are also tacitly agreeing to these:
**Do** drive away ticket sales, viewership numbers/advertising dollars and merchandise sales for a few years. And additionally
**Do** ignore overhead costs and the revenue required to maintain and/or continue profiting (if able.)
We must remember…
#NHL Hockey is a business.
NHL hockey is entertainment; a product, a means to attracting *consumers* and generating *money.*
Needless to say, not many are entertained or compelled to invest time, energy, or money in a product with little chance of being entertaining and little chance of winning, especially so with zero mega stars/generational talents ie. attractions to draw them in. See: [Chicago Blackhawks recent season tickets sales winning the lottery.](https://www.cbssports.com/nhl/news/blackhawks-sell-2-5m-worth-of-season-tickets-after-winning-draft-tottery-rights-to-select-connor-bedard/)
If you’re a team looking at few wins and no mega stars to draw good luck giving your tickets away let alone selling them in this scenario. And wouldn’t you know it tickets were a hard sell during the recent rebuild years. It wasn’t even the intentional *tank* people wanted and yet product consumption was still down:
[“Canucks season tickets a tough sell as NHL team struggles.” Vancouver Sun. 2017.](https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/canucks-season-tickets-a-tough-sell-as-nhl-team-struggles)
[“Canucks tickets, merchandise sales hit ‘historic’ lows.” CBC News. 2016.](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/canucks-tickets-merchandise-sales-hit-historic-lows-1.3911642)
[“Canucks season tickets not selling as well this year. Daily Hive. 2017.](https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/canucks-trying-sell-whole-lot-tickets)
Given they were forced (by who and by what conditions) to stay “competitive” and take a slower approach to rebuilding, what kind of financial losses would an intentional tank have caused?
Fear of dwindling attendance is not uncommon among ownership groups in other profesional sports leagues either. For example, the MLB and NBA:
As Colorado Rockies owner Dick Monfort stated, “We’ve never tanked and never will… Kansas City’s not drawing anybody, right? If the Royals are on a rebuild, this is Year 8 of it. [I don’t see our fans wanting to come to the games and say we’re gonna suck for eight years.”](https://www.thescore.com/mlb/news/2567440)
During the Astros’ rebuilding years of 2011–2013, when [they lost an average of 108 games per season, the team’s attendance was cut in half, and one game had a television rating of 0.0.](https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/no-longer-sports-dirty-little-secret-tanking-is-on-full-display-and-impossible-to-contain/2018/03/02/9b436f0a-1d96-11e8-b2d9-08e748f892c0_story.html)
The NBA sees tanking as a potential major issue, since [one of the largest drivers of revenue generation for professional leagues is gate receipts.](https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/071415/how-nba-makes-money.asp)
Canucks ownership is certainly not alone there.
And remember…
#Gates account over an estimated 1/3 of NHL organizations total revenue
[“The NHL generated 35.07% of their operating revenue from ticket sales in 2019-2020.](https://www.statista.com/statistics/193413/percentage-of-ticketing-revenue-in-the-nhl-since-2006/)
[“Gate revenue is approximately 36.6% of the NHL’s entire revenue for a season (30% in baseball, 22% in NBA basketball, and 15% in the NFL). In contrast, the AHL generates 70-75% of its annual revenue from fans attending games.](https://novacapsfans.com/2020/05/13/how-much-money-does-an-nhl-home-game-generate/)
Here’s a decent dive on the average financials for an average home game if anyone is interested:
**[NHL financial impact: How much money does a team bring in each home game?](https://theathletic.com/1672688/2020/03/13/nhl-financial-impact-how-much-money-does-a-team-bring-in-each-home-game/)**
But somehow the hope, belief, demand was that the Canucks should intentinally lose for a few years the worst way possible to get all the picks, the highest picks, and worry about nothing else. In essence, to advocate **losing potentially hundreds of millions of dollars** from a business perspective. And that was clearly a financial risk this ownership group was never willing to take.
Who is at fault for refusing to tank?
#Blame Game– *the long, slow, gradual process*
Do we blame Benning and the management group for executing the “vision” ? With such rigid *financial* boundaries and guidelines set in front of them, I ask what could anyone reasonably expect.
[As former Canucks AGM Chris Gear stated in an interview on Sekeres and Price from 5 months ago,](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmBXThA1fvQ&t=848s)
>”…there were those of us that didn’t agree with a lot of those decisions that fans didn’t like either; some of them I supported some of them I didn’t but regardless when a decision was made, whether it was the guy above me or **two or three above me** I supported it.
I ask who sits two or three above the AGM in the organizational chart?
Gear continues…
>”I’ve always been a supporter of trying to accumulate picks and young players, but you’re also **limited by what instructions you’re given and the dynamics you have to work with.”**
>”…[in 2018]… the organization want[ed] to be competitive. And **competitive doesn’t mean you have to get into the playoffs or else, but it means we want a winning environment. We want fans to see competitive hockey; We don’t want to get shelled 6-1 every night. So that’s the environment you’re trying to navigate.”**
If you’re a GM in that situation, what can you even do? And to that I say, if it wasn’t Benning and co. doing the job of “staying competitive” it would’ve been someone else in that seat at that time doing exactly the same thing with exactly the same blueprint and demands on the table.
Am I defending Benning and his management squad? Perhaps. I think they are, for the most part, scapegoats making the best of a tough situation.
Of course we can discuss all the “bad” moves. But how we judge a particular move during that time for the most part doesn’t even matter. We must first ask, was that move means to an ends in terms stop gap fillers to be competitive in now? *Or* was it a perceived future piece to build around moving forward.
Each decision is largely context dependant on the demands/needs being filled in a particular way.
Even though the common criticisms tend to be strictly focused on future results and nothing but.
Lest we forget, Benning and co. lasted 8 years. By this we can reasonably deduce that their work kept the dollars and viewership levels to an adequate level for ownership. They did the best they could to balance the needs of the present **and** the needs of the future.
Of course it’s easy to blame the ownership group putting the needs of the business above longer term gains that could otherwise be achieved at *faster* rate… IN THEORY. Just as a tank rebuild always sounds great in theory.
But it was simply never a *realistic* scenario in this market– never was and probably never will be. And I bet if you asked Francesco directly, even he *personally* would’ve preferred to take a different approach.
But… business is business.
Am I defending the billionaires at the helm? Not so much. But criticizing their chosen path with some *ideal* in mind is sure easy for us to say… especially considering we have zero financial stake in the business. And if we did I wonder if we’d feel the same way about how things played out. Perspective is everything.
**TL;DR:** Ownership throwing hundreds of millions of potential dollars in the garbage to take the *ideal* path– maximizing every asset/opportunity to get to a destination potentially faster for longer was never a *realistic* expectation.
Ownership chose to rebuild slowly over time to continue making money (as much as they could) for the duration– chipping away building a new young core along the way. As Francesco Aquilini once stated [“A rebuild is a long, slow, gradual process”](https://twitter.com/fr_aquilini/status/1022268645659926528?lang=en) and boy don’t we know it.
Edit: formatting hell.
by canucklesupreme
16 Comments
At the end of the day Benning is the face that people will remember for this dark era but I’ll always firmly believe a lot of those decisions were marching orders from Aqualini, including specific disasters. Virtanen. Signing fourth liners to lucrative deals. Pinching the wallet when guys like Toffoli and Tanev wanted to stick around. No spending or investment in an AHL development system.
I mean Linden walking away from likely his dream job kind of said it all. He saw you can’t win with the influences working against him, and even though Benning was GM, he doesn’t seem like a Draconian leader hell bent on executing his lone vision. Benning seemed like a good man way in over his head.
Truth is Aqua inherited a good hockey club that turned into a great hockey club because of guys like Nonis and Gillis and the Sedins. He mistook our on ice success as being his success. He thought winning was easy. Gillis wanted to do a full year down rebuild after the Stanley Cups runs and Aqua cleaned house, brought in a yes man in Benning and instructed them to just keep winning. Like it’s that easy.
I know this sub likes to clown Benning like he’s a moron but he didn’t have any support in the organization. It took a veteran presence like Rutherford to insulate his GM from an aggressively stupid owner.
….the 8 years of madness and massive financial losses would’ve been easily avoided if Gillis was allowed a quick shake-up…..they wouldn’t have lost a single fan and would’ve gained more along the way.
Its 100% ownerships fault – Benning being a terrible GM just made it worse.
One of the biggest issues plaguing the Canucks over the last 10 years, that doesn’t get talked about enough, is having the AHL affiliate across the continent. It seemed like Utica was run as a completely separate entity and organization. As a result, the Canucks have struggled to develop their own prospects. It doesn’t matter how many picks you get from tanking, if you can’t develop them, the picks are irrelevant. Hopefully having the AHL team in Abbotsford will improve player develop moving forward.
“We are gonna turn this thing around in a hurry”.
One regret Gillis expressed was that he didn’t change up scouting sooner.
We can tank forever but if amateur scouting sucks, you don’t get the tools you need to improve.
But then you need coaches and other player support to develop those tools effectively.
Benning tried to shortcut that by trading or signing players a bit further along in their development and failed miserably.
Add to that was lousy — criminally incompetent at times — pro scouting. Gillis made similar errors but hit some home runs too. Benning just fouled out.
Then you need great to excellent cap management— that hasn’t happened in ten years.
Time management? Player relations?
The chaotic and incompetent management of this organization has been mind boggling.
And now that they’ve hit on a couple great players there’s literally a panic driven obsession to quickly build a winning team out of spare parts.
Unfortunately, they’re just going to keep achieving mediocrity.
I’ve suggested the best move could be to trade our best player — maybe ever — for a haul that could help build this team into something competitive in 2-3 years.
Petey at $10 mil will be a joy to watch but he can’t do this alone. The rest of the forwards aren’t good enough. We have gone from one D to 1 1/2 D. Not enough. We have Demko and nothing — not good enough.
This current team is basically the Westcoast Express era with better goal tending.
But we are nowhere near the 2011 iteration of the Canucks and simply won’t be for a long, long time from now.
How we got here is just a nightmare. Where we go from here requires tough, controversial and painful decisions that simply won’t get made until it’s too late.
Imao.
The reason the hawks are selling tickets isn’t because Bedard is a star. He probably will be. It’s that they are selling hope and promise. Canucks we’re trying to compete in 2016 and 2017 and failed miserably. There was no hope or promis with those teams. It was obvious they needed to rebuild and the loaded up. You can make money even in a down year especially in a strong market like Vancouver.
The NHL is a cyclical business. When the team does well it generates more money and when it sucks it generates less. No NHL team will be good forever. Eventually they will have to rebuild but it’s for the long term gains. The faster you rebuild the better you will be in the long term and the more money you generate in the long run. This short sighted move to load up represents the Canucks well.
Their logic is like:
Contenders load up and make money.
If Canucks load up they will make money.
However it falls flat on their faces.
It’ll be funny when Chicago and LA start winning cups again soon and Vancouver would be the only team without any
LA’s rebuild is nearly complete. They have everything they need aside from that superstar centre they were hoping Turcotte would be.
Chicago has all the pieces in place. Superstar center Bedard with Moore and Nazar competing for 2C or the wings, bunch of young forwards in the system, a top 4 defenseman prospect list. The only thing they need now is goaltending and time for prospects to develop
TLDR: Benning = Bad.
Saved you your Friday afternoon.
“(because we haven’t beat that dead horse enough yet, right?)”
*proceeds to continue to destroy that horse*
Jim Benning , Francesco Aquilini and Weisbrod- the threesome of Vancouvers nightmares
You’ve commented this like 30 times we get it
First I’ve heard of any of this 🤯 someone should do a post like this more often
At the end of the day, the problem lies with ownership, and to defend them in this long post is just hilarious. You combine an owner who likes to play armchair GM and meddle with hockey operations with a yes-man and you get a decade of mismanagement that ultimately hurts the team long term. 10+ years of retooling and spending to the cap for mediocre results.
A winning team is built through the draft. You load up on draft picks to accumulate prospects. You shed salary. You weaponize the cap. There are no band-aid fixes. Yet this team has been taking shortcuts every turn, trading away draft picks and overpaying FAs, all in the name of “trying to be competitive”. In doing so, the team ends up in the same place they were 10+ years ago: mediocre team that has no cap space and no prospects. This is why the fanbase is upset. They are angry at the team’s shortsightedness and stubbornness at doubling down on this path, even though it hasn’t been working for them for a decade.
Yes, there will be pain when you rebuild, and attendance will naturally be worse, but that’s part of the process. The important thing is being able to pitch to the fanbase hope and promise. However, with this team, the fans see little hope when they see management continue the same failing direction.
Two things, they still sucked regardless of what they did so they should have embraced it for better picks instead of winning meaningless games at the end of the season. Also they lost as much money in bad contract buy outs as they would have had in lost revenue.
A well-meaning idiot is still an idiot.
It’s so rare to see well thought out dialogue regarding the Benning era. I think everyone’s gotten a little too used to using him as the sole reason for all the Canucks problems. Great post OP 👏!