The Canucks won their last game at home before Monday’s trade deadline in emphatic fashion and maybe we’re about to see some bold moves?
Is Jim Benning really done? There’s a big opportunity in front of him. It’s not a multi-year window, that’s for sure, but with Pacific Division the way it is, it’s a little insane but it’s also not unthinkable that the Canucks could make a surprising run to the Western Conference final.
They need to avoid Vegas in the first round, that’s for sure. They also need to avoid finishing in the wild card so they don’t face one of Colorado, Dallas or St. Louis.
Match them up against the Flames or the Oilers and there’s a decent chance of winning a round.z
A second-round showdown with Vegas probably goes as you’d expect, given the challenges of playing at T-Mobile, but hey you never know.
There are serious cap-induced decisions to be made once the playoffs are done and it’s unlikely the lineup will be as strong next year as it is at the moment. That’s why there’s a good case to be made to just go hard after creating as deep a group as you can right now, upgrading as much as you can, looking at an elaborate collection of moves.
The Stecher thing
Troy Stecher likes talking hockey. He likes interacting with fans and media.
He doesn’t not like being the story, unless it’s about scoring a fun goal or perhaps to gently chide a teammate. That’s his nature.
So when he was a bit prickly on Friday when asked, as he knew would come, about being in trade rumours, you understood. He also handled the whole scenario professionally.
After Saturday’s game, he was thrilled to have opened the scoring. He was thrilled he didn’t get another bad-luck goal against go in off his chest.
And he made it clear that he really hope he gets to stay a Vancouver Canuck.
The guy always draws notice from the fans.
The VGK thing
It’s been quite the thing watching them, already good, chasing defencemen because they’ve smartly managed their cap and their roster.
They’ve now won five in a row. They face some pretty mediocre opponents in the next five games.
They could win ten in a row.
And they’re likely to only get better in terms of the depth of their squad.
Watch. Out.
The Florida thing
There are so many ridiculous things about the Panthers, who lost Saturday to VGK 5-3.
There’s endless ridiculous fact that Dale Tallon sent the Knights two-thirds of their current first line — Reilly Smith and Jonathan Marchessault — in a fit of spite.
Or that they’re playing defencemen as forwards.
Or that the team that Sergei Bobrovsky *used* to play for is doing just fine with goalies making much, much less.
Or this.
How can you go on with Tallon as you GM?
The elaborate thing
I do think there’s potential for something really elaborate to happen in Jim Benning’s world.
We’ve heard about the Leafs’ interest in Troy Stecher. Maybe that brings back Tyson Barrie, but as I and others have noted, he’s actually a really weird fit on the Canucks’ blue line now.
That said, it’s really unlikely Stecher gets re-signed this summer, so you might as well use him as a trade chip. But if you move him, you do need to find someone, a defenceman who makes your defensive game better in the aggregate
With that in mind, let’s kick out an idea. This is pure speculation here. I have no notions here, have heard nothing — unlike the noise that is actually out there about Adam Gaudette or Troy Stecher.
So: how about Jonas Brodin? Supposedly the Wild are willing to move either Brodin or Matt Dumba. Brodin would look good in blue and green.
But how do you get him? Might Bill Guerin still have Jake Virtanen’s fight 2.5 weeks ago still ringing in his head? (No one tell him that was only Virtanen’s third career fight, his first since his rookie season.)
Virtanen alone doesn’t get you Brodin, but with Devan Dubnyk past his expiry date, the Wild sure could use a goalie. How about Thatcher Demko?
But of course, the Canucks have a pile of games in March. Even if they’d like to ride Jacob Markstrom hard, they’re going to need some starts from a backup goalie, so Alex Stalock, the Wild’s low-salary, serviceable veteran backup will do. (He’s also under contract through 2021-22 so you can expose him in the expansion draft.)
So Virtanen + Demko for Brodin + Stalock.
Now, you need to find a home for Stecher and if it isn’t going to be the Leafs, who else could do with? The Jets are on the lookout for D, so surely there’s a fit there.
The Jets have Jansen Harkins, who’s from North Van and whose dad Todd long ago played a handful of games for the Canucks. He’s feisty, scored in the WHL. He projects as a solid third-line player He’s just the kind of forward prospect Jim Benning and John Weisbrod love.
Plus, he’s rather cheap and with the cap challenges ahead, you need as many solid, cheap, young players as you can find.
The Madden thing
If there was a clear delineation in how Benning and his right-hand man John Weisbrod view their prospect pool, it was in trading Tyler Madden.
Most people I spoke with, scouts and otherwise, rated Madden as one of the Canucks’ top five prospects. Some even said there was a case for top three. His development since being drafted in the third round now has most calling him a first-round quality prospect.
He’s going to play, they say and he’s going to be good.
My impression is that this is how the Canucks’ scouting staff felt too.
But it’s clear that Benning felt otherwise. His judgment about what the kid should be was made clear in his comments
“I see him as more of a winger,” he said on Tuesday. That caught more than a few people off guard, not just those sitting on the media side of the table.
Benning did see Madden play live once this year. That was three weeks ago during the Beanpot semifinals.
Madden was not good. It was, by all accounts, possibly his worst game of the season.
The war room thing
If there’s final writing on the wall to be observed about the direction going forward of amateur scouting, it’s that while the Canucks’ pro scouts are here in Vancouver this weekend to work with Benning and John Weisbrod in the trade deadline war room, director of amateur scouting Judd Brackett is not. He’s been here every other season he’s been in the role.
That just about says it all.
The owner thing
On the other hand, on top of the big win, apparently part of the reason that Francesco Aquilini took a seat in the stands for a while was because his usual box had actually been sold for the evening.
Business is ramping up.
The Leafs thing
It was astounding to watch the Leafs float around in their own end, to watch them try to make a zone entry on the power play.
They looked like a bunch of guys playing shinny during a weekly casual ice time, less a team in an organized league.
The conflict of interest thing
Just imagine the Leafs hadn’t stunk up the joint, that they’d turned things around and taken the game over and then beaten the Canes.
First, we wouldn’t be talking about the cute story of a guy getting a win in a game he really had no business being in. A CIS goalie, like the guys who the Canucks keep on hand as their emergency backups, would do better. This guy may take shots for the Marlies and sometimes the Leafs, but he hasn’t played a real game in a long time and that performance was terrible.
The bigger issue is he’s *employed by an NHL club*. That he’s the on-call emergency goalie, under a league rule, puts him in an inherent conflict of interest.
He’s supposed to play well for whomever. If the Leafs had lit him up, which you’d expect, you still might wonder if he’d given his best. If I were the Florida Panthers or the Hurricanes themselves, two teams in a playoff hunt alongside the Leafs, I’d have been furious.
It’s not quite the same as the league’s top disciplinarian having a clothing brand that glorifies hockey violence being in partnership with a number of the league’s players, but it’s still a bush-league look.
The Eddie thing
Eddie Lack won hockey twitter today.
The Canes Thing
Let’s get the first absurdity out of the way: in a week where we were reminded that the NHL’s head of discipline runs a clothing line that has players *in the league* doing endorsements for and one of them this week got off without any discipline for a reckless hit from behind, it was pretty fitting on its biggest stage, there was another case of absurd conflict of interest.
David Ayres, the emergency backup who played for the Hurricanes on Saturday and got the win, *works* for the Toronto Maple Leafs. Imagine if the score had gone otherwise. If the Leafs had won. I mean, the chances were good if they’d been able to generate any shots.
They didn’t because the Hurricanes have an incredible defence. You just never have the puck.
And so much about how they run things is because they have some of the smartest people in the room helping make decisions. Eric Tulsky isn’t the general manager. He isn’t the guy making the final calls. But he’s a trusted voice.
And the Canes are winning because they’re being smart in their front office.
The kid thing
We should all take heed of this kid. The game can wait. The chance to watch cool things only happens every so often.
See you Monday.
