VANCOUVER – Seeking answers for the Vancouver Canucks’ alarming road trip and poor start, owner Francesco Aquilini met Tuesday with general manager Jim Benning.
They speak nearly every day, but this meeting was a little more formal and a lot more urgent. Aquilini is also believed to have asked questions of coach Travis Green, and spoken with other senior members of the organization, including special advisors Henrik and Daniel Sedin.
As far as the owners are concerned, it matters less about how the Canucks have collapsed to 5-9-2 when they are supposed to be an improved team capable of making the Stanley Cup Playoffs, and more about how the beleaguered people in charge are going to get them out of this.
But, really, the only answers that matter will be delivered by Vancouver players when they open a three-game homestand Wednesday that feels a little like a last-chance final exam for the Benning-Green era.
Either the underperforming team comes together and competes with the Colorado Avalanche, Winnipeg Jets and Chicago Blackhawks, or it stays in the fetal position and gets run over like it did in a three-game road disaster in which the Canucks were outscored 19-6. The Avalanche embarrassed them 7-1 in Denver last Thursday to start Vancouver’s roadkill, and is first up on this homestand.
If these next three games are as bad as the last three, it’s impossible to see how the Aquilini family can leave unchanged the GM-and-coach tandem that has existed the last four-and-a-half years.
“I don’t listen to the noise,” Green said after Tuesday’s practice at Rogers Arena. “I only worry about coaching the team. I don’t worry about the noise. I know there’s a lot of passion in the city and rightfully so. I can understand people not being happy with our record right now (but) there’s no one that’s more unhappy than the people in our room. I do understand when people get upset, but as far as listening to the outside noise. . . it doesn’t have an effect on me one way or the other.”
Since neither Aquilini nor Benning held a press conference to publicize details about their private meeting on Tuesday, which was first reported by Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman, Green was asked by a reporter about his bosses’ summit.
“Ownership is always evaluating our team,” Green noted. “That’s not surprising.”
Benning’s longevity has surprised many, considering the Canucks he rebuilt have made the playoffs only twice in his seven seasons. But the team’s progress, although slow and at times undermined by poor decisions in free agency and asset management, had been evident until COVID-19 and the 2021 pandemic season crushed the Canucks’ trajectory last winter.
After Benning prioritized winning now by making a series of bold moves over the summer, shedding his worst free-agent spending mistakes while adding players to improve the lineup, this was expected to be a bounceback year for the Canucks. Benning said they were a playoff team.
Instead, for the first time under Green, the team is badly underperforming its talent level, epitomized by star centre Elias Pettersson’s three even-strength points in Vancouver’s first 16 games.
There is immense pressure on the coach and GM to turn the team around before another season spins down the toilet bowl. And that pressure is going to be supercharged by the Canucks’ homecoming.
It was only after ticket-buying “home” fans, easily the most important segment of the broad fan base, chanted “Fire Gillis!” inside Rogers Arena was former GM Mike Gillis finally dismissed just before the end of the 2013-14 season.
In the NHL, which relies on ticket revenue far more than the other major professional leagues, a crisis in consumer confidence can be lethal to the people in charge.
But it is the rockstar employees, the players, who have the best chance to quell the current uprising.
“I’m not on the internet checking to see what the gossip is, so I don’t know,” winger J.T. Miller said when asked about the vulnerability of Green and Benning. “I can focus on what I’m doing to help the team and our team and how we’re playing. I just try to stay focused on that, and whatever happens outside of that is kind of outside my control.
“We have to play. You know, it’s on us. It’s the guys in that room who are going make a difference, not the coaches. They prepare us for the game. . . but we as leaders and as a core group, whatever your role is in the team, you need to buy into winning first and not yourself. I think once we do that on a consistent basis, we’re going to get the results. I have complete faith in our group. Just because it’s going a little crappy right now, I still think that we have a good hockey team.”
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They were trending that way before the road trip, outplaying teams at even-strength but losing close games due to awful special teams including an epically-bad penalty-kill that is terrorizing everyone in the organization. And then the baby steps forward turned into a giant leap backwards, over a cliff, during games in Denver, Las Vegas and Anaheim.
“I think, you know, we have too many passengers sometimes during these games,” captain Bo Horvat conceded. “We have to hold each other accountable. We have to. . . really evaluate ourselves as individuals and as a team. Obviously, we know that this past road trip wasn’t good enough. We can’t have guys not competing or not playing on a nightly basis. We need everybody to win.
“Everybody in that room, the guy next to you is the only person that matters. We have to care about each other in that room and care about each other’s success, and want to do it for the next guy. That’s all that matters right now — is us getting together as a team and really coming together. None of the outside noise or anything like that has to matter in that room. Nobody has to pay attention to it. It’s about us.”
But if they lose badly this week, it’s probably going to be about their bosses.
