For a few minutes after the announcement came down on Wednesday that Trevor Linden was leaving his position as the Vancouver Canucks' president of hockey operations, I bought into the idea that the decision was mutual and amicable.
We knew when Linden came in that he didn't *need* the job, which had the potential to be a largely thankless affair. He had plenty of other businesses and interests to keep him occupied.
Since he signed on as president on April 9, 2014, Linden has also become a first-time father to son Roman, while his Canucks have posted the fifth-fewest points and fifth-fewest goals over those four years (not counting Vegas). The Canucks appeared in just one playoff round, in his inaugural season in 2014-15.
The waters have been choppy, for sure, and all the second-guessing in the marketplace couldn't have made Linden's job any easier.
I initially figured that Linden had probably made his decision around the end of the season and waited to make the announcement until after Jake Virtanen's contract was finalized on Wednesday morning, completing the Canucks' offseason to-do list.
Even Francesco Aquilini's initial tweetstorm didn't dissuade me from that line of thinking. The team owner has been tweeting regularly since the late stages of the season and seems to have gotten comfortable using the platform as a method of communicating directly with fans.
The first sign that there was more to the story was this comment from Canucks reporter Dan Murphy, who's as close to the team's inner workings as anybody.
OK, fair enough. Even though Linden always said that he had absolute autonomy in hockey decisions, some disagreement is a part of any organization.
Then, Farhan Lalji of TSN weighed in.
Farhan suggested that the split was probably triggered by a fairly recent disagreement, where Linden brought examples of four or five teams that had rebuilt in a way that he'd envisioned and were now having success, but ownership saw it differently. Linden stepped away, Lalji said, because "he wasn't prepared to put his name on their vision."
The report was then corroborated by Elliotte Friedman over at the rival Sportsnet.
Aquilini also showed that maybe his announcement was perhaps a bit hastier than it first appeared when he added one more corrective tweet to cap off his messaging for the day:
Would someone from Linden's camp have to make a request in order for us to see a tweet like that?
Though he's beloved in the city, Linden took heat when he was hired for his lack of experience in hockey operations—though that's really on ownership; they're the ones that hired him. I would agree that lack of experience may have narrowed his initial vision when it came to re-making the team: both Willie Desjardins and Jim Benning were his hires and were also first-timers in their positions.
The plan, in the beginning, was to turn things around quickly after the tire fire that was John Tortorella's 2013-14 season. At that point, the team was only one year removed from the playoffs. But after Willie's lightning-in-a-bottle first season, the downward trend began in earnest.
At that time, I feared tearing it down for a rebuild because I didn't want to relive the Canucks of the late 90s, when turnover reached breakneck proportions on the ice, behind the bench and in the front office and beloved icons like Pat Quinn and—yes, Trevor Linden—were run out of town.
At that time, Linden's trade brought the team Todd Bertuzzi, a draft pick that became Jarkko Ruutu and defenseman Bryan McCabe, who was ultimately flipped in part of the deal that allowed Brian Burke to draft the Sedins. And the Canucks missed the playoffs for four seasons beween 1997 and 2000 before the West Coast Express started to fuel the team's turnaround.
The Canucks have now missed the playoffs for the last three seasons. Granted, it's harder to reach now in the 31-team league than it was the days when Nashville, Minnesota, Columbus and Atlanta (Winnipeg) were new franchises, but one more year out of the postseason picture will match that late-90s drought, which was tied with the team's first four seasons of existence in the early 70s as the longest no-playoff stretches in franchise history.
With that in mind, I can certainly understand some of Aquilini's frustration. Playoff games are where owners maximize their revenues. And a non-playoff team is a much tougher sell to both fans and sponsors.
In the big picture, I think the Aquilini Investment Group is doing just fine. They've definitely made the most of their real estate investment on a relatively small parcel of land with those new condo towers that now surround Rogers Arena. But as
Jason Botchford of The Province points out in his article, the Canucks' franchise value tripled during the early years of the Aquilinis' ownership but has flatlined in the aftermath of the 2011 Stanley Cup run.
Mike Ozanian of Forbes ranked the Canucks as the NHL's eighth-most valuable team at $730 million in December of 2017, up 4 percent from one year earlier but down from the franchise's peak value of
$800 million when the big Rogers TV deal was signed in 2014-15. At that time, the team was the league's fifth-most valuable. In 2017, the Canucks still boasted reasonably respectable revenues of $156 million and operating income of $22 million.
As a reminder, the Aquilinis paid $207 million to purchase the team in 2005.
So here we are. For the time being, Jim Benning is fully in charge of hockey operations, reporting directly to ownership, until a new president is appointed.
Word this morning is that the search is already on:
Botchford is pushing Chris Pronger's name as an NHL darling who the league would like to see move into team management, following a similar path to Brendan Shanahan. Pronger is currently a senior advisor of hockey operations for the Florida Panthers following a three-year stint with the Department of Player Safety while his playing contract wound to its conclusion.
I'm wary of more change. I feel like Linden's group was making some good hires behind the scenes as they revamped the scouting department and brought in smart minds like current Utica GM Ryan Johnson and assistant coach Manny Malhotra. I'm hopeful for what goaltending coach Ian Clark will bring to the table, working alongside Dan Cloutier this season.
But I can see why ownership can only wait so long to make changes—and why they're itching to get back to contending status. And with Botchford reporting that Jim Benning's contract extension is only two years in length, he may also be on a short lease depending who the next big hire turns out to be.
Will it work? I guess we'll find out—and as we go forward, actions will speak louder than words in showing us why the canyon between Linden and ownership became too big to bridge.
Vancouver Canucks Blogger • 
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