I can admit Benning drafted the canucks a great future core and even made a good trade here and there. But I can also see he was unable to build a supporting cast or bring in coaches that could work with the players he had. Those negatives were the reason the canucks could never succeed under Jim Benning.
It's part of a bigger pile of reasons. And I'll try my best to write them. I wrote this before in many capacities, and I'll happily write them without any reservation.
JEB is a terrible GM and found no success because...
- He doesn't know how to give out proper contracts. Most of the contracts he signed range from bad to "you gotta be KIDDING me". Just look at Sbisa, and Sutter, and Eriksson, and the countless others.
- He's really not that great of a drafter. Now, I said I'm giving him credit for drafting Pete Hughes and Boeser, well done. But his misses on OJ and JV are inexcusable, this coupled with Linden's accusation that he wanted Glass, paints a picture of a man whose so-called eye for talent might not be a real thing. Remember when he compared OJ to Lidstrom? And mentioned Sutter and Bergeron + Toews in the same context?
- His UFA acquisitions are dreadful. Most of the UFAs he brought it didn't accomplish much, even when given undeserved chances (Megna, Chaput are the most obvious examples I can think of).
- He can't trade worth shit. OEL, Forsling, plus a list long enough to write a book about, yeah...
- He does not have a grasp on asset management. We almost never had spare cap space, with underwhelming players on bloated contracts, which gives us no cap flexibility to improve. He routinely make buy high sell low type moves, then lose value in the process, and consistently so.
- He does not present well. As GM who's inevitable talking to the media a lot, he does not project any kind of competence or strength. He talks like a dimwit, frequently adds random stalling words in his sentences, and always seem to be thinking 3 steps behind the question and the conversation.
- He lacks self-awareness. This is a bit of a guess work based on watching and listening to him through the years, but he seems to present this...feeling that he's ahead of everyone else, that he's smarter than everyone else, and he's pouncing on deals that he had snatched out of other GM's grasps with seconds to spare. Like when he tried to talk to PK Subban, got caught and ended up looking like a total dumbass.
- His character is quite strange. I say that because morons like Seravelli's defense for JEB is "oh but he's a nice guy". While that may be true, many incidents seems to show that he's not exactly the Mr. Rogers of hockey ops here. He compared the team's difficult situation to the terrible flood of Abbosford, he didn't even try to offer anything to Tanev despite the latter basically had no reason not to be here, he dragged his family into the conversation in an attempt to gain sympathy and pity points. I think the most likely explanation is that JEB is simply just an idiot, but even then, the "he's a nice guy" defense is by far one of the weakest excuses.
The "most GM's are bad" excuse is also very weak. Yes, almost all GM's screw up, but I have not seen many who's screwing up so consistently. And the notion that if we had drafted better in OJ and JV years we won't be able to get our current core is just a twisted butterfly effect excuse, if we didn't get those prospects maybe we can draft someone who'll turn out similar? Who's to say?
Moleman and Mr. Clean are the ones who did the heavy lifting. The team is having success despite JEB's incompetence, not because of it.
EDIT: I definitely consider myself to be far to the "dumb" end of hockey knowledge spectrum, this is the crap I come up with in 10 minutes off the top of my head. The more well-read, well-versed and well informed people/fans know exactly how much horrible details I'm not including.
