Like-able player but completely replaceable 4th liner. Some serious overreaction going on as par for the course with any Canucks move right now. We get it, Benning sucks and I don’t disagree but the Canucks could literally waive a traffic cone right now and the majority of Canucks fandom would be “OMG of course we did, what a dumb move, THIS is why we suck, you’re going to LOVE this traffic cone, it really competes hard, no idea why we got rid of it!!!”
(Now spending a high 1st on said traffic cone in the first place…now that outrage I can get behind)
It's funny to me. A lot of the people crying about the "asset management", seem to themselves, be leaning on a sunk cost fallacy, and succumbing to endowment effect. A fallacious "asset management" principle in itself. Thinking
our garbage bubble players are better, just because they're ours.
Yes, it's certainly poor optics to lose two "homegrown" depth forwards back-to-back like this. No getting around that. But homegrown depth is really only useful, up to the point that it can be used as "depth". Either to functionally ferry up/down through waivers as needed (by clearing, or exemption). Or by actually upgrading your current roster, and providing more "value" there than the alternatives. Beyond that..."homegrown" and "what pick you used to get them" doesn't really matter so much outside of sentimentality, and maybe a marginal advantage in being a familiar "known commodity" within the organization. It's a nice "story", but of negligible real asset value.
The reality is...MacEwan is an eminently replaceable 4th line/depth forward. Like a lot of limited fringe NHL forwards, he's showed some scoring ability at lower levels but been unable to translate it to the big leagues. He's 25 years old now. He is what he is. He's not going to suddenly become much more than a big body who isn't very dynamic, doesn't score much, and doesn't really contribute to special teams.
There are plenty of players on waivers, or even being signed off the street still...who are plenty serviceable depth filler, or may even have a little bit of upside to offer somewhere. The Canucks have even slipped some others through waivers already. There will continue to be guys like that available, as we see better NHL players returning from injury/covid protocols over the next while. And quite frankly...neither of MacEwan/Gadjovich really
earned a spot on the roster over others. Which is where an organization has to fundamentally decide how they're going to approach "asset management". Are you going to protect this completely non-tangible, non-contributing "value" by keeping the players who performed inferiorly if they're deemed a bigger claim risk? Or are you going to go with the tangibly bigger contributors through camp, and deal with the consequences if you end up losing some other fringe roster players? It's about whether speculative non-tangible "asset value" and "anticipated future growth projection" is more important to you than "tangible contributions right now" or vice versa.
Though with MacEwan...i don't think you can even really claim it's about future growth projection, given his age and experience at this point. It's more about sentimental value, and how much that's worth.
I think the Juolevi trade illustrates that they're not just
purely floundering around in the dark on this "asset management" stuff. They took a guy in Juolevi who they stood a reasonable chance of losing for nothing on waivers...and swapped him for a comparable
already cleared RHS defenceman,
and a guy like Lammikko who should be a serviceable MacEwan replacement/upgrade who can actually contribute to the PK as you want from a depth forward. That makes sense, and protects some "value" from a guy who wasn't working out but still held some "value" as an asset.
Optically...it's been a heck of bad week for perceived "asset management" bleeding "homegrown" players to waivers and depth swaps. But that's all it is. Optics. I don't see these kind of "losses" really hurting the Canucks team on the ice. They're a better team overall for the shuffling, in spite of the "losses". Though at the end of the day, these moves are all the sort of negligible impact tinkering that amounts to very little, if the big guns don't come to play. Hardly worth making a big fuss about.