Its kind of incredible how good, in general, Vancouver's scouting has been under Benning and how bad they've been with free agents.
As a life long Canuck fan, this is actually not really the case. Sure the Canucks have had some good picks over the past 5-6 years but they had one of the worst records in the NHL over a 5 year span between 2014-2019 so they had high picks.
-Some of the drafting credit needs to go to Judd Brackett (and the rest of the team scouts) who is no longer with the organization because of Benning and his desire to be the sole decision maker.
-Boeser was a good pick, Pettersson and Hughes were good picks, but the Canucks also drafted Virtanen at #6, Juolevi at #5
-Canucks only have 1 active dman that was drafted by the team in Bennings time as GM (Hughes)
-Canucks only have 3 NHL roster players that Jim drafted outside of the 1st round (Hoglander, 2nd round, Demko, 2nd round and Gaudette, 5th round).
So yes there were some good picks but there have been a lot of bad ones too. When you compare the good vs the bad and then account for Benning's free agent signings and trades it becomes very lop-sided to the bad.