Our board is pretty much completely divided down the middle and outright despises one another over the traditionalist vs. non-traditionalist approach to hockey. One side values passive, understated, smart, positional, boring/unsexy hockey and characterizes the opposite as running around like chickens with their heads cut off/dinosaur hockey, while the other thinks assertive, getting into scrums, being liked in the room, crashing into the boards, and presence-based, tough-guy hockey is invaluable and characterizes the opposite as useless spreadsheet hockey.
Broadly, people who think Gaunce is effective and Gudbranson is trash vs. people who think Gudbranson is effective and Gaunce is trash.
The same split involves arguing about:
- rebuild vs. re-tool
- drafting young players who might bust vs. trading for NHL ready but running-out-of-time-to-break-out 23 year-olds
- age gap debates
- dispassionate ruthless criticism vs. fanatical blind optimism
- consistent/relentless judgment vs. escaping judgement w/ wait and see + hindsight is 20/20 arguments
- spread-sheet non-traditionalism vs. dinosaur traditionalism
- excusing totals based on ice-time/deployment vs. treating counting stats as the be-all-end-all
- appeals to authority
- did-the-chicken-or-the-egg-come-first coaching-decision arguments about why players are/aren't in the line-up or deserve/don't deserve their ice-time.
- same thing about off-the-board draft picks and what we don't know behind the scenes
.... things like that.
They feel like exact microcosms of heated liberal vs. conservative debates, and Benning is basically our Trump. The whole board is just people throwing insults and dismissing everything the other side says as being the result of biased agendas and disingenuous narratives based on either being a Benning fanboy or hater. It's a pretty toxic environment, and it's been like this since Benning was hired.