Memo to Canucks: Do Less

Unfortunately the Canucks season hasn’t gone as many people hoped. It started off with a four game winning streak, and then has kinda gone  off the rails from there.

They are winning games, but have only two regulation wins, had four leads (which includes a total of 47 mins of lead time), and once score effects are calculated, the underlying data is not favourable.

The only people who may be excited about this losing skid are the sports department at USA Today who picked the Canucks to finish the season with 65 points. But as a fan of the team, it isn’t fun to watch your team sputter.

From a management perspective, you are looking for ways to get your team out of the slump. Looking internally for players who could help, or even looking externally through trade.

This raises alarm bells immediately.

It was reported by TSN’s Darren Dreger a few weeks ago, that rival GM’s were asking about Brock Boeser and Olli Juolevi. That has been followed up the past week with rumours of renewed interest in Buffalo Sabres forward Evander Kane. Followed by suggestions or rumours that the Canucks could look to move a defenceman for scoring help, with names like Alex Edler and Ben Hutton being thrown out there by many people, including TSN’s Travis Yost.

The rumours of Kane to Vancouver kicked into high gear today.

Simply, the Canucks are in a position where they are at serious disadvantage at any trade. Teams know they are reeling, and the smart teams will try to take advantage of this. In turn, Canucks management may feel pressure to make a move to get better – we aren’t at a point where their jobs are on the line, but that fear is likely starting manifest.

Those alarm bells got louder. Usually when there’s smoke, there’s fire.

I was reminded of a scene from one of my favourite movies, Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Kunu has some great advice that directed relates to this situation, basically “The less you do, the more you do”. 

For this, the Canucks would be best suited to just not do anything. The less they do, the more they do.

Making a panic move to trade to repair the team will only result in further long term issues. Trading a defenceman for a forward would only result in creating an issue on the back-end, that you just traded Jared McCann and a 2nd round pick to fix.

The thought process that someone like Hutton or Tanev can be moved because they have ‘depth’, is a frightening proposition.

Trading any sort of other future assets, whether that be picks or prospects, just paints a murkier picture going forward.

If the Canucks do want to make some moves to acquire young players and push this rebuild, or retool forward – then they are best served waiting until much closer to the deadline. If, as a management team, you deem someone like Alex Edler as a moveable piece – the bounty that they could receive would be better than current. Same goes for Jannik Hansen, Ryan Miller, Alex Burrows etc.

Those vulture teams will eventually back off once they realize they can’t take advantage of the situation and then will likely loop back closer to the deadline.

Kunu is wise in what he says – sometimes just letting things happen will lead to a result. In the Canucks case, they would be wise to heed this advice, ride through the storm and then decide where to go from there.