It’s a dark place around the Vancouver Canucks following their 5-2 loss to the Chicago Blackhawks on Wednesday night.

Despite outshooting Chicago 45-28, the Canucks could not beat Blackhawks netminder Spencer Knight until garbage time. But that’s not a knock against the players. They really tried, and you could tell. However, that might be the problem itself.

Forty-five shots against one of the teams that has been at the bottom of the barrel of the NHL standings for the last half-decade, and they still lost 5-2. No matter how hard the group tried, they just didn’t have the offensive weapons to push them over the edge. And that’s no fault of the players; it’s a result of some of the decisions this organization has made over the last 10 years.

And now Canucks fans seem to be more accepting of the idea that their best chance at their favourite team competing for a Stanley Cup is if the organization fully dives into a rebuild. The Athletic’s Thomas Drance made a fantastic point about this very topic during his hit on Sportsnet 650’s Halford & Brough on Thursday morning.

“This is where I think it’s time for this market and this organization – and most importantly Canucks ownership – to take a deep breath, look at the NHL standings, consider what happened last night and ask yourself the following question: have the Anaheim Ducks, the Utah Mammoth, the Chicago Blackhawks – teams mired in long rebuilds, disciplined rebuilds; rebuilds that haven’t even gone well – have those teams now passed the Vancouver Canucks?”

And I think the answer is yes. All three teams are ahead of the Canucks in the standings and seem to have a brighter future with deeper prospect pools. Vancouver has been better over the past few seasons, but what do the Canucks have to show for it? Two playoff round wins? Whoopie.

Again, I want to make this clear, it’s not the players’ fault. To be honest, the Canucks should be contending right now after going through their down seasons in the late 2010s. But they aren’t. They’re stuck in the mushy middle right now because of the shortcuts the organization took in the past.

Let’s go back to the 2013-14 season, when the writing was on the wall that the Sedin era Stanley Cup window was closing.

Vancouver missed the playoffs for the first time in six years. Ryan Kesler saw that their window was closing and wanted a trade, so they shipped him to the Anaheim Ducks for Nick Bonino, Luca Sbisa and a 2014 first-round pick. The Canucks selected Jared McCann with that pick (24th overall). Nearly a year to the day, the Canucks then sent Kevin Bieksa to the Ducks for a 2016 second-round pick. That 2016 second-round pick became current Minnesota Wild starting goaltender Filip Gustavsson.

Heading into the 2015-2016 season, the Canucks had eight remaining players from that 2011 Stanley Cup Finals team (Alex Burrows, Alex Edler, Dan Hamhuis, Jannik Hansen, Chris Higgins, Daniel Sedin, Henrik Sedin, and Chris Tanev). Of that core, Tanev was the only player under 29 years old – five of those players were 32 or older. It should have been clear that it was time for a transitional period.

Instead, the organization doubled down on its aging core. They traded Bonino, Adam Clendening (who was acquired in exchange for Gustav Forsling) and that second-round pick to the Pittsburgh Penguins for Brandon Sutter and a third-round pick (Will Lockwood). A year later, the Canucks traded McCann, along with a second- and fourth-round pick, to the Florida Panthers for Erik Gudbranson and a fifth-round pick (Cole Candella).

So, a team that’s window had clearly passed and should have been headed toward a rebuild, turned Ryan Kesler, Kevin Bieksa, Nick Bonino, Adam Clendening, Gustav Forsling, Jared McCann and Filip Gustavsson into Brandon Sutter, Luca Sbisa, Erik Gudbranson, Will Lockwood, and Cole Candella. Obviously, it’s tough to judge the Forsling and Gustavsson parts of the deal, but looking back at what those assets became is upsetting.

It was poor asset management stemming from a refusal to invest in rebuilding. Additionally, the Canucks chose not to move on from some of their pending unrestricted free agents, such as Dan Hamhuis and Radim Vrbata, at the 2016 trade deadline. Instead, they walked in free agency for nothing, and the Canucks did not maximize their assets. Even this past trade deadline, the team was close to a Wild Card spot, and passed on opportunities to move expiring contracts of Pius Suter, Derek Forbort, and Brock Boeser. Suter walked in free agency, and if not for a last-minute deal with Boeser right before free agency opened, the Canucks could have been left with only Forbort heading into this season.

The worst shortcut of all was trading Loui Eriksson, Antoine Roussel, and Jay Beagle, who were in the final years of their contracts, along with a first-round pick, to the Arizona Coyotes for Oliver Ekman-Larsson and Conor Garland. Garland is the bright spot in that trade, but the Canucks wound up buying out Ekman-Larsson, who they are currently paying $4,766,667 against their cap. And just to rub salt in the wound, that first round pick became Dylan Guenther, who is one point shy of a point-per-game and 35th in league scoring with six goals.

This all leads us to now. At this point, the Canucks are 27th in the league with a 7-8 record on the year and have just three regulation wins. The prospect pool may not be bare, but there aren’t many promising signs that high-end, game-changing talent is coming to turn this team around in the near future.

But even if this team decides that yes, it’s time to rebuild. They have made it difficult for themselves to extract as much value as possible from some of the contracts they’ve handed out.

Elias Pettersson, Brock Boeser, Jake DeBrusk, Filip Hronek, Marcus Pettersson, Tyler Myers and Kevin Lankinen all have full no-movement clauses this season. Evander Kane has a 16-team no-trade list, while Drew O’Connor and Teddy Blueger also have a 12-team no-trade list. Conor Garland and Thatcher Demko don’t have any trade protection yet, but they have full no-movement clauses that kick in next season.

It just seems like every decision they’ve made along the way has been through the lens of robbing Peter to pay Paul. In 2022-23, the Canucks had Pettersson, JT Miller, and Bo Horvat as their centre corps – one of, if not the strongest in the NHL – but found themselves with a weak blueline outside of Hughes. In both the Miller and Horvat trades, the first-round pick they acquired became defencemen, Filip Hronek and Marcus Pettersson. Which, don’t get me wrong, they needed, and they’re great players. However, look at the team now. What’s the Canucks’ biggest strength and biggest weakness? They have arguably too many good defencemen and have one top-six centre in Elias Pettersson.

It goes back to their drafting during those years. They needed help defensively, and so that was all they focused on. Since the 2020 draft, the year after they acquired Miller, the Canucks have selected 14 defencemen with their 34 picks. And before this season, they had only drafted five centremen – none of whom were drafted before Round 4. That even includes a 2021 draft class where they selected zero centremen. They had a similar outlook at this past draft, where four of their six picks were centremen and zero defencemen. Are we just headed down the same road we’re on now, just with a different position?

That strategy won’t solve any problems long-term. It will only kick the problems down the road, and we’re seeing that today. It all just comes down to being patient. Had the team just been patient and done things the right way, sell off expiring assets and stockpile picks in non-contending years, build through the draft, and not trade young players to accelerate a playoff – not Stanley Cup – window, they’d be in a much better spot today.

It’s only 15 games into the season; we aren’t saying to tear down the team completely just yet. They could be a Quinn Hughes bounce-back away from looking like a team that could challenge for the playoffs. But Wednesday night’s blowout loss to the Blackhawks opened the eyes of a lot of Canucks viewers to what this team is, and how the mismanagement of their assets is leading to another season of the team being in the mushy middle. Mediocrity is not what fans want, nor what they deserve after a frustrating 10 years of Canucks hockey.