With the Canucks struggling the way that they are, many are starting to wonder about Willie Desjardins’ involvement in the mess. Is he to blame? It’s tough to say, but the roundtable weighs in on whether or not he’ll take a fall for it before the season ends.

Willie lasts the year. The Canucks are still in rose coloured glasses mode, and Willie/Trev/Jimbo are still in a state of transition. Injuries have plagued the Canucks early on, and though that’s no excuse for the incredibly poor management of lines from Willie, history has shown management cuts slack to those coaches who deal with such issues. Ownership has shown they aren’t afraid to get there nose is in it, but I think they trust the management group enough to let them handle this for the time being. As the season goes on, and the Canucks probably fall down the standings, ownership may warm to the fact of drafting a marketable, youthful presence to add to the already built core and changing to someone else instead of the coach who formed his presence in minor hockey dealing with young players doesn’t seem like anything they’d be interested in. With a young core of players, one of the worst things you could do is change the leader midway through their first season. The job Desjardins did last year was praised, and I think he still has a leash that will at least last the duration of the reason.

On defense, the shift of who is delivering and who is having constant brain farts is quite visible; Hamhuis is showing his age, Edler just isn’t completely the Edler we may have bought into originally and his days seem numbered, Tanev and Hutton are the only two guys that truly bring value back there whereas Sbisa still is being judged I believe. The farm has some players they could call up but seems hesitant to buy in to their rebuild.

I’d say that Willie survives the season (mostly because I don’t think they can continue being as terrible as they’ve been recently), but I think that a playoff miss will spell the end of his tenure as the Canucks coach.  During the Aquilini’s reign, it has been consistently demonstrated that heads will roll if the postseason isn’t reached, and I don’t think that this year will be any exception. I think that management will survive, certainly if things continue the way they’re going now. That is, although the personnel has some holes, I think the way that they’ve been deployed has been far more damning.
The benching of young players is the most obvious example of this, but his insistence on rolling four lines  *in order* rather than feeding the Sedins easy offensive zone starts and shifts after TV timeouts and opponent icings, as well as rolling the fourth line out when there is still workable time left on power plays. ARGH. Not to mention complete systems breakdowns on the penalty kill, a power play that only functions because the Sedins force it to, and a tentative defensive third-period structure that continuously leads to blown leads. Even if the problem extends beyond Willie (which it probably does), the decisions he makes are so obviously odd that he’ll be an easy scapegoat.
All this is dependent on the Canucks making some sort of recovery soon. If the Canucks keep on playing like they did in November, management might have no choice but to force an earlier change. I think the Canucks are better than they’ve shown the last several weeks, and a good portion of them playing below their potential has to be on the coach.

Ticket sales are predicating on two key factors: winning and hope. As the season goes on both are in short supply. It is becoming more and more apparent to fans that the Canucks are a bad team, assembled by a bad GM, and coached by a bad coach. Fans vote with their wallets. Make no mistake about it, as less of their money ends up in the Aquilini coffers, there will be blood. With the Canucks right up to the salary cap, Benning has little flexibility to make a trade to improve the roster. Even if that weren’t the case , at this stage its fair to have a high degree of skepticism that Benning could actually execute a roster improving trade.  Linden is Canucks royalty, so it’s unlikely he walks the plank first. Benning should be the first to go, or at least re-positioned into scouting-centric role, but that is a more complex move, and is not something that will likely to happen before the end of season. That leaves one last play: replacing the coach in hopes that someone new will be able to make lemonade out of this roster. This does sound grim, but fear not Canucks fans. The last time we had a coach this bad, we got a new GM, new coach, and the 6th overall pick!