Mark Twain was purported to have said that “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”

He may not have realized at the time that he was writing about the Vancouver Canucks, but those words sure are ringing true in this 2025-26 season.

Fans of the Canucks are still scared of the wear and tear of the Jim Benning Era, the period from 2014 to 2021 during which he was GM of the team. Sure, some good came out of his time at the helm – namely, Quinn Hughes and Elias Pettersson. But even those positive things contributed to the overall feeling that opportunities had been missed, lost, and ultimately squandered under Benning’s leadership.

Now, many are wondering if they might be watching history repeat itself. Or, at the very least, rhyme with itself.

One of Benning’s most notable missteps occurred during the free agency period of October 2020. The team watched Chris Tanev, Jacob Markstrom, and Tyler Toffoli all walk as UFAs in quick succession, and then they watched the roster fall apart without them.

To add insult to injury, Benning made an infamous admission: “It got to a point where I know Tyler wanted to come back and we were trying to figure it out. We kind of ran out of time with him getting offers and one he needed to take.”

“We kind of ran out of time” became a bit of a death-knell for the Benning Regime, though it would take another year for him to actually be let go.

And now, we might have a new, updated, 2025 edition of the quote.

In speaking with Sportsnet’s Iain MacIntyre this week, Canucks President of Hockey Operations Jim Rutherford talked about losing Pius Suter via this summer’s round of free agency. According to Rutherford, “He was a guy that we thought we were still in on when he went to St Louis. And I know he wanted to come back here. There seemed to be some miscommunication on term (based on) what it eventually ended up. We would have considered bringing him back (for longer than two years), but it didn’t work out.”

The echoes here are obvious, but they go beyond the quote. In both instances, the wounds were far more self-inflicted than either manager was willing to admit.

In 2020, with Benning, he prioritized what were ultimately unsuccessful roster additions – the signing of Micheal Ferland the summer prior, signing Braden Holtby, and trading for Nate Schmidt – instead of extending his own players. In the end, the Canucks would have been much better off sticking with what they had.

The same can be said for the 2025 situation. The Canucks traded for Evander Kane on June 25, just one week before free agency opened. It’s now pretty clear that had they instead saved that cap space, it could have been used to keep Suter under contract.

It’s even more clear that doing so would have been a better choice for the team.

But the Benning echoes don’t end there.

In May of 2021, a few months before his firing, Benning made a statement that really summed up his time with the team. “The first step is making the playoffs,” said Benning. “Once you make the playoffs, then anything can happen.”

In retrospect, this was the dominant theme of the Benning Era. Constantly chasing the playoffs, but just the playoffs, instead of doing the work to build a foundation for a higher form of contention. The quote was mocked then, and became an even larger point of derision as that 2021-22 season played out.

But perhaps the lesson was not learned on a franchise level, because Rutherford is saying the same things in 2025.

In that same sit-down with MacIntyre, Rutherford said, “The best-case scenario is we get our players back, we (stick with) the priority we’ve had for six months to get another centre, and then see where we’re at. Take a run at making the playoffs. And if you get in the playoffs, you just never know.”

Except, Canucks fans do kind of know. They’ve been living through Mission: postseason for the better part of a decade-and-a-half by now, and the routine has become tiresome.

Making the playoffs in any one year is two steps short of buying a lottery ticket. Time and again, it has been proven that true contenders are built over and for the long term. A single-season plan just doesn’t work.

But maybe, Rutherford is suggesting in true Tobias Funke fashion, it will work for the 2025-26 Canucks.

It kind of has to, because as Rutherford also mentioned in that interview, there is no backup plan. Rutherford pushed back hard against the notion of the Canucks ever rebuilding, even in a scenario where Hughes departs via free agency.

This might be the strongest Benning parallel at all: a stark refusal to consider the necessity of a rebuild, all the while sinking to the bottom of the standings despite their best efforts. One might call it the “accidental tank.” And with the 2025-26 Canucks currently holding the sixth-worst record in the league, it’s happening again.

Which feels like a set-up for more familiar frustration. Like the Benning Canucks, it looks like these current Canucks will trip their way into some quality young talent. They already appear to have hit on some first-round picks, like Tom Willander and Braeden Cootes, and might end up with something even better this year.

But as was the case with the burgeoning Hughes and Pettersson core, without doing the rest of the rebuilding work required to develop a stronger foundation around the young talent, it’s all for naught. The Canucks have already wasted some of Hughes and Pettersson’s best years on this faulty mindset. And as they attempt to shift gears and focus toward their incoming prospects, all the while still chasing that singular season playoff dream, they run the risk of doing the exact same with the new crop.

The echoes of the Benning Era are starting to ring louder in Vancouver, and that’s not a good thing by any reasonable measure.