Does Mike Gillis have a plan?
Writing about professional team sports is not my thing. There’s so much noise in that space, particularly when you factor in the second guessing and mouthpieces opining away on sports talk radio, that there’s no real point adding to the clutter. I won’t even begin to guess where the Canucks are going to be come training camp because there’s simply no way to know.
Having said that, I’m a pretty big hockey fan and I’ve been following the happenings in the NHL off-season since draft day. Normally it wouldn’t be that big a thing, but like most other Vancouver Canucks fans, I’ve been expecting massive change with the dawn of the Mike Gillis era. Here we are four days into free agency, though, and what kind of changes are we seeing?
Why Gillis in the first place?
I don’t presume to judge Gillis just yet, but with the way he trashed the work of Dave Nonis and the Canucks’ scouting and player development during his somewhat classless presser at his hiring, I think I could be excused for having some expectations. That day he promised big changes. Full stop. Then again, since he was apparently the only candidate team owner Francesco Aquilini seriously considered and he has zero experience managing a professional sports team, should I have had expectations at all?
From the Globe and Mail:
The rookie general manager, a former player agent who moved to Vancouver nine months ago, was short on platitudes for the previous regime and long on opinions about the state of the club. The former NHL player said the Canucks aren’t close to contending for a Stanley Cup, that their player-development system is a shambles, and that the team’s forwards are inadequate.
It’s becoming standard Canucks managment practice right down the line to have no practical experience and hire a similarly inexperienced person to work for you. The rumours that Geoff Courtnall, among other ex-NHL players and former Gillis clients, was bending Aquilini’s ear to hire Gillis would seem to have some truth in hindsight.
It’s hard to believe that a guy like Doug Armstrong, the man largely responsible for what the Dallas Stars have in place now, wouldn’t have been worth a look.
Cleaning house should start with coach
It’s not worth listing the hires he’s made, but Gillis hasn’t brought on board one person with deep management experience at the NHL level to work for him. Scott Mellanby and Dave Gagne were both fine players in their own right, but not perhaps the way you want to go to imbue fans with confidence that you’re going to inject professionalism into your scouting and player development. Why not look at an assistant director of player development somewhere like Detroit, where their success at that task is mind-blowing, and make them an offer they couldn’t refuse to come here and build a new system? Seems like Zetterberg and Datsyuk have turned out OK.
Going the player route, maybe Trevor Linden would have been a wiser choice than either Mellanby or Gagne. Mind you, regardless of whether he retired or not, getting rid of Linden was probably part of the plan to gut the old regime and change the face of the team. Part of the same strategy, no doubt, that was employed in not offering Naslund even a pittance that he’d have to reject. Ensuring he went somewhere else was obviously intentional.
OK, so Gillis wants to inject fresh faces and perspectives and is prepared to take the risk that entails. Fine. It will either work or it won’t. Then you take a look at how he handled the coaching situation and you start to wonder even more.
You could argue that head coach Alain Vigneault made some pretty large mistakes last year. He pissed off a number of players, which in large part led to the trading of Matt Cooke. No big deal in its own right, but he had a pretty public spat with Willie Mitchell over his return from a serious injury and there’s rumours of other players not seeing eye to eye with the coach, including employing a defensive system which stifled Markus Naslund as he played musical chairs with linemates who couldn’t get him the puck.
From the Calgary Herald:
Naslund was stuck in a defence-first system under Alain Vigneault and finished last season with Ryan Shannon and Brad Isbister as linemates — not exactly the West Coast Express. In 2006-07, Naslund played on 13 different lines. “At times it’s been frustrating,” admitted Naslund. “I was used to playing in a Vancouver environment where we’re used to scoring a lot of goals.
He got lucky with goalie Luongo two years ago, but Roberto was too distracted with a pregnant wife living 5000 miles away and played way too many games in a row too often this past season. He was spent, along with his team, and the whole thing broke down, the team losing themselves a playoff spot by dropping 7 of their last 8 games.
That would be enough to lose the head coach his job on plenty of teams. Not on Gillis’s watch. He made the decision to fire Vigneault’s assistants and then took several weeks to decide to keep Vigneault and give him a contract extension. The public face Vigneault put on for all this is that he sees it as a ringing endorsement. Those with a little more balanced perspective might see it as the mental miscues of an inexperienced control freak of a general manager.
While he’s a pretty strong personality, bringing back ex-Canuck assistant Ron Wilson (just one example) seemed a solid idea. Mind you, that would mean Gillis would have a real hockey guy with solid head coaching success - someone he might have to allow to hire his own assistants.
So, you’ve got a first-time general manager surrounding himself with equally inexperienced folks on his management team, save for long-time survivor Steve Tambellini. Maybe Aquilini likes it that their names rhyme and so, he forced Gillis to keep him. Further, your head coach is willing to accept being told who his assistant coaches will be (which virtually never happens) in exchange for keeping his job. Will Gillis take a stab at coaching through headphones from the box when the season begins?
Trading and spending to mediocrity
Even with all the madness in management and coaching, when you factor in that Naslund, Linden and a few lesser lights won’t be back, and that the salary cap is going up by six million bucks, it should have bade well for leveraging an 10th overall pick into a more impactful player in the short term and buying a bevy of solid free agents come July 1st. Apparently not.
Whether it’s the rumours of how many enemies Gillis has made in NHL GM circles as he held guns to their heads while a player rep, or Vigneault’s reputation as a defensive specialist, or maybe just that the Canucks don’t have a lot of players that other teams are interested in … Either through spending like madmen or putting together an attractive enough package as trade bait, Gillis has not managed to make any kind of significant player impact on the team so far. He did, however, draft a guy who will be a second line player at best a few years down the road, claimed an injury-prone guy with upside off waivers, re-signed a questionable backup goalie, and got a couple of players who will hit and block shots, but not score. Lastly, he recycled a career minor league defender. What’s next? Maybe Gordie Howe would like to play again.
From the Vancouver Sun:
More than two months since becoming the Canucks’ boss and pledging change, Gillis is still looking for his first impact acquisition. Sorry, claiming Kyle Wellwood on waivers and signing five-minute-man Darcy Hordichuk as a free agent doesn’t count.
I’ll give him props for taking a $20 million stab at Sundin, but this is a guy who isn’t even sure he wants to play and most certainly does not want to come to Vancouver if he does keep playing. He won’t make a decision for long enough that the offer will be off the table by then. As of this writing, there ain’t much left.
You might be able to see if Brendan Shanahan has anything left in the tank for a year. You could throw a bunch of money at Jaromir Jagr (who’s got 35 million reasons to go to Russia), but he’s mostly about the money and sleeping in his own bed on road trips, if he decides to show up at all. It seems likely that Pavol Demitra could end up here, but he’s softer than Naslund and had fewer points last year. Martin Straka will be in Europe and Todd Bertuzzi is a basket case.
Looks like it’s offer sheet time to restricted free agents. Let’s just hope he’s smart enough to do that after their teams can’t afford to match.
So, what IS the plan?
Who knows? There have been lots of options to Canucks ownership and, by extension, the team’s GM. Seems that hiring a veteran GM would have been a start, but this owner has no experience hiring executives. In turn, someone with team management experience might not be quite so blinded by his ego, and might have made more logical decisions around player development, team management and coaching decisions. Gillis has the demeanour of a guy who thinks he’s always right and that may ultimately be his downfall. It sure isn’t looking too good right now.
And what about Vigneault himself? If he truly can coach offensive hockey with the right weapons, as Gillis asserted when he gave him the contract extension, do you think he’s jumping for joy at the coming season, as he’s handed the likes of Kyle Wellwood to fill the opposing net? Pyatt and the Sedins do not a top offensive line make.
Mind you, maybe it will all work out alright. After all, maybe the plan is that Gillis will simply get by on his charm.