Can the Canucks’ current management be trusted to rebuild the team?

There’s no longer any question about where the Vancouver Canucks are as a franchise. The team sits dead last in the NHL standings by a wide margin. In December, they traded away their best player in defenseman Quinn Hughes for young players and a draft pick. On Monday, the Canucks continued to auction off their roster by trading forward Kiefer Sherwood to the San Jose Sharks for defenseman Cole Clayton and two second-round picks. This is a team in a rebuild, whether they admit it or not.

The question Canucks fans should be asking, is why should the people overseeing the rebuild be the same ones that oversaw the collapse? Jim Rutherford has been Vancouver’s president of hockey operations since December of 2021. Patrik Allvin has been their general manager since January of 2022. Under their watch, the Canucks have gone from one of the NHL’s most promising young teams to one of its most disappointing.

On Wednesday’s episode of Daily Faceoff LIVE, hosts Tyler Yaremchuk and Steve Peters were joined by Irf Gaffar from the DFO Rundown Insider Edition to discuss whether Vancouver’s management team should stick around for a rebuild.

Tyler Yaremchuk: If they are going to rip this down and try to build it back up, is this management group the right group to do it? Will they be the group that gets to do it? How much of this failure do you think lies at their feet?

Irf Gaffar: I think a lot of it does. Jeff (Paterson), our co-host at Rink Wide Vancouver had a lot of great things to say about accountability, and the lack thereof from this management group of what’s gone on over the last little while. You don’t really hear any of it. It starts with ownership, obviously, with Francesco Aquilini, and then it goes down to Jim Rutherford.

Do we trust Jim Rutherford to go and make moves to improve hockey teams or try and strip this thing down? For a guy that’s been around as long as he has, I’m in maybe the majority that says he kind of gets a little bit of the benefit of the doubt here, where he can go and make some of these moves. You look at what he got back for Kiefer Sherwood, an injured hockey player where there was no chance that they were getting a first-round pick, you still got something for the guy, and those two picks could end up being top-50. That’s a pretty good return for a guy like Kiefer Sherwood, not to mention the prospect.

You can catch the full discussion and the rest of Wednesday’s episode here…