Because absolutely no one saw it coming, these three words will suffice: Holy. Fucking. Shit. And, seeing how it’s important to give credit where credit is due, it’s time to thank the main architect of your 2023-2024 Vancouver Canucks, who are currently sitting in the number-one position in the NHL.

Thank you, Jim Benning. You are responsible for the foundation that this most magical of seasons has been built on. And, no, this isn’t meant to read like something from The Onion. Who assembled, via the draft, the kind of dream team that five decades of Canucks' GMs were unable to, many operating in some epically shitty, cellar-dwelling years? Jim Benning. Funny how things look today compared to the way his legacy is often percieved.

The Canucks’ former GM is still regarded as a man whose sole skill was losing, which the Canucks did plenty of during his time at the helm. But right to the point when he was fired 13 months ago, Benning was confident that Vancouver was headed for greatness.

Recall, if you will, the West Coast’s former all-purpose hockey whipping boy making this statement back in March of 2021: “In two years’ time, I think we’re going to be real competitive.”

And thanks to the five core star players the Canucks have dominating the league today, that was kind of understating things.

If Elias Pettersson, Brock Boeser, J.T. Miller, Quinn Hughes, and Thatcher Demko have one thing in common—besides the fact they’re all headed to this year’s NHL All-Star Game—it’s that one man is responsible for them being here: Jim Benning.

Miller was the outlier, arriving by trade from the Tampa Bay Lightning. Benning shipped Marek Mazanec to the Bolts, along with a third-round pick in the 2019 draft, and a conditional first-round pick in the 2020 NHL entry draft, with the American-born winger coming the other way. Today, Miller sits fifth in league scoring and number one with Vancouver. Mazanec is the answer to a Trivial Pursuit question that no one has ever gotten right.

As for Pettersson, Boeser, Hughes, and Demko, that’s where Benning’s legacy is, despite thinking to the contrary, a truly impressive one.

If there’s one thing the Vancouver Canucks has excelled at over the decades, it’s blowing donkey dicks at the draft table.

Over 50 entirely futile years, Vancouver drafted plenty of greats: Thomas Gradin, Trevor Linden, Stan Smyl, Patrik Sundstrom, Mattias Öhlund, Alex Edler, and Ryan Kesler. All were good—often very good. But they weren't game-changing stars. Those would only come via trade wins for the likes of Markus Naslund, Todd Bertuzzi, Alex Mogilny, and Roberto Luongo.

The short list of true elite talents that Vancouver identified, drafted, and then nurtured over the years starts with Daniel and Henrik Sedin and ends with Pavel Bure (who might go down as the single greatest sixth-round pick in the history of the NHL—thanks for having no clue as to what was going on, Gil Stein). And by “elite,” we’re talking the best-in-the-world players that sell official jerseys—not just in Vancouver, but in Buffalo, Columbus, and Arizona.

Anyone can draft a generational talent like Connor McDavid, Sidney Crosby, or Connor Bedard. Benning arrived in Vancouver with a reputation for identifying players capable of exceeding all expectations. And during his eight seasons with the Canucks, he often did just that.

The team’s history is littered with high-profile busts: Alek Stojanov, Jason Herter, Dan Woodley, Libor Polášek, Nathan Smith, Patrick White, Josh Holden, and Jake Virtanen. (While Benning has to wear the last one, there’s been plenty of speculation that the team’s notoriously involved owners, the Aquilini family, had something to do with the decision to go with the locally-raised Shotgun Jake over the likes of future league-leading scoring stars like William Nylander and David Pastrňák.)

The odd time the Canucks did get it right, the team still managed to blow it—goodbye, future hall-of-famer Cam Neely; hello, um, Barry Pederson.

Want a sobering history lesson on how utterly terrible the Canucks have been at identifying talent at the draft table over the decades? Go here, and marvel at the list of underperformers, not to mention those who never even made it to the big show. 

Benning reversed that, drafting not just impact players but marquee-calibre stars. 

Hughes—11th in league scoring—is currently considered one of the two best defencemen in the league, and possibly the greatest skater in the game not named McDavid. Pettersson, who’s right behind Miller for sixth in league scoring, is putting up numbers that suggest he’s once again a better player than Electronic Arts poster boy Auston Matthews.

Only four players in the league have more goals than Boeser. Only one goaltender has more wins than Demko.

All of them were drafted by Benning, who was thrown overboard in December 2022 before his core had a chance to mature into the legitimately world-beating force they’ve become today.

The benefactors of a roster with five of the best players in the game? That would be new general manager Patrik Allvin and head coach Rick Tocchet, both of whom inherited a team with which the ever-elusive blue-chip building blocks were already in place.

The obvious counter-punch here is going to be that Allvin and Tocchet have accomplished in roughly a year what Benning and former coaches Travis Green and Bruce Boudreau failed to do over the course of nearly a decade: create a winner.

That’s complicated.

If Benning failed at one thing as a GM, it was surrounding his future superstars with the right supporting cast. Conventional wisdom is that you build a powerhouse by bottoming out for a few years, stockpiling draft picks and choices—short-term pain paying off with a long-term gain. That thinking is why the Colorado Avalanche have been great over the past few years, after a half-decade of being truly shitty. And why the currently really shitty Chicago Blackhawks and San Jose Sharks mights be really good in three or four years—unless they draft like the Canucks before the arrival of Jim Benning.

As an organization, the Canucks never seemed to get over the disastrous collapse that ended their run in the 2011 Stanley Cup Finals. A final, it should be noted, in which the NHL fucked the franchise six ways to Sunday. The next year, with the window for the cup still open, saw the first-round bed-shitting to the San Jose Sharks.

During his short-time, last-decade stint on the West Coast as coach of the Canucks, the famously opionated John Tortorella posited that the team was chasing a dream with a core that had grown stale. And, by implication, obsessed with nothing but all-important playoff revenue.

Whether real or imagined, the goal right from the moment that Benning was hired seemed to be two-fold. One was to rebuild the franchise with young drafted players. And two was to win and make the playoffs today not tomorrow, typically considered mission impossible when you’ve got promising players still learning how to operate in the NHL.

No one will ever know if upper management meddling was responsible for an endless carousel of support-cast veterans who did zero to win, well, anything under Benning: Jay Beagle, Loui Eriksson, Antoine Roussel, Oliver Ekman-Larsson, and Brandon Sutter. Rebuilding on the fly with established players who hopefully have something left in the tank rarely works out, and it certainly didn’t here.

With a seeming (unstated) mission to make the playoffs, the team traded away draft picks until the cupboard was dry, handed out contracts to aging vets that left zero room on the salary cap front, and generally made fans irate to the point where jerseys were being thrown on the ice as the home losses mounted.

The jersey tossing, during a December 2022 defeat to the Pittsburgh Penguins, was the final nail in the coffin for Benning.

Whose fault was the mess that never seemed to end? Benning took the blame, but ask yourself this: why did former team president Trevor Linden walk away from a franchise, where he was worshipped, in 2018? Shortly after, it should be stated, he opined that the team wouldn’t be competitive for four years? That kind of projection doesn’t sell a lot of season tickets.

The betting money was that Linden was preaching patience and running against an ownership group that wanted instant results. And that Benning was, rightly or wrongly, willing to continue give the Aquilinis what they wanted. Constantly chasing playoff revenue by attempting—and failing—to stay competitive rather than bottoming out eventually alienated almost every hockey fan in the city.

There’s zero disputing that Benning—and by proxy, the team’s ownership and management—blew things big time, to the point where no one seemed to know the direction of the team at the start of the 2022 season, leading to his firing.

Given the ship seemed rudderless, endless respect is due to Allvin and new president of hockey operations Jim Rutherford for orchestrating one of the fastest turnarounds in the history of this most traditionally doomed of franchises.

Most notably, the chasing of veteran players to fill holes seemingly stopped overnight, partly made possible because they inherited a team where the kids—Boeser, Miller, Pettersson, Hughes, and Demko—were no longer kids. The supporting cast suddenly pivoted to young no-names: Pius Suter, Dakota Joshua, Andrei Kuzmenko, and Nils Höglander.

Allvin and Rutherford have also proven themselves as masters of figuring out what’s missing from the team. If Hughes is having a transcendent season, that has much to do with the arrival of defencemen Filip Hronek, traded from Detroit in return for a first- and second-round pick this past March. The Czech defender currently sits fifth in team scoring, right behind Boeser.

Interestingly, when the trade for Hronek was announced back in March, fans were convinced the new regime was offering more of the same. Consider the comments on Sportsnet at the time, which consisted of peanut-gallery musings like: “If there was any doubt the Canucks are clueless, this trade removes all doubt.” And: “Anyone still think we are in a full rebuild? I keep saying this management team is trying to make the playoffs next year. Here is the proof. Rebuild or retool or whatever—this is not a good trade at all. Yikes.”

If that sounded familiar, it’s because it’s pretty much all we heard non-stop during the Benning era—especially during his last few years. But it’s an era that’s now positioned the Vancouver Canucks as the league-leading team at the halfway point of the season.

At the end of Benning’s reign in Vancouver, chants of “Fire Benning” rang out at Rogers Arena during every home-game loss. At the time, the team was as awful as the GM’s cap-management skills.

Technically speaking, it’s Allvin’s team now. But if the GM, and Vancouver hockey fans, should be endlessly thanking anyone for this season, it’s the man who assembled the pieces.

When, as interim general manager and president of hockey operations, Rutherford was brought in to clean up a team that looked like a screaming mess 13 months ago, he was asked about blowing things up and starting fresh. His response was a resounding “no,” his rationale being that “we got a lot of good players here.”

Rutherford knew a good thing when he saw it. And, no doubt, who exactly was responsible for a future that looked as bright as the present was bleak.

Pettersson, Boeser, Hughes, Miller, and Demko—Benning, for all his misses, hit big time with the team’s foundation. Five stars, all young, have emerged as the league’s greatest game-changing players at the same time. And all—amazingly, in the salary-cap era—on one team.

Two years ago, Benning promised a winner. Thirteen months after his firing—which many in this famously negative market will still argue was justified on every level—it’s looking like we might owe him a parade. And if that parade is this June, only three words will do things justice: Holy. Fucking. Shit.