Jim Benning has made no bones about being a meat-and-potatoes kind of guy -- a simple sort who tends to ,听perhaps because that's where he keeps all the meat and potatoes. He made this quite clear again on Thursday .
鈥淭o be quite honest, I don鈥檛 get it sometimes,鈥� said the Canucks GM.
He continued, but let's pause there, just to marvel at this line out of context.听
"There鈥檚 a place for analytics. We use analytics. But you use analytics like vitamins 鈥� to help you out, not as your staple. Decisions have to be made by hockey people who know what winning teams look like and how to build them.鈥�
Nailed it. Analytics aren't a staple food. Meat and potatoes are. Although I'd point out that red meat is full of thiamin (vitamin B1), riboflavin (vitamin B2), pantothenic acid, folate, vitamins B3, B6 and B12, and potatoes have a bunch of vitamin B6, potassium, copper, vitamin C, manganese, phosphorus, niacin, and dietary fiber. One would argue you eat your staple听for the vitamins, and anyone who doesn't know that is probably the sort of person that eats staples. But I digress.
I do agree with Benning that hockey people should be making your decisions. You definitely don't want your hockey team being built by basketball people (such as, say, ). A basketball person would probably wind up single-mindedly focusing on size over all else -- in which case, he'd probably still make the Erik Gudbranson trade, which doesn't exactly instil me with confidence.听
We'll come back to Gudbranson. But first, another baffling quote:
鈥淚鈥檒l be perfectly honest with you,鈥� he says. 鈥淲e won a Stanley Cup in Boston and we didn鈥檛 use analytics.鈥�
Yeah, so did the 1914-15 麻豆传媒映画Millionaires. Neither did they use forward pass. Who needs it?听
Is there a quote that more succinctly sums up the phrase "living in the past"?
My biggest problem with these proudly anti-intellectual quotes from Jim Benning is they set him up as a patsy. It's like a millionaire loudly boasting that he doesn't trust banks, so he keeps all his money under a mattress -- right until the day someone breaks into his house and robs him blind.
Which brings me back to Gudbranson. I like the guy, and to this deal, I think he'll help the Canucks. But I can't shake the feeling that Jim Benning should check under his mattress.
Since Benning is living in the past, let's use an analogy from the past: !听Back in the day, gramophones were hot, hot, hot. Everyone had one, and if you didn't, you wanted one. In the 1920s, travelling salesmen would come to the door and try to sell you The Peter Pan Clock Gramophone, which, by winding both the clock and gramophone motors, setting a start time, and laying the needle down, could wake you up to the music of your favourite . And you'd be into that. (And you'd still call them race records, because it's the 1920s.)
But at some point, society left the 1920s and moved past the gramophone, especially the wind-up version. If you had a surplus of Peter Pan Clock Gramophones now, you wouldn't just go door-to-door. You'd look for a sucker (or a hipster): someone who still thinks this is how it's done. And if you were fortunate enough to find someone completely clueless, perhaps because he kept loudly proclaiming how clueless he was, or saying things like "Music decisions have to be made by gramophone people,"听you might even be able to charge an exorbitant price for an outdated item that's really worth much, much less.
Why, you could probably sell that Peter Pan Clock Gramophone听for a promising teenage prospect and a high draft pick, like, say, the Panthers got when they quietly targeted 麻豆传媒映画to make this deal.听
Benning: "Florida called us first & they asked about Jared. They brought up Erik's name then we tried to figure it out."
鈥� Canucks Now (@CanucksNow)
听
Hey there Mr. Benning have I got a deal for you! It's a top-flight, first-pairing defender! Drafted third overall! He's big, he's got character and leadership and a whole boatload of intangibles I can't even get into right now! Better act fast! I'm also selling this !
For Jim Benning's breed of hockey person, Gudbranson is an irresistible sell. He's precisely what the ideal defenceman used听to look like. The dude is meat and potatoes on skates. But what about his vitamin content?
Well. .
Gudbranson, 24, is a 6-foot-5, right shot defenceman who was the third overall pick in the 2010 Draft. He uses his size to play a physical game 鈥� hits a lot, will fight if needed 鈥� and that鈥檚 obviously why he holds appeal for Vancouver.听(Sounds pretty good, in an old-school rough-and-tumble defenceman kind of way, doesn鈥檛 it?)
On the other hand, Gudbranson is a defenceman with limited puck skills who has amassed 43 points in 309 games and is routinely on the wrong end of the possession game. To be fair, those results were okay (52.1 SAT%) this season when partnered with Brian Campbell, but not so effective (45.3 SAT% or worse) with his next three most-common partners, which might lead one to believe that Campbell was the one driving the possession train on the Florida blueline.
Yikes. Let's get a second opinion.听Here's J.D. Burke, :
The Panthers have haemorrhaged shot attempts with Gudbranson on the ice, as he's only been in the black by Corsi For percentage once in his entire career -- even then, he had a negative relative impact. And while one might suggest that the time he spent attached to Willie Mitchell's hip at even strength didn't help his cause this season, Gudbranson's 5.6 FA60RelTm (good for tenth worst in the league last season) indicates that the aggregate of his impact on his teammates ability to suppress shots was hugely detrimental.
Double yikes.
And speaking of Canucks Army, if you really want to get conspiratorial, it's worth noting that the Panthers hired two of Canucks Army's bloggers away to join Florida's analytics team. Now, I'm hardly suggesting they orchestrated the trade -- I have a handful of friends working for NHL analytics teams these days, and trust me, they don't get to make trades. But their suggestions are heard, and if I were working for an NHL team after two years of following Jim Benning closely, my suggestion would be to give him a call.
