Island Nucklehead wrote:
I have nothing wrong with bringing a guy in that did great things for the franchise to harken back to the glory days, or is pretty much a physical embodiment of the franchise. But the Canucks have never really seen "Glory Days". We're at the tail-end of the best seasons in franchise history. In less than a year we've fired our best coach, GM and goalie the franchise has seen. I see this hiring like a screen for the owners incompetence. "How can the fans criticize us now? We brought back the great Trevor Linden!"
It will be interesting to see where Linden wants to take the franchise going forward, and it's great to see him back in the fold, but I'd prefer if he came in and learned the ropes a little bit instead of being thrown into the breach to clean up what is clearly an ownership-induced dumpster-fire.
Yep, I concur with this very realistic assessment.
I have absolutely no problems with Trevor Linden. I believe that he's a sincere guy with a honest-to-goodness motivation to win a Stanley Cup for Vancouver.
I mean, imagine if Trevor fucking Linden was the president that was able to make it happen. Steve Nash who?
But reality is reality and that reality is the Canucks are in a bad bind right now with no easy solutions. The twins aren't suddenly 5 years younger. Those rumours of Kesler wanting a trade haven't exactly gone away. We still have two rookies in goal. And our team in general has a dearth of 20-25 year old players.
If Trevor Linden had been brought in at the same time as Mike Gillis had been brought in, then I'd say hooray. Mike inherited a team that was on the cusp of greatness and frankly, it would have taken an idiot to really screw up the 2007/08 Canucks. Kesler, Burr, Sedins, Bieksa, Luo, Edler were all already on the team when Gillis took it over so he was primed for success.
Linden, on the other hand, is taking over a team that (as IN politely called it) is an ownership-induced dumpster fire. Linden of the zero years of hockey ops experience with "complete" autonomy. Yes, he's probably pretty good at setting up gyms and selling gym memberships but the gym business is an
entirely different business than running a hockey team.
It's sort of like, oh, that guy running the japadog cart at the corner of Granville and Burrard must be good at business. Let's get him to run the Yaletown Earls.
As much I love Linden (and I even have a stick-in-rink jersey with 16 on it), this just reeks of figurehead-ism.
