Canucks GM Mike Gillis must walk a fine line between giving the Canucks a chance to win this year, and a chance to win for a few years.
Mike Gillis is short on time, any way you look at it.
He just got the general manager’s job last summer. So job experience is at a premium.
Mats Sundin is on a one-year deal, the Sedin brothers are impending UFA’s, and Roberto Luongo could be gone after next season. Gillis has got to impress upon those superstars that Vancouver is the place to stay, and he doesn’t have an abundance of time to do it.
And Gillis himself is demanding that, after years of Vancouver having one of hockey’s least productive farm systems, he be allowed the latitude to tend to that area. But remember, Mike: don’t let the aforementioned scenarios go south while you’re building up the farm.
Now the trade deadline is approaching. "Remember, Mike: win now, but not at the expense of later."
Poor Gillis, his head must be on a swivel.
"All doors are still open," Gillis said in an interview with Sportsnet.ca, "but it’s about evaluating the cost of doing business. Obviously, we’re trying to avoid making any errors in judgment. We’ve been preparing for this for a long time."
The rule of thumb at the deadline is, any teams willing to help you with today are going to ask for some tomorrow in return. Therefore, it is impossible to maintain 100 percent of your tomorrow, hording all your drafts and prospects, if you want to get better today.
"We’ve pumped more money into player development this season, basically tripling the budget. We’re a ways away from seeing real results," Gillis said. "To take away the opportunity to have those results after pumping that money in isn’t something I’m keen on doing."
That’s the pragmatist speaking. And in Vancouver, where the draft record for so many years been so blatantly average, the pragmatist’s voice should be heard.
The problem is, of course, that the playoff results have also been less than stellar out on the West Coast for many a year. While teams in Edmonton and Calgary have all sipped from the Stanley Cup, the Canucks – who have been around much longer – never have.
More recently, though it often seems like the Canucks have talent and a puncher’s chance out West, they have actually only won three playoff rounds in the last dozen seasons. And never more than one in a spring.
Today, the Canucks have likely the best goalie alive, a true star in Sundin, and a pair of damned good Sedin twins who should be in their prime and ready to take a playoff run. It is easy to whisper "Bet the farm!" to Gillis, yet much tougher to stay a course towards consistency for the organization.
"Yes, I hope to avoid looking really narrowly and short-term, and getting too focused on the here and now," Gillis said of the March 4 deadline. "Look, in any Canadian city the GM is under terrific pressure to win. We face that acutely here in Vancouver. The thing for me to do is avoid making errors that will not bring us further ahead, but instead retard our ability to compete for the Stanley Cup year after year. That’s our goal – to compete for the Stanley Cup year after year."
The general manager of Vancouver’s chief rival – the Calgary Flames’ Darryl Sutter – said almost the identical thing this past fall when he said, "It’s easy to make a playoff run every few years. We try to win the Stanley Cup every single year."
It is the difference between good organizations and ones with no real plan; the difference between New Jersey and the Islanders.
Vancouver is better under Gillis than they were at this time last season, when the Canucks fell out of the playoff race with a tell-tale 1-7 stumble down the stretch. As a new GM, he deserves to see if that was just bad luck and injuries, or a disturbing trait that runs deeper in his roster than he believes it does.
The Canucks would love to add a puck-mover, but have little to give away. They have all drafts but their seventh-rounder in June, plus last year’s first-rounder Cody Hodgson, goaltending prospect Cory Schneider, and another first-rounder in Michael Grabner. After that, the system is bare.
With so little on the way up, Gillis is not wont to use a No. 1 draft to make a big splash next Wednesday.
"We’re perfectly happy with out team right now. If you have a team that can win like we did in November and February … we have a good team," he said. "Our biggest acquisition this season... was getting Mats’ ability and character. And we haven’t given up one development player or draft pick."
That was some pretty fancy GM’ing, we’ve got to admit. Likely enough moving and shaking, in Gillis’ first year at the helm.