It was a scary scene: Dan Boyle’s slap shot was way off-target, rising up and away from the net, directly into the face of Dan Hamhuis. He collapsed to the ice, feet kicking in pain, then struggled to get to the bench, spitting blood and teeth along the way.
Hamhuis will undergo surgery to repair a facial fracture and, while it’s unclear just how much time he’ll miss, he’ll clearly be out of the lineup for quite a while. With Luca Sbisa also out of the lineup, the Canucks are in trouble: their already rickety defence corps is in danger of collapsing completely.
The question that has to be raised is whether Jim Benning has done enough to address the Canucks’ defensive depth. It seems pretty clear at this point that he hasn’t.
With Hamhuis out, the second pairing will likely be Ben Hutton and Yannick Weber, according to lines at practice. That leaves Matt Bartkowski and Alex Biega on the third pairing. Yes, injuries are to blame, but those pairings ought to make Canucks fans nervous, as if they weren't nervous enough about the Canucks' defence. Even without the injuries, the defence was a cause of constant concern.
Consider where the current roster came from: the defencemen on the current roster were almost all brought into the Canucks’ organization by previous regimes.
Alex Edler was drafted under Dave Nonis. Chris Tanev was a free agent signing out of college by Mike Gillis. Hamhuis and Weber were both signed by Gillis, while Hutton was drafted under Gillis. Even Biega was a depth signing during Gillis’s last year on the job.
That’s not unusual, of course: all general managers inherit players. What matters is how you build around those players, supplement them, or replace them.
Jim Benning traded away Jason Garrison and Kevin Bieksa, both easily defensible moves that absolutely made sense for the Canucks. Bieksa in particular has shown this season that he isn’t anywhere close to the defenceman he used to be.
The issue is who Benning brought in to replace those departing defencemen: Luca Sbisa and Matt Bartkowski. Neither player inspires much confidence in Benning’s ability to assess defencemen. Though each has individual elements that impress—physicality and speed, respectively—their all-around games are lacking, particularly in the defensive zone.
Benning also traded away Adam Clendening and lost Frank Corrado to waivers unnecessarily, moves that, individually, aren’t devastating, but when seen as part of the larger picture don’t look good. Neither player has done much this season—Corrado hasn’t even played a game for Toronto—but they would have been useful to the Canucks as depth.
Perhaps the issue is that Benning’s drafting, which appears to be his strength, hasn’t filled in the gaps yet, whereas at forward the Canucks are already benefitting from his recent draft picks: Jared McCann and Jake Virtanen. Defencemen do tend to take longer to develop, so that might be a defence of Benning.
The Canucks just signed Guillaume Brisebois to an entry-level contract; Carl Neill and Tate Olson are each scoring at near point-per-game paces in junior; the mysterious Nikita Tryamkin looms in the KHL; and there’s also Andrey Pedan and Ashton Sautner in Utica.
Oh, and don’t forget Jordan Subban. Except he was drafted under Gillis as well.
None of these players look remotely ready for the NHL. Pedan is the closest and the most likely to get called up, but up until last season he had a tough time even staying in the AHL.
It’s entirely possible, however, that players like Pedan and Brisebois will play an important role on the Canucks’ blueline in the future. It’s just tough to trust that Benning knows how to build a defence corps when Sbisa and Bartkowski are the only two NHL defencemen he’s added to the roster.
For now, at least, it seems clear that Benning has done more to damage the Canucks’ defensive depth than to build it.
