Trending Topics: Do the Canucks have any sort of plan?

It is obviously something of a fluke if a team goes 212:09 without scoring a single goal. Especially if they go 0-fer on more than 100 shots. This is the sort of thing that, statistically, shouldn’t happen.

But also, we’re talking about the Canucks here.

A 3-0 loss in Anaheim, the team’s fifth straight L and third straight game without scoring a single sad solitary goal, eliminated the Canucks from playoff contention for the third consecutive season, and fourth in the last five years.

Now normally, if you miss the playoffs four out of five years and look to be in the bottom-three of the league in the three most recent tries, that normally leads you to think, “Ah, well, we must be pretty bad.” But the Canucks in particular have a kind of admirable delusion about what their team could be if everything goes exactly right at all times. After all, look at the one time they made the playoffs in recent years; they rampaged to more than 100 points and finished in the top eight teams in the league. Sure, they immediately lost in those playoffs to a PDO-ing Calgary team, but still: Eighth!

The latest excuse, one supposes, will be that they weren’t exactly playing great for most of the year, but no one was healthy either. Derek Dorsett’s career ended; Markus Granlund, Brendan Gaunce, and Chris Tanev have all been out more than a month; Loui Eriksson hasn’t played in three weeks; Brock Boeser and Sven Baertschi went down in early March; Erik Gudbranson’s season is over as well. Earlier this year, guys include Ben Hutton, Sam Gagner, Brandon Sutter, and more also missed time to one extent or another.

That’s a lot of guys to have lost for a big chunk of the year, but they were trying to do that thing where they get into the playoffs with 92 points and maybe win a round but probably not. Many in the front office feel as though the rebuild, such as it is, is over or close to it, and there has been talk that they wouldn’t do a full strip-it-down rebuild as long as the Sedins are still around. Something about owing those two competitive hockey.

Now, it seems to me that if you’re trying to be competitive and finish 28th, 29th, and maybe even as low as 31st this season (they’re trying like hell, clearly), that might say something about your managerial approach, but here we are anyway. The nightmarish stuff you see in the media about this team the past few weeks in Vancouver has been alarming. The front office wanted little to do with trading much of anyone at the deadline and got very little back for Thomas Vanek, the only player of any real consequence they traded. Then some friendly media people tried to sell the fans on Tyler Motte as some sort of consequential player.

Rumors have since begun to circulate that they might have been able to move Loui Eriksson, who is useful in his way but certainly overpaid by a dramatic amount, at the deadline, but didn’t do it (who knows what the return would have been, but no doubt it would have been nearly as expensive and perhaps less helpful on the ice). Then this week, when asked what the team would do with Tanev in the offseason, GM Jim Benning acted as though this is some sort of foundational player who the team would really only consider moving if he were really bowled over by an offer.

Which is a weird position to take on a 28-year-old defenseman who’s only played 91 games over the past two seasons and contibutes almost nothing to the offense. That’s not to say Tanev isn’t a good example of one of those rare and valuable defensive defensemen, because he is, but if other teams have interest in him it really shouldn’t take a big offer.

Tanev is not “young” any more, he’s a depreciating asset who can’t stay healthy, and if you’re a team finishing in the bottom three every year, getting futures for him is just good practice. What does keeping Tanev around get you, really? He’s useful but not a huge difference-maker or anything; if you can get a second-round pick for him, that’s something you have to take.

They extended Gudbranson already despite the fact that Gudbranson does what Tanev does (in theory) but is also much worse at it. And this is, somehow, seen as a good transaction. You can tell ownership likes the direction of the club, because Benning too just received a three-year extension, but if you understand what that direction is supposed to be, please let me know as well.

At this point, the absolute very best thing the team can do for itself is hope these seasons of losing either has the Sedins considering other destinations or just retiring. Because if they won’t try to torpedo the team’s future themselves, Benning is going to keep drilling holes in the hull and sink it slowly over time.

There’s no doubt at all that Benning has mostly done well at what his advertised skillset is: They’ve drafted well. Now granted, if you finish as low as the Canucks have since he took over, you’re going to get good players a lot of the time, and Boeser was an unequivocal home run at No. 23 in 2015. And this is with the team suffering some bad luck in the lottery. Whether they get Rasmus Dahlin this year is somewhat immaterial to what the plan should be going forward.

If the Sedins do indeed return to Vancouver, it’s just going to be another year of this nonsense, though. Benning continue to retain or seek out mediocre-or-worse players in their mid-20s, throw a mid-level contract at a 31-year-old coming off a high-shooting-percentage year, and the team will finish 28th or something despite Boeser’s best efforts to do it all himself.

There’s no chance to stick to the plan because there is no plan other than “Let the Sedins dictate our future.” It’s not that the Sedins are bad or anything, but their mere presence seems to be what’s holding back their franchise from going anywhere. So that’s not on them, but if they want to leave a franchise better than they found it, they actually have to leave it.

That is, unless their presence is just an excuse for not-tanking. In which case, ownership will just have to find another pathetically transparent reason why the team won’t do what the majority of its fans seem to want.

And hey, with their track record? You gotta believe these guys have it in ’em.

Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.