Coach Travis Green has enough to deal with handling questions about his team’s game on a day-to-day basis. The voices of GM Jim Benning and owner Francesco Aquilini have been conspicuously absent.
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It doesn’t always have to be Travis Green.
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It shouldn’t always be Travis Green.
And yet, in this crisis-filled 2021-22 season, for the Vancouver Canucks, it has almost always been Travis Green.
The Canucks head coach, by the nature of his job, will always be available to the media.
Your boss, the guy who pays your salary, should also be seen a lot more.
This week, reporters from a variety of outlets, including this one, made multiple requests to speak with the team’s general manager, Jim Benning.
As of Wednesday morning, those requests were still simply “acknowledged.”
Of course, it is a crisis situation for the Canucks. They have had a terrible start to the season. Everyone outside the club is in arms.
It’s the kind of situation where the guy who built the team should be talking about what he’s seeing. After all, there are so many things that the head coach and his players can say.
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And even if he didn’t meet the media in an open forum on a regular basis, the Canucks general manager would appear almost weekly in the team’s radio rights holder.
Brian Burke was the first to appear weekly, first on Dan Russell’s pioneering Sports Talk, the radio show you must listen to every night. Then he switched to CKNW’s Neil Macrae in the mornings.
His successor, Dave Nonis, continued to make weekly appearances, even as the team’s radio rights shifted from CKNW to Team 1040. Mike Gillis picked up the torch after he was hired to replace Nonis, his appearances sometimes turned into sessions. fighters that continued to attract ears.
After Gillis was fired, apparently because fans at Rogers Arena started booing him, but actually because his relationship with owner Francesco Aquilini had been broken by how the owner believed he should address the team, the weekly defender duty changed. to team president Trevor Linden. Mainly.
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From time to time Benning would appear, but between him and Linden, the messages often became confusing and sometimes even contradictory.
When the newly founded Sportsnet 650 seized the rights from him in 2017, the tradition of the team’s senior hockey operations leader showing up weekly ceased. Linden would still appear quite frequently on the air and was available to the media.
But since his departure in 2018, there have been fewer and fewer of Benning. The general manager has long shared his phone number freely, saying that he wanted reporters to be able to reach him for the full story, but that he is responding less and less on his phone.
And that’s not what the fans, much less the media, should expect from the top management of the team.
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Fans are spending their hard-earned money. They are not just casual clients in this relationship. They should be able to know what’s going on with the team, know what the team itself believes.
And when there’s none of the team’s brain trust, that’s not good enough.
Aquilini himself has not spoken to the media since 2014, the day he hired Linden. It has been featured on Sportsnet 650 almost annually and to the credit of the hosts at 650, they have generally mixed up difficult questions during their discussions.
That is not the same as facing a group of reporters, who have different ideas to bounce off the people who make the decisions and spend the money.
Requests have been made regularly to speak to Aquilini, who calls himself president of the team and is understood to speak to Benning on a daily basis, but those requests never go anywhere.
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Instead, he has chosen to use social media to amplify his voice and only does so when things are going well. He does not interact with fans, not even with positive messages.
Social media is going nowhere so it is obvious that it will be used for messaging, but it is not a true forum for accountability or conversation. The team used to host sessions with season ticket holders, where the club’s most engaged fans could ask questions about the team’s leadership, but even before COVID-19 started, those events had been greatly reduced.
This year there has been a COVID outbreak in the team, a player accused of sexual assault and a terrible start to the season. In almost all cases, it has been Green who has been introduced as the spokesperson for the team, and that is not good enough.
The fans deserve better. They deserve to hear from the men who make the most important decisions.
Reference-theprovince.com