Canucks' Aquilini on rookie president Linden's inexperience: 'He knows what he doesn’t know'
The Vancouver Canucks, perennial contenders for much of the past decade, cleaned house following a disappointing 83 point campaign this offseason.
The Canucks fired head coach John Tortorella and general manager and president Mike Gillis, and replaced them with a trifecta of rookies - first time executive Trevor Linden, newbie general manager Jim Benning, and novice NHL head coach Willie Desjardins.
Owned by the Aquilini family, Vancouver Canucks ownership has developed a bit of a reputation for impatience. Over the past eight seasons the club has only missed the playoffs twice, following both of those occasions, the Aquilini's fired and replaced upper management.
This week Francesco Aquilini, the most publicly visible member of the Aquilini family, gave an interview to BCBusiness.ca and touched on his decision to fire Gillis, and the relative inexperience of the Canucks' new management team.
"When we hired him in 2008, everyone thought it was a bad idea because he was an agent with no experience as the president or GM of a hockey club," Aquilini said of Gillis. "But he had the right skills and the right attitude—he was just as committed to building a Stanley Cup-winning team as we were.
"All the people badmouthing the Canucks this year, I hope they can step back and look at the big picture. We won the Northwest Division five times and the President’s Trophy twice. We came up a game short of the Stanley Cup in 2011.
"Believe me, I was as heartbroken as anybody, probably more, but there are 30 teams in the NHL and about 27 of them wish they’d had the success we did with Mike. You have to keep things in perspective. This is one of the best NHL franchises, and we owe a lot of that to him."
On the subject of incoming president Linden's inexperience, Aquilini - who historically has not been shy about hiring first time executives - offered a full-throated defense of Linden's qualification, savvy and expertise. In particular, he focused on Linden's awareness of his limitations and channeled former US SecDef Donald Rumsfeld:
If you couldn’t take on a role with no experience, we wouldn’t ever have a new mayor, a new prime minister, a first-time CEO. Trevor has Vancouver and the Canucks in his blood. He knows the game and has great connections at all levels of the sport. He’s really involved in the community, and he’s a successful businessman.
Most important, he knows what he doesn’t know, and he’ll surround himself with the right people. We brought him on because he’s determined to build a championship team, which is what we’re all about. It’s not going to happen overnight, but he’s an important piece of the puzzle.
Finally, Aquilini addressed the disastrous one-year tenure of former Canucks bench boss John Tortorella, widely believed to have authored the club's nightmare 2013-14 campaign.
"Despite your due diligence, you never know how well somebody new is going to mesh with your organization," Aquilini said. "If the results show it’s not working, the worst thing you can do is be indecisive and hope things will change."
The "due diligence" aspect of that answer is particularly interesting considering the history of the Tortorella hire. It's widely believed and has been reported that the Aquilini's pushed their management team hard to hire Tortorella. That line of thinking has been contested by the Aquilini's, who even threatened multiple media companies and reporters with legal action over the issue.
Read the full interview here.