The Vancouver Canucks front office likes to act like a box full of chocolates — you never know what you’re going to get. General manager Jim Benning could make a great draft pick, a bad trade, a good signing and a questionable choice to hand out a contract extension to a fairly average player.
It was widely expected that Benning would deal 6-foot-5 blueliner Erik Gudbranson at the trade deadline. Instead, ‘Guddy’ got a three-year, $12 million extension. And Canuck nation was left wondering why.
We don’t have to dig too deep into the advanced stats and data to understand why the extension was fairly generous, yet also questionable.