It has been confirmed, former player and player agent Mike Gillis has been hired to replace Dave Nonis as the new GM of the Vancouver Canucks.
When I heard the initial news that Dave Nonis was fired last week I was quite disappointed since I felt he was a great person to lead the Vancouver Canucks, who had more room to play in the off-season. I felt Dave wasn’t given enough time to build a Stanley Cup contender, he had the pieces in place and now that he actually had a chance to change the team and have more money to spend.
Now they hire Mike Gillis who has no GM experience and has only player agent experience, I’m quite frankly pissed off. I’m happy Francesco Aquilini and the rest of the ownership group hired someone right away before the draft but I’m pretty sure they could have hired someone with a better resume in the General Management department.
So what kind of changes is he going to make? Is the coaching staff gone? Being a former agent of Markus Naslund is he going to sign him? How is he going to make the Canucks competitive again? Is Luongo going to stay? All these questions will be answered soon enough, but at this point I don’t feel confident that this guy will lead this team to being a contender again.
There are many GMs that were once former Player Agents; in fact, this would place an individual in a very unique position in terms of being able to assess the business, player personal and coaching staff. At times, making a change is necessary from a business perspective which is not necessarily a mark against Mr. Nonis. Thus far, one can see that Mr. Gillis is trying to change the direction of the team from one that was more defensive to one that is going to place an emphasis on more offense.