(Hello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend’s events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it.)

The NHL is smarter now than it has ever been.

Teams use advanced data of many different stripes to try to gain an edge on the competition, whether it's to streamline breakouts and defensive systems, identify a talent in a player other teams cannot see, better determine the actual and future value of a player, or find diamond-in-the-rough prospects that can help their teams down the road.

A great many teams now employ these strategies, to the point that the advantage they can give is already diminishing because most everyone has already figured out a lot of this stuff. And while there's plenty of proprietary information these teams have that the public does not, market inefficiencies are to some extent beginning to dry up.

Fortunately for about 27 teams in the league, all you need is one guy who doesn't know about those inefficiencies and you might just be able to make something happen. Right now the three teams that are walking down the midway with a fistful of bills clutched in one hand and a big mound of cotton candy in the other are more than willing to make deals they don't realize are mistakes.

Take, for example, the Vancouver Canucks, who on Wednesday traded a second-round pick, a fourth-round pick, and 2014 first-rounder Jared McCann for Erik Gudbranson and a fifth rounder.

What do you need to know about trade, other than the fact that because we're dealing with Jim Benning here we know for sure that he misevaluated things? How about this direct quote from the victim himself:

Benning: "Florida called us first & they asked about Jared. They brought up Erik's name then we tried to figure it out." #Canucks — Canucks Now (@CanucksNow) May 27, 2016

Rare is the hockey trade where a team calls you about a player they just re-signed less than a month prior where the person on the receiving end of that call is actually getting a non-lemon. Jim Nill once received just such a call from Peter Chiarelli, but other than that, Florida called Vancouver because they knew for sure that a 6-foot-5 defenseman is something Benning would have moved heaven and earth to receive.

The trade was immediately and widely mocked among certain circles of hockey people (the smart ones) and cheered by others (the ones still living in 1992). I would say the former went overboard a little bit, because Gudbranson strikes a neutral observer as being a decent No. 4 or 5 defenseman; he's not outright terrible. But he's certainly not worth what Vancouver proudly gave up for him. He'll make the team better, but not as much as McCann and a high second-round pick make Florida down the road. And the lack of forward-looking understanding is what's really the issue for Vancouver here.

It's especially troublesome because Benning is still out here talking about how the team owes it to fans to be competitive right now and all that. This about the team that finished 28th in the NHL, behind Columbus and Calgary and Arizona, and whose best players are now in their late 30s. Not that standings are necessarily the be-all, end-all in determining team quality, but in this case that feels just about right for a team that is currently being managed right into the ground. Especially because Benning is also out here saying things like, “Decisions have to be made by hockey people who know what winning teams look like and how to build them.”

This is like when people used to sell bricks in camcorder boxes out of the trunk of their car, except if you had the tools right at your disposal, because they're just on War on Ice or Corsica, to tell you, “Hey there's a brick in that box, not a camcorder.” But then you're proud you bought the brick.

And with Darren Dreger recently confirming what we might have already guessed — that Benning has more trades in the hopper — any smart GM with a physical player to unload should be calling him twice a day to talk about the weather and maybe just mention in passing that this guy who had 200 hits last season is available for the right price. “Ah jeez, would love to have him around but just can't make the cap numbers work,” and so on. Benning would be more than happy to help you with that, provided he doesn't spend his own cap money on a six-year deal for Kris Russell or Milan Lucic, or both.