(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.)

Call it one hand not knowing what the other is doing.

The good news for the Canucks is that they know they should be rebuilding this roster. It’s flat-out not very good, even if it’s leaning young. Ryan Miller, The Sedins, Alex Burrows, Loui Eriksson, Derek Dorsett, Alex Edler and Jannik Hansen are all on the wrong side of 30, but that’s only eight guys. It’s not a terrible position.

The bad news for the Canucks is that they seem to not know how to go about this rebuild, with a combination of misevaluation of talent and an idea that they’re significantly better than they actually are. The GM and the team president seem to very much not be on the same page.

This has become a bit of a well-known laugh line already, but for those who haven’t heard, Trevor Linden went on record last week as saying he doesn’t know why people think the team “would be flipped around quickly.” They might have gotten it from GM Jim Benning, who upon taking the Canucks job said, “This is a team we can turn around in a hurry.” It’s not word-for-word, but man is it ever close.

The Canucks were famously picked to finish last in the NHL by a lot of people, and that seems to have cheesed off a lot of the executives. A number of projections had them in the low- to mid-60s as far as the team point total goes, which is probably a bit pessimistic. Closer to the high-70s feels about right, but even still, that’s a pathetic performance for a team this expensive, and more to the point it’s a problem because it all but assures this team doesn’t get Nolan Patrick unless a lottery ball bounces their way.

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So if the Canucks are largely and rightly seen as one of the worst teams in the league, but Trevor Linden says “at the end of the day, we’re going to be in the fight (for a playoff spot),” one wonders where the disconnect arises. But you don’t have to look all that hard to find it.

To give you an idea of the kind of duality of thinking the Canucks are putting into things these days, a perfect example comes in the avatar of Bo Horvat. He had 16 goals and 40 points last season as a sophomore, and is widely considered the “future face of the Canucks” when the Sedins finally shuffle out of the NHL (if they’re not traded first). And yet, the 40-point third-year man who will lead this team into whatever its next incarnation happens to be was getting… fourth-line minutes in the Vancouver season opener on a line with Derek Dorsett?

For most reasonable observers of the game, Horvat probably projects as something like a solid or even very good No. 2 center. He might surpass that, because he’s only 21, but mathematically it seems unlikely he suddenly starts hitting 60-plus points on a regular basis. So if that guy ends up as the face of your franchise, you have a serious problem.

Other reasons the Canucks think they’re in line to take a step forward after finishing 28th last season are varied. They dramatically improved their top-line scoring capabilities by adding Loui Eriksson this summer. Eriksson is very good and should forge some quick chemistry with the Sedins; they looked good at the World Cup of Hockey. This was a good add, though one wonders about the long-term implications given the Sedins are five years his senior, and he’s already 31. One supposes if Eriksson becomes that good-in-the-room veteran who can reliably play 40-point, two-way hockey in a top-six role, they don’t care much during a rebuild. Of course, the Canucks front office may or may not want to turn it around quickly, and if so, that contract could become an albatross. And more to the point, it seems like they think adding Eriksson gets them over some sort of hump, when it in actual fact does not.

There’s also that the Canucks pinning playoff hopes on having Brandon Sutter and Alex Edler stay healthy for the entire season this time around. They played just 72 games combined last year, and Vancouver felt that badly hurt their chances to compete for the playoffs. This, however, seems to be something along the lines of that misevaluation of talent alluded to earlier. Today’s Edler isn’t exactly the same guy in his mid-20s who was routinely an impressive defender. He’s not bad or anything, but he’s also not the difference-maker he once was.