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Earlier this month, The Athletic’s Jason Botchford re-iterated that Aquilini had made multiple offers to Lombardi.

This past weekend, our own Ed Willesreported the multiple approaches angle as well.

Add it all up, and it seems the boss just wanted to make on thing clear: he hadn’t spoken with Lombardi.

But even a mediocre lawyer would note that this doesn’t deny that the Canucks or the owner himself triedto speak with Lombardi.

For whatever reason, Aquilini felt it necessary to declare a sort of innocence.

(I found myself recalling the scene from All the President’s Men, when Bob Woodward notes that he was given an answer to a question he hadn’t even asked, the non-denial denial: “I never asked them about Watergate. I only said what were Hunt’s duties at the White House. They volunteered that he was innocent when nobody asked was he guilty.”)

One wonders what the answer would be if we were able to ask Aquilini if he tried to speak to Lombardi.

The fact remains that Aquilini declared in the wake of Linden’s departure that he planned to find a new president, though as we learned from Jim Benning not long after, there didn’t seem to be any rush to complete the search.

But as we head into the summer of 2019, there’s plenty of reasons to think that search is still on. For one, Benning’s contract has just a year left. Second, while he’s done a decent job at the draft table, his work in free agency has mostly not been good and his trading record is also far from solid gold.

As Sportsnet 650’s Satiar Shah first reported, the Canucks are indeed looking at finding someone to look at the whole operation over a period of time and then make decisions on how to organize the front office.

Dean Lombardi never seemed like he was coming anyway, so what does it matter whether he was spoken to or not?

pjohnston@postmedia.com

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