Brandon Sutter got a lengthy and expensive contract extension from the Vancouver Canucks this week, as Jim Benning continues to shuffle his feet.

Does anyone have a clear indication of what Benning is going for here in his attempted... what do you want to call it? Rebuild? Rebuild on the fly? Remaking? Retooling? It could be all or none of those things, depending on your viewpoint. And also, it's important to stress “attempted.”

Because what Benning has done to the Canucks over the last several months frankly just comes across as baffling. They've had a fairly quiet summer in terms of free agent signings — Matt Bartkowski, a useful-ish middle-of-the-lineup defenseman Benning would know from his Boston days, is the marquee name in the small group — but the GM has certainly been working the phones for trades.

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Since the end of the season, Benning has made five different trades, involving a hell of a lot of pieces. Some of the deals haven't been that big — blue line prospect Patrick McNally for a seventh-round pick next season is a good example — and some of them are, to use Benning's own term (against him?) “foundational;” the big Brandon Sutter trade could in many ways be a defining moment for his administration, however much longer it may have.

The net result of all these trades is below. Try to make out what you think he's doing:

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He traded four clear NHLers of varying quality. Bieksa had to go, Lack is demonstrably good but was was the odd man out in a crowded crease, Kassian never lived up to his potential for many Vancouver fans, and Bonino was part of the bait used to lure Jim Rutherford into giving up a bottom-six center. McNally was a good defenseman for Harvard last year but hasn't played a second of pro hockey, and Clendenning is a promising if unfinished product. He also gave up a fifth-round pick, but that doesn't really matter one way or the other.

In return for those seven pieces, he brought in two third-round picks, two seventh-round picks, and Brandons Prust and Sutter, neither of whom are smiled upon by the corsi gods but for whom old school hockey guys will speak almost too highly. Even if we're accepting the arguments that Sutter and Prust are better than their numbers suggest (though, at what point do we take them at face value?), and with the acknowledged benefit of no longer having to pay — much less extend — Bieksa, this represents a clear downgrade for the team as it struggles to remain in any way relevant in what any reasonable observer accepts is a rather poor division.

At the recent summit for season ticket holders, Canucks brass said flat-out that they traded Lack because they thought Ryan Miller represented a better goaltending option, and if they'd wanted to offload their Six Million Dollar Man (who posted a .911 save percentage last season as a 34-year-old) they could have, because there were offers. The cap savings alone might have been worth it, but there seems to be some belief that Jacob Markstrom — who dazzled in the AHL last season as he has many times before without ever representing himself too well at the top level — could be in a position to overtake Miller for the top job if he gets a real chance. Now, we can argue about the merits of having a $6 million backup on hand in that scenario, but Benning made his decision.

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