He wasn't garbage at trading or drafting. The Canucks young core is centered around his draft picks and trades: Horvat, Hutton, Rodin, Markstrom, and Tanev.

Nonetheless, the team that was built after the SCF was not his vision. It was Aquilini's vision and he forced Gillis to build a team that's comparable to Boston. Aqulini also made trading for Gillis extremely difficult as he would reject trade proposals that Gillis wanted to execute on because ownership wanted to say competitive.

Gillis went on radio and said he wants to build a high-transistion, fast hockey team a week before he got fired. It was very evident he had a clear plan but deviated away from it after losing to Boston to satisfy Aqulini's ego.

Every GM makes mistakes, no one has a near perfect record but Gillis was intelligent and made good decisions that at least made sense on the surface.

I would have loved to see him rebuild this team and I guarantee you we would have Nylander and Tkachuk in our line-up right now. It hurts every time I see this line-up which would realistically happened next year if Benning went with the consensus pick:

Sedin-Sedin-Boeser Tkachuk-Nylander-Eriksson Baertschi-Horvat-Rodin Granlund-Sutter-Hansen

I would have loved to watch this version of the Canucks next season and we would have be able to see a light at the end of our rebuild tunnel. Right now, it seems like we're going to suffer for at least 4 years.