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| Judd Brackett at the Canucks' 2019 scouting meetings. photo: Canucks/YouTube |
Instead, there’s nothing else going on in the world of the Canucks, so the ongoing question of Judd Brackett’s future with the team is not just a story — it’s the story.
As of right now, Brackett is still the Canucks’ director of amateur scouting, a role he’s filled since he was promoted in the summer of 2015 after playing a key role in the scouting of Brock Boeser and Adam Gaudette. He’s been in charge of the Canucks’ drafting for the last four drafts, which have resulted in two true superstars in Elias Pettersson and Quinn Hughes, along with a handful of other intriguing prospects that could play a large role in the team’s future.
Since amateur scouting and drafting have been the primary strengths under Jim Benning’s tenure as general manager of the Canucks, it’s surprising that Brackett’s future with the team is in doubt.
Actually, it wouldn’t be surprising if Brackett’s future with the Canucks was in doubt because another team wanted to hire him to give him a bigger role with more responsibility and higher pay. After all, that was the path Jim Benning took to becoming a general manager. He was first a scout, then the director of amateur scouting for the Buffalo Sabres before the Boston Bruins hired him as Director of Player Personnel, then promoted him to Assistant General Manager.
What’s unusual is that Brackett seems likely to lose his job despite being very good at it and with no other team headhunting him.
Patrick Johnston of The Province first reported on the troubles behind the scenes back in January, making connections between reports from his sources and Benning’s statement that the hiring of Chris Gear as assistant general manager would free him and John Weisbrod up to do more scouting.
Amateur scouting isn’t normally the job of an NHL general manager or assistant general manager, though both Benning and Weisbrod have a scouting background. Certainly, GMs will get out to a few games here or there, as well as major events like the World Juniors, but that only provides a few viewings on players already deemed top prospects. It requires a much longer and larger process to identify and scout players for an extensive draft list.
Brackett described part of the process in 2018 when I asked him about drafting Elias Pettersson.
“It starts with an identification process early on, and then people come in from all over and put him against players from their region and vice versa. There’s a real process to it,” said Brackett. “Scouting is a group effort for us. We have Inge Hammarstrom over there [in Sweden] and Thomas [Gradin] traveled there, but Elias played in the U20 tournament in November...and we had plenty of guys that cross over to Sweden. So, there’s no one person that drafts. If there’s a player we like, we have long discussions about that player. It’s definitely a group effort when we find someone special like Pettersson.”
You can’t give just one person credit for the work of the Canucks scouting department. Brackett himself will be the first to tell you that. Trying to say that Ron Delorme is responsible for the Canucks drafting Pettersson, for example, is absurd. Delorme is a WHL scout for the Canucks, to start with, but the bigger issue is that the entire scouting department weighed in on the decision to draft Pettersson. Certainly, Delorme argued for Pettersson, but so did Hammarstrom, Gradin, and other scouts.
Despite opportunities to self-aggrandize and take responsibility for drafting, Brackett repeatedly emphasized the importance of collaboration and discussion when I talked to him.
The Canucks gave a peek into that process in a behind-the-scenes video from the Canucks’ 2018 scouting meetings. In the video, you can see Brackett directing the discussion, putting players up on a whiteboard to break down their various strengths and weaknesses in comparison to one another, but everyone in the room has input into that discussion.
“Regardless of if it’s your first year or your 30th year, if you’ve got an opinion on a player, let’s make sure we get it out there,” says Trevor Linden early in the video. The emphasis is on collaboration.
Other behind-the-scenes videos illustrate the collaboration between Brackett, Benning, and Weisbrod, such as the one from the 2017 draft. Their discussion of Jonah Gadjovich is interesting: Brackett seems more interested in Gadjovich’s scoring potential in front of the net, while Weisbrod jumps to the idea that he could create a “safe working environment” with his toughness.
The more intriguing moment, however, is around the 3:25 mark of the video, when Benning calls Stan Bowman, GM of the Chicago Blackhawks, about trading picks. Bowman makes a counteroffer and Benning hangs up to discuss things with his group, primarily Brackett.
Benning asks Brackett, “Do you guys wanna do it?” and Brackett responds, “Yeah, I think it gives us another shot.” Weisbrod chimes in and asks if the extra picks later are of value to Brackett and he says they are. So they do the deal.
The two picks the Canucks got turned into Kristoffer Gunnarsson and Petrus Palmu — Benning seemed particularly excited about Gunnarsson in the video — so nothing much came of the trade, but it’s still a sign of how much autonomy Brackett had in the later rounds of the draft. Benning and Weisbrod deferred to his opinion — it was essentially his call to make the trade.
You can see it again in the 2018 behind-the-scenes video. At 1:09, in reference to previous discussions about trading down, Brackett says, “If Woo goes, we make that trade.”
It takes a fair degree of autonomy in running the draft — particularly the second day of the draft — to say that to the general manager of your team. Obviously, this is something they’ve previously talked about and they have an understanding regarding the players they like in the draft and where they’re likely to be available, so it’s not like Brackett is overstepping, but the fact he’s comfortable enough making that statement says something.
The discussions further on about Tyler Madden further reinforce Brackett’s standing with Benning and Weisbrod at that time. They were on the same page, but there was a push and pull on that page.
There’s an exchange of ideas, questioning each other and accepting what is said. Brackett asks about taking a goaltender; Benning pushes back on the idea of taking one in the third round when they only have one third-round pick. Benning brings up the option of trading down; Brackett pushes back that he’d rather have Madden.
Later on, another trade option comes up: Benning turns to Jonathan Wall, the team’s Senior Director of Hockey Operations and Analytics, who presumably had run the numbers on pick value. He defers to Brackett: “It’s up to Judd.”
It seems telling that the Canucks never released a 2019 behind-the-scenes video from the draft, despite hosting the draft in their own building.
If they had, perhaps fans would have seen the once collaborative relationship turn acrimonious. According to a report by J.D. Burke on TSN 1040, that’s when things turned sour.
“The situation basically started to sewer at last year’s draft,” said Burke, though he also reported that there was an earlier sign: the Canucks traded for Linus Karlsson “against the counsel of their scouting staff.”
“There was a real debate in that front office about what to do with the tenth overall pick and it was not the most friendly of debates either. In fact, it was bordering on acrimonious according to all sources,” said Burke. The debate over whether to pick Vasili Podkolzin, a player the scouting department loved across all levels of play, whereas Benning and Weisbrod preferred Philip Broberg, a player that had a strong showing at the U18 tournament, but was less impressive in league play.
The team went with Podkolzin, though it’s notable that Broberg was already off the board, going eighth overall to the Edmonton Oilers.
According to Burke’s sources, however, Benning and Weisbrod changed the Canucks’ draft board between day one and day two. He emphasized that this isn’t necessarily uncommon in the NHL, but if you’re looking for a moment when Benning and Weisbrod encroached on the autonomy of Brackett and his department, breaking the relationship in some way, there it is.
Satiar Shah on Sportsnet 650 later confirmed that Brackett isn’t asking for a larger role or a raise — he just wants the autonomy to run his department, the same autonomy granted to other areas in the Canucks’ front office. With Benning and Weisbrod wanting to take a more hands-on approach, that takes away from Brackett’s ability to do his job the way he sees fit.
If it’s not immediately clear why, consider that a big part of Brackett’s job is directing his scouts to view different players, ensuring that they have enough viewings from multiple different scouts on each player they’re interested in. Would Brackett be able to direct Benning and Weisbrod in the same way, telling them which games to see and players to watch?
Let’s be clear too: Benning still wouldn’t be able to do much scouting in his role as general manager.
Instead, that would fall primarily to Weisbrod, who would likely want to direct scouts himself, sending them to watch players that he thinks should be higher on the team’s list or deserve more attention. Again, that takes away from Brackett’s ability to run his department.
This desire to take a more hands-on approach to amateur scouting seems to follow a trend: when someone in the Canucks front office pushes back on Benning and Weisbrod, they’re pushed out. People get let go not necessarily because they’re doing a bad job but because they disagree. We saw that with Laurence Gilman and with Trevor Linden, as Benning and Weisbrod oversaw an ever-shrinking front office staff.
Perhaps that’s an unfair characterization. After all, you do want people to be pulling in the same direction towards a common goal. At the same time, you don’t want a front office full of “yes men,” who simply agree with whatever the boss says.
Gilman once said that one of his most important jobs as assistant GM under Mike Gillis was to say “no” when Gillis had a bad idea. It is vitally important to have people willing to disagree and argue their case and equally important for those in charge to be willing to listen to those arguments.
If you don’t have a diverse group of voices willing to provide contrasting opinions and tell you when you’re doing something dumb, you end up with the Phantom Menace.
When George Lucas returned to the world of Star Wars to write and direct the prequels, he was a very different figure in pop culture than he was back in the 70’s when he wrote and directed the first movie. In the 70’s, Lucas was a rogue filmmaker with one hit on his hands trying to make the type of movie that had never really been made before. When it came to the prequels, Lucas was the unassailable creator of one of the biggest forces in pop culture history. He was on a pedestal.
As a result, there was nobody willing to say “no” when he had a bad idea. A first-year film student could have looked at the script for the Phantom Menace and said, “This movie doesn’t have a protagonist.” Somehow, a massive team of film industry professionals didn’t have the chutzpah to tell Lucas. Because he’s George Lucas, creator of Star Wars.
On the other hand, look at the first Star Wars movie, later retitled A New Hope. Lucas had some grand ideas and a compelling story, but we wouldn’t have Star Wars as we know it without the dozens of people that pushed back on some of those ideas to refine them and make them better.
That includes friends and producers that helped refine and edit the screenplay from a mess of weird ideas and characters named “CJ Thorpe” and “Mace Windy” into a heroic space opera. Director Brian De Palma, after seeing an early version of the opening crawl, said, “George, you're out of your mind! Let me sit down and write this for you.“
The actors pushed back on some of the unwieldy dialogue. Harrison Ford famously said, “George, you can type this shit, but you can’t say it!” Mark Hamill made a habit of rattling off one particularly absurd bit of dialogue on late night shows, a line that Hamill convinced Lucas to take out.
The crew pushed back on Lucas as well, such as cinematographer Gilbert Taylor, who had frequent run-ins with Lucas when it came to technical details of lenses and lighting.
“He asked to set up one shot on the robots with a 300mm, and the sand and sky just mushed together,” said Taylor. “I told him it wouldn’t work, but he said that was the way he wanted to do the entire film, all diffused.”
Executives ended up backing Taylor over Lucas and a lot of the visual aspects of Star Wars can be credited to Taylor pushing back on Lucas.
Most importantly, the film was drastically changed in the editing process, with a trio of editors: Paul Hirsch, Richard Chew, and Lucas’s wife at the time, Marcia Lucas. The changes they made essentially rewrote the entire structure of the movie and saved Star Wars, winning an Oscar for Best Editing as a result.
They didn’t act alone, of course: Lucas was there throughout the editing process, collaborating with his editing team. None of this collaboration takes away credit from Lucas, whose creative vision and abilities as a director are primarily responsible for Star Wars. The pushback from friends, executives, crew, actors, and editors didn’t take anything away from Lucas: instead, they refined things and made them better. In fact, Lucas deserves credit for being so collaborative and listening when his collaborators said “no.”
When it came to the Phantom Menace, either Lucas was less willing to listen to “no” or the people he was working with were less likely to tell him “no” in the first place. As a result, you get a devastatingly bad movie with serious, fundamental flaws.
Back to the Canucks: it may seem like you want unity in a front office and, in many ways, you do. The unity that you want, however, is unity of vision: everyone pushing towards a common goal. That cannot turn into a unity of opinion, where everyone is in lockstep regarding the best path to reach that goal.
Instead, you want collaboration, with everyone free to bring their ideas to the fore and argue for them. You want to empower those working for you to have autonomy over their own areas of expertise, like a cinematographer has autonomy over lens and lighting choices and an actor has a certain degree of autonomy when it comes to knowing their character and what dialogue sounds natural coming out of their mouths.
A well-managed team almost runs itself. You put the right people in the right roles, provide an overall vision, and give them the resources they need to do their jobs.
From all reports, Judd Brackett is very good at being the Canucks’ director of amateur scouting. He isn’t demanding more power or more money: he just wants to be able to do his job and that means being able to push back at Benning and Weisbrod based on his expertise and the input of his scouts.
Benning and Weisbrod have already pushed out other voices in the Canucks’ front office that disagreed with them. There’s an argument, whether you take it from Star Wars or basic management principles, that you should instead welcome that disagreement and allow it to lead to better decision-making.
Ultimately, what do you want the Canucks to become: a new hope or a phantom menace?
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