Canucks finally ready to rebuild after oddly upbeat season

It’s that time of the NHL season where a few fan bases start buying playoff tickets while the rest turn their attention to MLB spring training. Elimination is no fun. But it shouldn’t color your whole fandom with tears. Just most of it. Seventy percent of it.

This is the 30 percent: SB Nation NHL Silver Linings, where we send hockey’s eliminated teams into the offseason with five good things to remember from this season.

The Vancouver Canucks weren’t meant to contend this year.

But they teased us for a few months, hovering around the Wild Card berths with a few good runs of play. Enough to make us question whether they needed to fully rebuild or just re-tool on the fly.

And then they fell back to Earth, finally hitting the elimination block late last week. Those two months of competitive play are something to hang on to as they hit the reset button as a franchise.

So are these reasons.

It’s no secret that Daniel Sedin and Henrik Sedin’s days with the Canucks are numbered. Vancouver won’t trade them, and they don’t want a trade. But the franchise icons will be 37 years old when the 2017-18 season begins, if they don’t retire this offseason. New leadership will need to step up sooner or later.

It already has. Bo Horvat played well enough in his third year to earn the alternate captaincy and leads the team in points. Talented centers are something to build around, and good money is on Horvat winning the captaincy very soon.

Benning became somewhat of a punch line last offseason. It’s hard not to when you get fined for publicly admitting interest in trading for P.K. Subban or signing Steven Stamkos and other unintentionally hilarious things.

He also didn’t make many moves at the trade deadline last year. Canucks fans had reason to worry if their GM was any good. But by trading Alexandre Burrows and Jannik Hansen at the deadline this year, Benning earned clear wins and re-invigorated the Canucks’ future.

Adding Jonathan Dahlen and Nikolay Goldobin to the prospect pool is a good start to Benning’s rebuild.

Markstrom’s injury ended his season early, but he outplayed Ryan Miller early in the season and won enough confidence for the Canucks to give him a longer look next year as they wait for prospect Thatcher Demko to develop in the AHL.

Just 27 years old, Markstrom was once the goalie of the future for the Florida Panthers. We’ve seen goalie “busts” find success and reach their potential with new organizations before. Markstrom earned a chance at that with the Canucks for another season.

There was some question about this earlier.

After all, Benning traded for Erik Gudbranson in May and considered trading for Evander Kane back in November.

But as the Canucks circled the drain in the second half of the season, it appeared the Canucks fully realized their situation. Those moves mentioned above were a good sign they knew they needed to offload for future talent.

Vancouver president Trevor Linden even admitted as much recently to The Globe and Mail.

It will still likely be several years before the team’s young players and prospects are good enough to vault Vancouver back into the postseason.

“It’s going to take a lot of things going our way for us to find ourselves in the top eight,” Linden, the team’s president, said in a recent interview. Several times, he invoked the word “patience.”

This is good.

The Canucks clearly want to surround their young players with veterans. Loui Eriksson and Brandon Sutter are part of that plan. But too many veterans makes for a tight cap crunch, something few rebuilding teams need.

So Vancouver will be ready for Miller’s $6 million cap hit to evaporate this offseason after failing to trade him at the deadline. Even if he comes back at a lower price tag, that’s cap room they desperately need.