from Mark Spector of Sportsnet,

Jim Benning has been part of plenty of these days, when a new general manager gets announced and everyone in the organization immediately gets nervous for their jobs. So he would not promise front-office changes on his first day as general manager of the Vancouver Canucks, because he knows how that would play. He purposely avoided the image of a guy looking to remake an entire organization in his own image.

In fact, Benning promised very little except for this: “We’re going to be about hard work … to get this thing going back in the right direction.”

There was a lot more “us” and “we” on Friday than there was “me” or “I.” The son of a fireman and a nurse, raised in the blue-collar north end of Edmonton, you could likely Google-image “meat-and-potatoes guy” and get a picture of Benning, side part and all.

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