from Damien Cox of Sportsnet,

There’s good news and bad news for the Vancouver Canucks, and both ends of that are somewhat counter-intuitive.

The good news is eight straight losses has the Canucks, after being generally in the playoff picture most of the season, two points out of dead last in the NHL with seven games to play. This is exactly the predicament Vancouver needs to be in, with the chance to acquire a top-end prospect through the draft for the first time since drafting the Sedin twins second and third overall in 1999.

The Canucks have some good young players like Bo Horvat, Jared McCann and Jake Virtanen, among others. But they don’t have a front-line, elite prospect along the lines of what looks to be available in the top three or four picks of the 2016 draft.

The sense is ownership didn’t want to go in this direction, but the team’s performance has taken it there. President Trevor Linden and GM Jim Benning know this is a good thing, and now they just need to get the highest draft pick possible and hope ownership doesn’t decide they don’t like the direction and order wholesale changes in management and coaching.

The only bad news to all of this is that it’s been done with the Sedins in the lineup along with veterans like Alexandre Burrows, Ryan Miller, Jannik Hansen and Dan Hamhuis.

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