My gracious. Just when you think the Vancouver Canucks might actually do something new, strange and unexpected - that is, demonstrate competence - they return to their ways.

It's now been reported that the bumbling franchise has told Assistant GM Ryan  Johnson that he's not permitted to interview with other teams.

This just screams blundering stupidity. It screams of the very low-class, bumbling incompetence that has marked this team for a decade.

The Bruce Boudreau fiasco was typical of the poor way this team treats its employees. Everyone and their dog knew that Boudreau was being fired. But the team let Boudreau hang in the wind for a few games, which was both malicious and undeserved. It screamed "this team gives no shits about its employees."

Listening to the gurgling in the Vancouver Canucks media spin cycle, it was more than apparent that someone in the organization thought Pierre Dorion was a capable GM, despite the overwhelming abundance of evidence to the contrary.

Oh, but hey - look the other way, would you? The team is elevating the Sedin twins to some greater, yet named, yet known job. We need only remember how the team treated Trevor Linden to remember how well the last Canucks-legend-given-job gig worked out. Linden somehow managed to leave the team with his reputation intact - although his back bore heavy scars from the Aquilini knife thrust.

And really, when you look at the horrible crap that the team has visited upon its staff, from Linden to Boudreau, to telling the NHL that the team would exercise its option on Rick Tocchett - remember that - and now blocking an employee from potential advancement with another franchise, this team is a dumpster fire and every trickle of combustible fluid traces back to a wretched ownership group.

Until that changes, the blaze will continue. The franchise is hot trash, everybody knows it, and no grand hire (or performative promotion of the Sedins) is going to change that.