On Wednesday, Alain Vigneault signed a two-year contract extension with the Canucks, which means that he is slated to be with the team for the next three years. Or, as some fans might put it, the Canucks are stuck with him for three years. Harrison basically summed up my opinion on the contract yesterday, but here it is again: Vigneault good. Winning good. Fire bad.

But the contract extension brought up a few other thoughts on the most successful coach in Canucks history.

The NHL’s General Managers recently wrapped up three days worth of meetings in Boca Raton, Florida, at which rule changes and other innovations to improve the game were suggested. Here at PITB, we were a little surprised to hear about Mike Gillis’s proposal, an initiative to outlaw hand-passing in the defensive zone.

It makes sense when you think about it, but the fact that the suggestion came from Mike Gillis, General Manager of the Vancouver Canucks, was strange. If anyone in the NHL was to suffer from this rule, it would be defensive specialist Manny Malhotra, who wins a great deal of faceoffs in his own zone by way of the hand pass. Why was Mike Gillis trying to spoil Manny Malhotra’s party?

As it turns out, it wasn’t solely about Malhotra. Gillis was trying to bring down the entire Canucks’ system from the inside — to bury his group in a sea of red tape and rule changes. Why? Your guess is as good as mine. But, considering Gillis continues to employ Alain Vigneault, despite the Canucks having only the second-best record in the Western Conference, it’s obvious he’s setting this group up to fail.

And now we have further proof. PITB has produced a very real, super authentic and totally not made up at all transcript of Gillis’s time on the floor, and Canuck fans should be thanking their lucky stars that most of these ideas were vetoed outright. What follows are 11 alarming excerpts from Mike Gillis’s speech:

(Ryan Kesler and Alex Burrows celebrate as gently as possible.)

Vancouver hockey fans rarely reach a consensus on anything, but I think we all agree that the Canucks looked unmotivated and disinterested on Monday night in Minnesota.

It was the Canucks’ 7th loss in 10 games, leading the cynics — who see everything as a conspiracy (including the rhetoric of any suspected non-cynics) — to freak. Some called for Alain Vigneault’s head once again, claiming the team had tuned him out, that his time here was done, and that the team should fire their coach 10 games from the postseason.

Level-headed thinking is not the strong suit of this pocket of Canuck nation.

But these folks have a point: if we’re assuming that Alain Vigneault is trying to wring the best and most hard-working performances out of his team — a reasonable assumption — he’s failing miserably these days. After the loss to the Wild, Canucks Army observed that, while the Canucks had 33 shots on goal, they only had 9 scoring chances. Against one of the NHL’s thinnest defense corps, it’s difficult to be that offensively inept. It’s as though the Canucks were actively trying to remain on the perimeter.

But maybe they were.