VANCOUVER – Authority, like water, flows downward.

In the history of the National Hockey League, a general manager has never fired a president. 

Sometimes an owner may fire both. But since Luigi Aquilini’s family, which owns the Vancouver Canucks, still trusts Jim Rutherford to preside over the entirety of hockey operations, there was an inevitability to Thursday’s dismissal of general manager Patrik Allvin after one of the worst National Hockey League seasons in franchise history.

Widely varying insider reports in recent weeks had the Canucks poised to fire everybody — or nobody. But as the team burned to the ground in mid-winter, the most likely scenario was always that Rutherford, the Hockey Hall-of-Famer, would stay, and Allvin, his hand-picked, first-time GM, would go.

Head coach Adam Foote? Well, Rutherford said during his enthralling press conference Friday that the next general manager will eventually decide on the coaching staff — and almost everything else in hockey-ops.

Assistant general manager Ryan Johnson, a holdover from previous GM Jim Benning’s regime who impressed Rutherford long before Johnson built the Canucks’ minor-league team into a Calder Cup champion, is the frontrunner to replace Allvin. 

As with the probable dismissal of Allvin, the potential promotion of Johnson has been whispered about for months.

Rutherford told reporters the Canucks did not refuse the Nashville Predators’ permission to interview Johnson for their own vacant GM job. Because they never asked.

“Somebody made that story up,” he said.

And no, the Canucks won’t grant permission for Johnson to talk to other teams until Rutherford concludes his own GM search.

In the meantime, Rutherford told Allvin, highly respected around the NHL for his scouting and player-development chops, that he is welcome to stay with the Canucks in a lesser capacity.

“I'll give him a little time to make that decision,” Rutherford said. “It's very emotional now.”

Other than the marketing impossibility of bringing back everyone after a 58-point season in which the Canucks won nine of 41 home games for their season-ticket holders, there wasn’t any one reason to........

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