Rutherford, who was hired Dec. 9, made it clear he's ready to do both jobs until then.
"I'm not here to be the general manager, but I'm capable of doing the job," Rutherford said Monday. "I would like to get somebody in place sooner than later, but if it's not in the near future it's OK. We want to try to get it right."
The Canucks fired GM Jim Benning and assistant GM John Weisbrod, along with coach Travis Green and assistant Nolan Baumgartner on Dec. 5. Vancouver also fired assistant GM and chief legal officer Chris Gear, and senior director, hockey operations and analytics Jonathan Wall on Friday.
Vancouver is 4-0-0 since Bruce Boudreau was named coach. It was 8-15-2 when Green was fired after five seasons. Benning was in his eighth season.
"We needed a change in vision," Canucks owner Francesco Aquilini said. "We needed a new voice. We needed a new culture and so at that point we decided as an organization just to clean the slate for Jim. Jim's going to bring in his people to start over again. That's the plan."
Rutherford, a Hockey Hall of Famer and three-time Stanley Cup champion as GM of the Carolina Hurricanes (2006) and Pittsburgh Penguins (2016, 2017), is in charge of rebuilding the hockey operations department. The 72-year-old said he hopes to have a new assistant GM in place by the end of the week and planned to start calling a long list of general manager candidates Monday.
"I do my homework on this every day, even if I'm not working," Rutherford said. "So I have compiled a list of 40 people and I put them in categories as possibility of potential general managers, and one category is of guys that have already been GMs and are no longer with their team.
"The other group is a lot of assistant general managers that would be entry-level GMs that I could mentor and work with, which I really enjoy. I have a number of guys around the League that I've mentored and have gone on to be GMs and coaches."
Rutherford was GM and president of the Hartford Whalers/Hurricanes for 20 seasons (1994-2014) before joining the Penguins in 2014. He was voted General Manager of the Year in 2016 by NHL GMs and a panel of five NHL executives and five media members and was inducted into the Hall of Fame as a Builder in 2019.
"I'll wait today because you have enough to write about," Rutherford said with a smile. "I'm not in a hurry to make a trade. I've already got calls. I got calls before I got to Vancouver: 'I like this player, I like that player, give me a call if you decide to move somebody.' If somebody calls and something pretty good comes along that we think improves our team now and in the long run, yeah, we'll take a look at it. But I'm not going to be making a lot of calls. My focus immediately will be to get this restructured and get people in place, because the stronger the hockey department is off the ice, it will make the team stronger on the ice.
"There's work to be done here. There's holes in the lineup, areas that have to be worked on. One of the real pluses for us is we have a franchise goalie (Thatcher Demko). When you're trying to build a championship team and you already have that piece in place, you can start chipping away at things."
Rutherford said the plan is not to move high draft picks to make those changes, a trend that saw the Canucks without a first-round pick the past two years at the NHL draft.
"I want to be careful with our trades," he said. "I don't want to trade draft picks unless they're later round picks. It's not the cycle we're in."
