Jay Woodcroft? Manny Malhotra? 9 candidates to be Canucks’ next head coach

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Rick Tocchet informed the Vancouver Canucks on Tuesday that he will depart the organization after a successful two-and-a-half year stint that saw him accumulate the second best point percentage of any coach in franchise history, while winning the Jack Adams for coach of the year in 2024.

Replacing what Tocchet brought in Vancouver won’t be easy, and Canucks management is very much in the early stages of a process to identify a new bench boss that the club sincerely believed wouldn’t be required this summer.

“We’ll do a shortlist,” said Canucks president of hockey operations Jim Rutherford on Tuesday afternoon. “I’d expect our phones will ring on a regular basis from people who want this job. We’ll narrow it down fairly quick and start the process from there. Up until now, we didn’t talk about it.”

As the process begins the Canucks will cast something of a wide net. There are veteran coaches who have had significant success working with Rutherford who are free agents this hiring cycle. There are also some talented young coaches, steering successful teams in the AHL. The club, at this point in the process, appears to be relatively open to considering a variety of different profiles for Tocchet’s replacement.

“We have a situation here where we have some star players, impact players, and any time you have them, the coach has to be able to adjust to how you deal with them compared to the rest of the roster,” Rutherford said. “They have to understand that playing in Vancouver, the travel can be tough at times, can they manage the schedule … It’s a bit of a unique situation because of that.

“We’ll break all that down. You have to have some experience, you have to have leadership qualities, you have to have a good structure and system that players can lean on when they’re not playing well.”

Let’s spotlight nine names that would seem to fit the bill of what Vancouver is looking for.

Manny Malhotra

Rutherford confirmed that Malhotra will be on the shortlist of the club’s head coach candidates. It makes complete sense when you consider how successful Abbotsford has been this season.

Malhotra spearheaded the Abby Canucks to the fifth-best regular season record in the AHL despite seeing many of his key players shuttled up to Vancouver throughout the campaign as call-ups. That included an incredible 13-game winning streak down the stretch when some of Malhotra’s top players were up with the big club.

Malhotra has also done an excellent job developing young players: defenceman Elias Pettersson and forwards Aatu Räty and Linus Karlsson, among others, all showed legitimate NHL promise down the stretch. A big part of an AHL head coach’s responsibility is ensuring that players who get called up can hold their own at the NHL level, and by that measuring stick, Malhotra passed with flying colours. Even Jonathan Lekkerimäki, who didn’t necessarily take the NHL by storm, scored 19 goals in 36 AHL games, which is still considered a developmental success.

The 44-year-old former Canuck’s knowledge of the game, dogged preparation and detail-oriented style are all impressive. He’s a terrific communicator and is well-regarded as a leader going back to his playing days.

There’s a risk in rolling the dice on a candidate who doesn’t have previous NHL head coaching experience and, before this season, had never been a head coach at any pro level. But Malhotra has seven seasons of experience as an NHL assistant, which included three years in Vancouver with Travis Green. As Rutherford noted on Tuesday, there are teams having success right now with bench bosses who didn’t have a previous NHL head coaching resume. Spencer Carbery in Washington, Martin St. Louis in Montreal and Kris Knoblauch in Edmonton are three notable recent examples.

There would also, of course, be a familiarity factor. This management group will have a really deep understanding of how Malhotra operates and whether he’s ready for the next step. Malhotra already has relationships with many of the organization’s key prospects. The structure and playing style he committed to in Abbotsford doesn’t stray far from what Tocchet and the Canucks were doing, which aligns with how this management group wants the team to play.

Adam Foote

Foote, who arrived in Vancouver as an assistant coach with Tocchet in January 2023, has successfully run the defence over the past two and a half seasons. He’s overseen Quinn Hughes’ breakout, the dominance of the Hughes pairing with Filip Hronek, the development of younger defenders like Elias Pettersson and the two-way bounce back of Tyler Myers.

A hard-nosed defender who won multiple Stanley Cups and Olympic Gold with Team Canada in 2002 as a player, Foote has serious weight as a leader and hockey mind. And his Canucks future is murky in the extreme in the wake of Tuesday’s news. He’s widely expected to join Tocchet’s staff at his next stop.

Rutherford suggested Tuesday that the club will have to “tread lightly” in navigating the future of their remaining assistant coaches.

“I would say that the organization respects the other guys and they will be guys that we will want to keep,” Rutherford said, “but at the same time, if you bring a new coach in, they might want to bring in one or two of their guys.”

If the Canucks are going to retain Foote, a promotion may be required. It’s a route that might appeal to Canucks players. Foote has developed a close working relationship with Hughes, for example, and would have the added benefit of maintaining some sense of continuity in the wake of Tocchet’s departure.

While Foote has shown his mettle as a top NHL assistant, however, he’d be an inexperienced candidate for an NHL head coaching job. Foote has never served as a head coach at the professional level, and his performance in one season as a WHL head coach with the Kelowna Rockets in 2019-20 was largely unsuccessful.

Peter Laviolette

If experience is what the Canucks are looking for, they won’t find anyone more qualified than Laviolette. The 60-year-old has over 20 years of experience as an NHL head coach and has the seventh-most wins in league history. He’s won a championship and has been to the Stanley Cup Final twice more.

Most interestingly, there’s a deep history between Laviolette and Jim Rutherford. The pair won a Cup together when Laviolette was the Hurricanes’ head coach in 2006. Rutherford said in 2017, when his Penguins faced off against Laviolette’s Predators in the Stanley Cup Final, that he would have hired Laviolette as his first head coach in Pittsburgh had he been available.

Laviolette’s last two stops in the NHL have been a mixed bag. He had quality regular seasons but couldn’t get an aging Capitals team past the first round in 2020-21 and 2021-22, before being fired for missing the playoffs in 2022-23.

His first year with the Rangers was a dream as the club won the Presidents’ Trophy and made it to the Eastern Conference final. He unlocked the breakout version of Alexis Lafrenière, had the Rangers defending better and was pushing many of the right buttons.

However, this season, they were a disaster at every level. New York’s on-ice habits were horrific, playing like a disjointed bunch rather than a team, and overall, the Rangers were one of the worst defensive teams in the NHL. Not all of that falls on Laviolette, but he was certainly part of the problem.

Jeremy Colliton

Former Chicago head coach Jeremy Colliton would be an interesting candidate, if the Canucks were open to repatriating the New Jersey Devils assistant coach who left the organization just last summer.

Colliton, 40, is a young bench boss with a ton of experience relative to his listed age. Colliton has enjoyed significant AHL success across stints in Rockford and Abbotsford, and served as the Blackhawks’ head coach for nearly three seasons from 2018-2021, while being put in the unenviable position of replacing Joel Quenneville following his dismissal in November 2018.

Not only is Colliton familiar with the organization, but he’s coming off an impressive season running the Devils’ power play under Sheldon Keefe. Though it ran cold in New Jersey’s first-round series loss to the Carolina Hurricanes, who, it should be noted, are also the league’s best penalty killing team, the Devils managed the third best conversion rate with the man advantage this season — and impressively held up as a dangerous power-play side even after star centre Jack Hughes’ sustained a season-ending shoulder injury.

Mike Yeo

Canucks management hired Yeo in the summer of 2022 to join Bruce Boudreau’s staff as an assistant. It’s telling that the club held onto him even when Boudreau was replaced with Tocchet. Last season, Yeo oversaw a dramatic improvement in the Canucks’ penalty kill, which was a significant reason why the club beat Nashville in Round 1 and pushed Edmonton to seven games in Round 2.

Vancouver offered Yeo an extension last summer, but he opted to instead join Travis Green’s staff in Ottawa as an assistant for 2024-25. The Senators made the playoffs for the first time in eight years. The 51-year-old is highly regarded and has had two non-interim coaching stints. He’s also got a long-standing relationship with Patrik Allvin dating back to their shared time in the Penguins organization.

Yeo’s rough ending in St. Louis — he was fired during the 2018-19 season, with Craig Berube replacing him and leading the Blues to the Stanley Cup that year — is what will immediately come to mind for many fans. However, what’s often forgotten is that he had a genuinely solid three-year run as Minnesota’s bench boss. Yeo is the only coach who’s steered the Wild to a playoff series win over the last 20 years, and he did it twice, in 2014 and 2015.

Under Yeo, the Wild were one of the stingiest defensive teams in the NHL. He’s a clever defensive tactician, which is something the club will presumably be looking for in its next coach.

Todd Nelson

Nelson is easily the most accomplished head coach in North America who has yet to be given a real opportunity to coach an NHL team for a full season.

The 55-year-old, whose only stint as an NHL head coach came with the Oilers in relief of Dallas Eakins during the 2014-15 campaign, has a ridiculous track record of success both as an NHL assistant and at the AHL level. In fact, across two stops and separated by a four-year stint as an assistant coach with the Dallas Stars, Nelson’s teams have won three of the last four Calder Cup playoff trophies in the AHL seasons that he has worked.

It’s frankly preposterous given Nelson’s track record that he’s never been handed the keys and permitted to try his hand driving an NHL team. All this guy does is win.

Jay Woodcroft coached the Oilers for parts of three seasons. (Gary A. Vasquez / USA Today)

Jay Woodcroft

Edmonton was teetering on the edge of disaster when Woodcroft took over in the middle of the 2021-22 season.

The Oilers lost the qualifying play-in round of the 2020 bubble playoffs to an aging, mediocre Blackhawks team coached by Colliton. They were swept in the first round by the Winnipeg Jets in 2021. They were outside of a playoff spot with a 23-18-3 record when Dave Tippett was fired on Feb. 10, 2022.

Woodcroft instantly took the Oilers from mediocrity to Cup contender status. Edmonton went on a 26-9-3 tear once Woodcroft took over, which saved the franchise from an embarrassing playoff miss. Not only that, but he guided the Oilers to the Western Conference final. That marked the first playoff series win the Oilers had celebrated since 2017 when Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl were 20-year-olds.

Edmonton continued that momentum into the 2022-23 season, finishing second in the Western Conference with 109 points. The Oilers lost a hard-fought second-round series in the 2023 playoffs to the Vegas Golden Knights, but there was no shame in falling short to the eventual Stanley Cup winners.

Heading into the 2023-24 season, Woodcraft changed Edmonton’s neutral zone defensive formation to a 1-1-3 structure. He also switched the club from playing man-to-man defence to a zone style, similar to what Vegas ran when it won the Cup. Woodcroft believed those changes would set the Oilers up for better defensive success in the playoffs. Instead, the adjustments backfired spectacularly: Edmonton got off to a horrific 3-9-1 start, and Woodcroft was dismissed. Knoblauch, meanwhile, restabilized the team and took the Oilers to Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final.

While Woodcroft unquestionably bears responsibility for the failed system change last season, the team’s bad start wasn’t all his fault. The Oilers weren’t getting any saves (.889 save percentage), were getting zero bounces offensively (31st-ranked 6.5 percent shooting clip), not to mention that McDavid and Mattias Ekholm were struggling because they were playing at less than 100 percent health.

Woodcroft is a sharp, thoughtful, introspective mind. He left Edmonton with a .643 points percentage over 133 games and three playoff series wins, which is solid work considering the mediocrity the Oilers were entrenched in before his arrival. He was reportedly the runner-up for head coaching jobs in New Jersey and Columbus last summer.

Mike Vellucci

Vellucci, a Penguins assistant coach, has a ton of experience in NHL front offices as well. He worked as an assistant general manager and director of hockey operations and was a high-quality AHL head coach with the Charlotte Checkers and the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins. He’s also been a mainstay on the coaching staff in Pittsburgh since Rutherford hired him in 2019.

Vellucci is a quality coach at the AHL level with a ton of hockey experience, but no NHL head coaching experience to speak of. He’s got a built-in, trusting relationship with Rutherford, however, and has done very well when given command of the bench at lower levels.

Dominique Ducharme

Ducharme’s rapid rise and fall is one of the most unique recent stories in the NHL.

Ducharme took over as Montreal’s head coach in the middle of the abbreviated 2020-21 season. He led the underdog Canadiens to a Cinderella run to the 2021 Stanley Cup Final. Ducharme didn’t have much elite offensive firepower on his roster, but the Habs were stingy defensively, boasted an elite penalty kill and relied on top-notch goaltending from Carey Price. That’s an intriguing story considering some of the similar ingredients the Canucks are trying to win with.

However, the fall was just as fast and hard. The Canadiens face-planted to a league-worst 8-30-7 record when Ducharme was let go. Ducharme had his flaws, but he was also dealt an impossible hand. Price only played five games in 2021-22. Shea Weber never played again after the 2021 Cup run. Montreal lost other key players in free agency that summer and had to contend with a brutally short offseason, as the 2021 Cup Final was played in July.

After being fired in Montreal, Ducharme has spent the last two seasons as an assistant in Vegas.

(Photo of Manny Malhotra: Andy Abeyta / The Desert Sun / USA Today via Imagn Images)

This news was originally published on this post .

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