Inside the Vancouver Canucks’ decision to hire Adam Foote as their head coach

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Adam Foote, as it turned out, had the presence and weight that Vancouver Canucks brass was looking for in the 22nd head coach in franchise history.

It was a surprise hire for a lot of observers. Foote has never been a head coach at the professional level, and his brief stint as a WHL head coach with the Kelowna Rockets ended poorly.

A decorated shutdown defender, who won at every level as a player, Foote had become Rick Tocchet’s closest confidant and collaborator during his two and a half seasons as Vancouver’s bench boss. Short of earning a promotion of this variety, the widespread assumption was that Foote would’ve departed to join Tocchet’s staff wherever the former Canucks head coach landed.

Foote, however, made a sufficiently strong impression on the Canucks that they leapt to proactively land their man, and call their shot.

The timing of this is especially telling. Jim Rutherford’s track record hiring coaches is solid (or better) across his lengthy career as an NHL executive, but the one clear exception, the hiring of Mike Johnston in Pittsburgh, occurred late in the hiring cycle — when all of Rutherford’s preferred options were already off the board, leaving him scrambling to choose between a top WHL candidate in Johnston and a top AHL candidate in Willie Desjardins. It wasn’t an experience Rutherford was keen to recreate in Vancouver.

Additionally, as the Vancouver short list congealed around a small handful of inexperienced candidates, the club began to prioritize speed in the process. The Canucks wanted to act decisively, so as to maximize their runway to fill out the rest of Foote’s staff.

A more experienced assistant or associate coach, after all, would seem like a must to guide Foote’s development and ease the inevitable learning curve for a first-time professional head coach. Especially given the stakes of next season.

Beyond those factors, Foote’s authority, his presence, the work he did with Vancouver’s defenders over the past two and a half seasons as the Canucks morphed from a track meet, punt-and-hunt side under Bruce Boudreau into a top defensive side under Tocchet, spoke for itself from the perspective of Vancouver’s top decision makers. The club settled on Foote as their guy, had the comfort level and familiarity built in, and on Wednesday, named him head coach.

There’s another echo from Rutherford’s history here worth noting. Typically speaking, Rutherford highly values AHL success and AHL coaching experience when hiring coaches. That profile, increasingly common around the league, with Mike Sullivan, Jared Bednar, Jon Cooper and Spencer Carbery ranking among the recent successful NHL bench bosses with that sort of background.

There are any number of ways to build a team or win games in the NHL, however, and the path of Rod Brind’Amour in Carolina loomed large in Rutherford’s thinking while considering Foote’s candidacy to be Vancouver’s head coach.

Brind’Amour, who remains a friend of Rutherford’s, was first hired as a Hurricanes assistant coach when Rutherford was the Carolina GM. And if Rutherford hadn’t departed Raleigh for Pittsburgh in 2014, Brind’Amour might’ve been the Hurricanes’ head coach earlier than when he took over for Bill Peters in 2018.

Brind’Amour’s adherence to a stress hockey philosophy has been wildly effective, with the Hurricanes advancing to at least the second round of the Stanley Cup playoffs in each of the past seven seasons. While critics around the league describe his tactical approach as inflexible, he’s won games — lots of them — with consistency.

Most impressively, however, Brind’Amour has found a way to play max effort hockey year over year without ever seeming to have his message flag, or his best before date show whatsoever. And he does it because of how he connects and communicates with his players.

It’s that force of personality, combined with a hard nosed view of the value of structure, that the Canucks are looking for in selecting Foote. That he’ll already be able to count on the buy-in from the club’s captain Quinn Hughes, with whom Foote has built a strong sense of trust and respect, was a critical aspect of his candidacy.

Foote has also already discussed his view and plans for what this club should look and feel like when it hits the ice next fall. His input on the next Canucks roster was part of the process when he was interviewed.

It’s a big bet for the Canucks, who will enter a critical campaign with a deeply inexperienced head coach, whose only previous experience as a bench boss wasn’t successful.

It’s a bet the club placed, frankly, because it believes that Foote was the right person to get a perpetually underachieving group back on track.

(Photo: Jeff Vinnick / NHLI via Getty Images)

This news was originally published on this post .

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