Coach Rick Tocchet’s exit stings badly for reeling Canucks
The drama just won’t stop for the Canucks, but it’s not a good thing in this case. Rick Tocchet’s decision to leave on Tuesday makes a tumultuous, disappointing season even worse.
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VANCOUVER – The Vancouver Canucks are about to have their fourth coach in less than four years, but they’ve had only 21 of them since joining the National Hockey League in 1970.
Still, as far as we know, Rick Tocchet is the first one to leave by choice when his superiors badly wanted him to stay.
And that alone should give the organization pause.
This entire season has been hard in Vancouver, sabotaged by key injuries, drama and underperformance. The dysfunction in the dressing room between J.T. Miller and Elias Pettersson was hard. Trading Miller was hard. Injuries to Thatcher Demko and Brock Boeser and Filip Hronek and Quinn Hughes and Pettersson, among others, were hard.
But Tuesday’s shock announcement that Tocchet, No. 2 by winning percentage among the 21 coaches over 5½ decades, turned down the team’s offer of a long-term contract extension was something else again.
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It wasn’t bad luck or miscalculation.
It was a 61-year-old coach, having survived the emotional wringer of this past season, deciding that for a variety of reasons he has a better chance to be happy somewhere else.
That hurts more than anything.
Along with obvious disappointment and surprise, this pain was evident when president of hockey operations Jim Rutherford faced the media Tuesday at Rogers Arena to try explaining why his friend – the coach he hand-picked 2½ years ago to guide the Canucks – was leaving.
“He just expressed that he felt he needed a change and part of that was for personal reasons,” Rutherford said near the start of his sombre press conference. “He wanted to move back to the eastern part of the United States and be closer to his family. But obviously, we’re very disappointed.”
There was always a chance that Tocchet would leave, especially since he could parade the Jack Adams Award into a free-agent coaching market that features seven other NHL teams looking for head coaches.
But as Rutherford explained on Tuesday, as Tocchet himself expressed in the same press conference room less than two weeks ago, he had sounded all along like someone planning to return.
Rutherford was confident enough in this that he voluntarily waived the club option the Canucks held on Tocchet for next season to negotiate a long-term extension. Over the weekend, the team raised its offer to five years from four.
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No wonder everyone was surprised when Tocchet said no.
“I’m choosing to move on from the Vancouver Canucks,” he said in a press release issued by the team. “Family is a priority, and with my contract lapsing, this becomes the opportune time. While I don’t know where I’m headed, or exactly how this will play out for me over the near term, I feel like this is the right time for me to explore other opportunities in and around hockey.”
In hindsight, about the only thing Rutherford and general manager Patrik Allvin might have done differently was be more proactive in offering to extend Tocchet last fall or last winter as the adversity started to bury the Canucks.
Eventually, an exit window opened and Tocchet took it.
The Canucks’ already daunting to-do list for the off-season just got a new No. 1 item in bold red ink: HIRE A NEW HEAD COACH.
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“I mean, the coach is the guy that leads the team every day, makes a lot of decisions, makes a lot of in-game decisions that can determine whether you win or lose games,” Rutherford said. “I would say for management, it’s the biggest decision, yes.
“We’re going to get lots of calls. We’ll have lots of names. We have to break those names down, and then we’re going to have to interview these people and see where they’re coming from.
“You have to have some experience, you have to have leadership qualities. You have to have a good structure and system that the players can lean to when they’re not playing well. Those would be some of the things that we’re going to look for.”
Those were all of the things Tocchet had.
Apart from 199 points over the last two seasons, Tocchet delivered on the mandate given to him by Rutherford and Allvin to elevate standards and accountability. The new coach will have to address those, and build trust and belief with players, especially captain Hughes.
Eight days after Rutherford said at his year-end press briefing that the organization must do everything in its power to keep Hughes, Tocchet’s exit makes the defenceman’s departure next summer feel a lot more likely.
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“If we get Rick back and add a piece or two, we can be very successful,” Hughes told us just three weeks ago. “He’s an amazing coach. You look at me individually and my game, he’s been amazing for me – amazing for a lot of guys. He’s just a great person, first of all. That’s a guy you want to compete for, you want to play for.”
One of Rutherford’s first calls after learning of Tocchet’s decision was to Hughes, arguably the best player in Canucks history and who on Tuesday was named a finalist for what would be his second straight Norris Trophy.
“Well, I hope he’s playing golf because he usually returns my calls right away, and I called him within half-an-hour after I talked to Rick,” Rutherford explained. “So he hasn’t called me back yet. Knowing how he feels about the coach and that he’s a sensitive guy, I would suspect that he’s feels like I do – that we’re disappointed. But knowing the maturity of Quinn, he will make the adjustment necessary. But they did have a very strong relationship, a very good one. Quinn had a lot of respect for him, and Toc had a lot of respect for Quinn. So there will definitely be an adjustment there.”
And elsewhere.
Although the Canucks should interview top assistant Adam Foote for the head coaching job, Tocchet’s friend and blue-line guru will probably go wherever Tocchet does. This too will be a blow to the team, as Foote’s excellent work – and relationship-building – has been in obvious in the play of defencemen like Hughes, Filip Hronek and Tyler Myers.
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Rutherford ruled out Mike Sullivan, whom he hired in Pittsburgh where they won two Stanley Cups together, as a candidate for the Canucks’ job, saying his friend wants to coach in the east. Canucks AHL coach Manny Malhotra will certainly be interviewed.
As Tocchet can attest, Vancouver is an unyielding market and the Canucks’ dressing room, after last season, a complicated landscape. It will probably require a strong, experienced coach to command that room and get the culture and leadership in order – and win enough games next season that Hughes will want to stay.
“As for the major issue we had to deal with in the first half, it wore really hard on everybody,” Rutherford said. “Players, coaches, managers, it was tough. But we can’t talk about that forever; it’s behind us now. Whether we did the right thing or we didn’t do the right thing, it’s behind us. We did what we had to do (and) we have to move on from that.
“Now, it’s about getting the top players – and when I say that, I don’t refer to Quinn; he’s a phenomenal player (and) we don’t have to worry about him – getting the top players to perform the way they have to. You have to have your impact players win games for you, not just be one of the guys. That’s part of the job of the coach, and that’s something that the new coach is going to have to figure out.”
Yes, Tuesday makes a tumultuous, disappointing season for the Canucks even worse.
