The disastrous 2024-25 Vancouver Canucks season keeps on disastering.
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And, of course, head coach Rick Tocchet, the reigning Jack Adams winner, .
The Canucks’ management already had a lot of work ahead of them this summer to try to turn the team around after their massive step backwards. Now they also have to find a new head coach.
The challenge for the Canucks is that they have a lot of competition, with seven other teams also on the prowl for a new head coach, while another team or two could potentially join them in the near future. That means a lot of competition for the Canucks as they look to replace Rick Tocchet.
Further complicating matters is that the Canucks are a mess. Compared to some of the other coaching vacancies in the NHL, the Canucks might not be the most tempting proposition for the various jobless coaches out there.
Whoever the next coach of the Canucks ends up being, they’re going to have some tough tasks ahead of them. Perhaps the right coach is the one who sees these challenges as opportunities.
Help Elias Pettersson realize his potential
Elias Pettersson’s first full season under Rick Tocchet started out strong. Heading into the 2023-24 All-Star break, Pettersson was eighth in NHL scoring, with 27 goals and 64 points in 49 games. Then he fell off a cliff.
Since the 2024 All-Star Game, Pettersson has 22 goals and 70 points in 97 games, which is ranked 126th in the NHL in that timespan. Whether it was because of a or affecting him mentally, Pettersson has been far from the player he promised to be earlier in his career.
Last season, it felt like there was a clear disconnect between Pettersson and Tocchet, with the coach talking about and changing the way he plays, trains, and practices.
When he’s at his best, Pettersson is a Selke-calibre defensive centre, who can also put up 100 points. But he hasn’t been that player for over a year.
The Canucks need Pettersson to not only get back to where he was before but to take another step forward and become the type of player that can take over a game, especially when the stakes are highest in the playoffs.
“Now it’s about getting those top players — and when I say that, I don’t refer to Quinn [Hughes], he’s a phenomenal player, we don’t worry about him — but getting the top players to perform the way they have to,” said Jim Rutherford. “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 the new coach is going to have to figure out.”
That’s the most important task for any new head coach: connect with Pettersson and get him to that next level. Pettersson will have to have a fantastic offseason and do a lot of the work himself, but the new coach will play a big role.
More shots and goals
Only the Chicago Blackhawks had fewer shots on goal than the Canucks this past season and no one had fewer shots at 5-on-5. That’s extremely troubling, especially given Tocchet’s stated goal heading into the season of designed to create more offence.
It remains to be seen what the forward group will look like, but the new head coach will have to get more out of whoever he is given. That likely means some systematic changes to how the Canucks create chances, whether off the rush or offensive zone possessions.
Getting Pettersson back to elite status will certainly help, but getting more out of players like Nils Höglander and Dakota Joshua will also be important.
The new head coach will also have input on who the management team targets in free agency and on the trade market.
“We knew we were certainly going to make some changes with our forwards, but ideally, we know who the coach is, so the coach can have input on that,” said Jim Rutherford. “It’s important for the coach to get players that he wants, not for the general manager just to make trades and say, ‘Here’s your guys, you make the adjustments.’”
Patch up the holes in the defensive structure
One of the things that was said about the Canucks under Rick Tocchet is that at least they were good defensively.
Only, that wasn’t really true this past season. The Canucks were pretty mediocre defensively. They may not have given up a ton of shots on goal, but that was because they slowed games down and played low-event hockey overall, at the expense of their own offence. Even with that in mind, they still gave up high-danger chances at about a league-average rate at 5-on-5.
In terms of goals against, the Canucks were a little worse than league average, allowing 3.06 goals per game.
Worst of all, the Canucks were seemingly incapable of closing out games. They lost nine games this season when they entered the third period with the lead. The only two teams that lost more in that situation were the Chicago Blackhawks and San Jose Sharks — not good company to be keeping this past season.
The Canucks were outscored 99-to-80 in the third period this season and it cost them the playoffs.
The new head coach will have a little bit more to work with on defence than Tocchet did at the beginning of last season, as Marcus Pettersson gives them a legitimate top-four option behind Quinn Hughes on the left side, but there’s still quite a bit of work to do.
Establish a culture and an identity
Who are the Canucks? They’re not a high-flying offensive team exploding with skill. They’re not a team of brutish power forwards that beat down their opponents. They’re not a hard-working, gritty, blue-collar team.
The Canucks were supposed to be hard to play against but that certainly wasn’t true last season given their wildly-permissive defence early in the season and coughed-up leads.
So, who are the Canucks? What’s their identity? What’s their culture?
Tocchet repeatedly talked about creating a culture in the Canucks organization, and there were signs of it starting to come together with how the team’s prospects in the AHL were prepared and ready when they were called up to the NHL, but the job was left half-done.
The new head coach needs to instill some pride in being a Canuck in his team and help them carve out an identity: something that defines how they’re going to win games; something they can fall back on when nothing else is going right; something that can get fans invested.
Figure out the best way to platoon Demko and Lankinen
One of the most important goals for next season has got to be keeping Thatcher Demko healthy, assuming they don’t trade him this offseason.
When healthy, Demko is a Vezina-caliber goaltender capable of stealing games and coming up with . In theory, Demko could be a core part of a Cup-contending team.
The trouble is that major caveat: “when healthy.”
Demko’s past three seasons have been marred by injuries. A lower-body injury took Demko out for three months in the 2022-23 season. A knee injury cost Demko a month in the 2023-24 season, then another knee injury ended his 2024 playoffs after just one game.
That same knee injury prevented Demko from getting into a game in the 2024-25 season until mid-December and further injuries limited him to just 23 games.
All told, Demko has played 107 games over the past three years. In that same time span, Connor Hellebuyck has played 207 games.
But the Canucks don’t want Demko to be Hellebuyck, who has repeatedly fallen apart in the playoffs after play 60+ games during the regular season. They need to find the right number of games to keep Demko healthy, but also in the zone to provide the team the most possible value.
The task for the Canucks’ new head coach, along with goaltending coach Marko Torenius, if he’s sticking around, is to find the right balance between Demko and backup/1B goaltender Kevin Lankinen.
Convince Quinn Hughes the Canucks are Cup-bound
Finally, we get to the toughest task of all: convincing Canucks captain Quinn Hughes that the team is en route to a Stanley Cup.
Hughes is eligible for a contract extension in just over a year, meaning the Canucks will be negotiating with him and his agent after the 2025-26 season. If they can’t get him signed to a contract extension, some that offseason.
That means that what happens in the next year could determine whether or not Hughes remains a Canuck for the next decade. This could be one of the most important years in the history of the Canucks franchise and the team will have a new head coach navigating them through those troubled waters.
The Canucks’ new head coach doesn’t have to win a Stanley Cup in his first year on the job — though, wouldn’t that be nice — but he does have to lay down a blueprint for success.
The team has to be good next season — at the very least, in the playoffs — and they have to show signs that they will continue to be good for the foreseeable future. Hughes likes Vancouver a lot and has given every indication that he wants to stay and win here, but he’s also one of the most competitive people you will ever meet: if he can’t see a path to a Stanley Cup in Vancouver, who could blame him for wanting to go somewhere else to win?
So, here’s the pitch to a prospective head coach: fix the formerly-elite franchise forward, find offence where none exists, patch up the defence, figure out what the heck a Canuck is, keep the injury-prone goaltender healthy, and keep the best defenceman in franchise history in the city.
Any takers?
