For first-year Abbotsford Canucks bench boss Manny Malhotra, this summer has been a whirlwind.
Since the organization hired the former Vancouver Canucks centre, who appeared in over 1,000 NHL games between the regular season and playoffs, and has spent the past eight years working as an assistant coach with the Canucks and the Toronto Maple Leafs organizations, Malhotra has been busy studying for the next challenge in his career.
Malhotra is an experienced hockey guy, but he’s never previously served as a head coach at the professional level.
“It’s been kind of like going back to school and learning a whole new subject,” Malhotra says with a laugh. “It’s been a ton of fun.”
It’s also been a ton of work. At the American League level, the Canucks have modified how they do business under Patrik Allvin and Jim Rutherford’s leadership. The high-salaried American League veterans who dotted the Abbotsford roster during the club’s inaugural seasons in the Fraser Valley have made way for younger, more developmental and more financially sustainable lineups over the past few seasons.
Despite that, outgoing head coach Jeremy Colliton and his staff were able to make the Calder Cup playoffs in consecutive seasons in an uncapped league.
That staff has now departed. After contract talks between the Canucks and Colliton fell apart, the experienced bench boss landed on Sheldon Keefe’s staff in New Jersey as an assistant. Longtime defensive coach Gary Agnew opted to retire. Well-regarded American League assistant Jeff Ulmer landed a job as an NHL-level assistant coach in San Jose.
Building up a new coaching staff, watching video to prepare and integrating himself with Rick Tocchet’s Canucks staff have been major preoccupations for Malhotra as he’s prepared for this new role.
“Since I took the job a large part of my time has been spent on restaffing, going over resumes and meeting with people and talking to people and trying to find the right fit,” Malhotra says.
“It’s been an interesting experience for me going through that interview process, making sure you’re asking the right questions. There’s definitely been some guys that have stood out for one reason or another, from the relatability standpoint, and in terms of their hockey acumen and their ability to present that and present ideas.”
Already Malhotra has added one assistant to the staff, Jordan Smith, who joins Abbotsford from the Springfield Thunderbirds and came highly recommended. Malhotra and the Canucks have one more assistant coaching hire in the pipeline, which will round out the Abbotsford staff.
“So there’s been a lot of work staffing, and then going over video and getting accustomed to seeing the guys and what they look like on the ice. And making my own analysis of what worked for the group last year and what didn’t work.”
Last week, The Athletic caught up with Malhotra to discuss putting his stamp on the team in Abbotsford, why he was ready to take on a head-coaching assignment and the opportunity to work with Henrik and Daniel Sedin again.
What follows has been edited for length and readability.
Why were you ready at this stage of your coaching career to take on a head-coaching job for the first time?
Having been an assistant coach for eight years, and seeing the way different organizations ran and how various coaches did things, in addition to having a number of different coaches during my playing career, I felt like now was the right time to try and implement those things. I have ambitions of being a head coach at the NHL level one day, and you obviously have to gain head-coaching experience at some level before you’re going to get that opportunity.
I want to take that next step, and the opportunity with Abbotsford being what it is, and talking to Ryan Johnson and how passionate they are about the organization, it just felt like the perfect opportunity.
You worked on the staffs of a pair of NHL bench bosses — Travis Green and Sheldon Keefe — who came up through the American League ranks. Did you pick their brain on what to expect and how to approach working in the AHL? And the value of going down to the American League to get that experience?
It wasn’t necessarily a specific conversation with either of them, but over the course of my time working with them, there were numerous stories and conversations about how situations were handled at the American League level versus how they’re handled at the NHL level.
For both guys, they had a number of players come up with them to the next level who they’d coached in the American League, and then speaking about the differences about how things were handled, I took in all of that information. It was the same thing too with Spencer Carbery, who I worked with in Toronto, and who had experience at the American League level and coaching junior before, too.
As you cross paths with all of these people, it’s not just the coaches you’ve played for, but also the roundtable talks you have with fellow coaches on a daily basis. In regular day-to-day meetings, things will come up that will intrigue you, and you ask your colleagues to elaborate on different answers and pick their brains on certain things.
Over the last eight years, there’s been a lot of learning on my part about the differences between the two leagues with a focus on what makes you successful and what doesn’t necessarily work.
As a player you played for coaches like Todd McLellan, Alain Vigneault, Ken Hitchcock and Dave Tippett. Who do you think your biggest influences are as a bench boss?
I always tell people that playing for Hitch was a very big part of my development and growth as a player. Understanding the game, the way he saw it, I give him a ton of respect for the fact that he never played the game at a high level, but his attention to detail was second to none.
Then playing for Todd in San Jose, that’s where it all came together, in terms of his knowledge of the game and the way he taught, in addition to the communication aspect.
For myself personally, I feel that communication between coaches and players is so instrumental in … well, everything. In the day-to-day function of practices, in players’ psyche, in terms of knowing where they stand. For me, Todd was the best at letting players know where they stood, what his expectations were and what needed to be cleaned up in your game. There was no grey area ever. It was ‘I need you to do A, B, C; clean up D, E, F, and we’re good.’
When I look forward to how I want to be as a coach, first and foremost, communication is huge for me. I want to make sure that players don’t just understand systems and expectations as a team, but just knowing what I know now, players just want to know where they stand. Don’t wait for things to escalate, nip things in the bud and allow people to correct things quickly, as soon as you see it.
Manny Malhotra with Henrik and Daniel Sedin. (Jeff Vinnick / NHLI via Getty Images)
Knowing how involved the Sedin twins are in Abbotsford and with the coaching staff generally, what’s it been like to get to work with them again? Was that part of the appeal of coming out West?
It was definitely one of the selling points for me.
If you look at their post-playing career, they’ve kind of gone in the opposite direction of most players. Most people get into scouting, then player development, then coaching and then management. These guys started in management but had this feeling that they wanted to get back to be closer to the game.
That’s what I love about them. As skilled and as good as they were, Hall of Fame careers, the way that they can think and communicate and break down the game for any type of player — a grinder, a skilled player, a defenseman — is really great. We’ve already been having good talks about the various prospects, the synergy right now between Abbotsford and Vancouver, and the evolution over the last two or three years, really, of how the club has turned things around and how they’ve made the Canucks such a competitive group again.
So I’m really looking forward to working with them. We got a taste of it at development camp, but I’m really looking forward to having them around the guys and having an understanding of what it takes to not just make it to the next level but to stay at the next level and contribute.
I know that Rick Tocchet tends to view it as an 80/20 split with his American League bench boss, autonomy-wise. The idea that the bulk of what you do will be about preparing players for the NHL, but you still have room to experiment and grow as a coach personally and put your own spin on it. How do you approach finding that 20 percent in your first season as a head coach?
Over the years it’s about seeing the things that I like and the things that I don’t like schematically, and how I would teach the key points.
That was one thing that, when I spoke with Tocchet about how our systems would work, in terms of following it to a T, being given some autonomy is really refreshing to hear. The idea that he likes the experimentation. That he wants to hear the new ideas, likes the idea of trying things, wants to break down different things and discuss why they work and how we can improve on them.
How much video of last season’s team have you been digging into over the summer? Do you go as deep as watching shifts from, say, Jonathan Lekkerimäki at the SHL level last season?
Oh, quite a bit.
Right away, as soon as I got a computer, I started watching Abbotsford’s playoff games from last year, just to get a sense of what the systems looked like. I wanted to watch it all myself before getting input from anybody else in terms of the strengths and deficiencies of the team and what systems we were running.
Even prior to talking to Tocchet about it, I wanted to see what we were doing, see if there were similarities to what they were doing in Vancouver. I really wanted to have my own book, before getting instructions from them.
So I watched quite a bit of the guys, their playoff games, individual clips on players that we know will be returning, to get a sense of what their game is about. Then there’s the deep dives, the background checks, the bios, the statistics.
I legitimately feel like I’m preparing for an exam, so to speak. Just doing the work, getting all of the information I can about everybody, and it’s been a lot of fun watching it.
When you go through that process, how much do you think about making the insights you’re gleaning actionable once training camp opens and you’re actually on the ice?
It goes back to understanding what players are good at, what they need to improve on to get to the next level and then seeing how their game plays out within the system. Are they making the right reads? Are they accountable for where they are positionally? Are they making good decisions with the puck?
It’s those types of things, which are very much habit based. Then when you look at the systems and how we want to implement them, that’s about going over it with the coaches in terms of practice planning, in terms of how we replicate certain situations, how do we improve certain things.
We want to continue to build off of the things the team is good at and try to clean up deficiencies wherever we see them.
(Top photo: Jeff Vinnick / NHLI via Getty Images)