Patrick WilliamsTheAHL.com Features Writer
Manny Malhotra He had an extensive hockey resume long before he joined the Abbotsford Canucks.
Malhotra was drafted by the New York Rangers with the seventh overall pick in 1998 and played 16 NHL seasons, totaling 991 regular season games. In 2000, he won the Calder Cup with the Hartford Wolfpack. After retiring as a player, he went straight into coaching and development. He first served as a development coach with the Vancouver Canucks in 2016 before serving as an assistant coach for three seasons. He then spent four seasons as an assistant coach with the Toronto Maple Leafs.
There’s only one thread missing from this resume: head coaching experience.
That’s where Abbotsford stepped in two years ago. Malhotra left Toronto on May 24, 2024 to take over as Abbotsford head coach. Thirteen months later, he won the Calder Cup again. He returns to the NHL after more than two years in the Abbotsford position.
This time as head coach. Vancouver General Manager Rian JohnsonMalhotra, who was promoted from Abbotsford last month, announced Monday that Malhotra is the first NHL head coach he has hired.
Malhotra spent two seasons on the AHL bullpen, compiling a 72-61-6-5 record with Abbotsford. In his first season leading the club, he staged a mid-season turnaround and led a mid-table team through a torrid second half. Abbotsford then advanced to five rounds of the Calder Cup playoffs and defeated the Charlotte Checkers in six games to capture Vancouver’s first Calder Cup championship. Along the way he sent defenders Victor Mancini and Elias Pettersson with striker Ashdeep Baines, Linus Carlson, Atul Rati and Max Sassen That includes a trip to Vancouver.
But his second season provided a much different learning experience. Offseason departures, injuries and Vancouver’s promotion hit Abbotsford hard. After significantly adjusting its lineup, the Abbotsford team achieved a record of 3 wins, 12 draws, 1 draw and 2 losses in the first quarter of this season. These early setbacks put Abbotsford in deep trouble in the standings, and the team never really entered Calder Cup playoff contention. To cope with the ever-changing lineup, Malhotra ended up using 52 different players, including six goalkeepers.
However, Abbotsford did manage to remain competitive. After a disastrous first quarter, the team went 25-25-3-1 the rest of the way and wreaked some havoc in the Pacific Division in April with a 6-1-1-0 record.
The Johnson-Malhotra combination has been successful in developing and winning in Abbotsford. Vancouver hopes the parent team can succeed. Vancouver ranks last in the NHL this season with a record of 25-49-8, 14 points behind the 31st-place Chicago Blackhawks. This result led to the dismissal of the general manager Patrick Alvin with the head coach Adam Foote and assistant coach Kevin Dean, Brett McLean and Scott Young.
Johnson succeeded Alvin on May 14. team legend Daniel and Henrik Sedin are the new co-presidents of hockey operations in Vancouver; the two also have experience working with Abbotsford prospects. Jim RutherfordHe, who previously served as the team’s president of hockey operations, will assume a senior advisory role. Amid all these changes, Malhotra’s promotion means Vancouver will go through three head coaches in as many seasons.
Malhotra’s career includes three seasons with Vancouver, including the team’s run to Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals in 2011. There’s still a lot of work to be done to make Vancouver a winning club again. That work will continue with the NHL draft later this month, where the Canucks have 10 picks, including four in the top 41 picks.
“I think one of the things we’ve experienced in Abbotsford is that commitment to daily improvement has helped our team get to where we have been during the year,” Malhotra said during an introductory news conference in Vancouver on Thursday. “I think this is one of the main reasons this is such a special opportunity.”
Of course, a poor start early in the season suggested that Abbotsford’s playoff chances were slim at best. However, that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a losing season. With the turnover Abbotsford experienced, Malhotra and his coaching staff really delved into the teaching elements of the job in year two. He had to rebuild the team’s foundation almost from scratch, and he did that. By the end of the season, Abbotsford had emerged as a team capable of handling opponents vying for a Calder Cup playoff spot.
Vancouver’s rebuilding NHL franchise will need to continue using the same approach.
“You’ve heard [Johnson] Malhotra continued. “For me and our coaching staff, it’s going to be about those daily incremental improvements. Today’s practice needs to look better than yesterday’s practice.” The level of execution needs to be better than it was yesterday and I think by developing that mentality with the players, you’re starting to see individual growth now. Now you can see the collective growth of the team. This is where we’ll start hitting our stride.
“Having the opportunity to instill those things from day one is one of the things that really excites me.”
Malhotra emphasizes on body language and the concept of maintaining positive energy. Even in what he calls his “humbling” second season at Abbotsford, he remains committed to those ideals. Bad times in any area of life are caused by someone. These struggles can intensify and lead to more problems. A losing team can become grumpy and leave players to deal with various personal matters. In other words, those tough times can build resilience and provide lessons for moving forward.
Malhotra hopes to get through a difficult season and make something useful out of it. This isn’t the fun of making it through the Calder Cup playoffs and chasing a championship. This season, a very different challenge tests him.
“You have to live it,” he explains, staying true to the concepts even when circumstances test that commitment. “You know, it’s easy to be in a good mood when things are going well, you’re winning the playoffs, and everyone’s in a state of excitement. It’s the ability to find the energy and have the right body language when things aren’t going well. For us as a staff, we know we’re in a much different predicament, but our focus is to keep the same level of emotion, the same level of preparation, the same level of energy coming to the ice every day.
“I think the message got through to these people.”
About two decades in the American Hockey League, TheAHL.com feature writer Patrick Williams also currently covers the league for NHL.com and FloSports and is a regular contributor to SiriusXM NHL Network Radio. In 2016, he received the AHL’s James H. Ellery Memorial Award for outstanding coverage of the league.
