MoxVlog

KANATA, Ont. — Before a brisk, high-energy 50-minute practice at the Canadian Tire Centre in Kanata on Wednesday afternoon, four figures took to the ice.

At one end of the rink, Canucks goalie coach Ian Clark put Thatcher Demko through his regular paces. To a layman’s eye, their routine — the positional drills punctuated with some conversation — never changes.

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At the other end, however, Canucks head coach Rick Tocchet could be seen chatting at great length with defenseman Mark Friedman. In some moments they seemed to be discussing positioning at the offensive blue line, with Tocchet even walking the blue line with the puck to demonstrate something or other to the newest Vancouver defender.

In other moments, Tocchet would feed Friedman the puck and he’d corral it and shoot. Mostly though, they were just talking.

Friedman wasn’t happy with his performance in Vancouver’s win over the Oilers. He finished the game minus-1 and logged just a hair over 10 minutes of ice time, but any struggle he had in that game didn’t particularly stand out to me — although it clearly did to the player, and to Tocchet too based on his usage.

It’s uncommon for an NHL head coach to be out on the ice 20-25 minutes ahead of a full practice. Tocchet, however, doesn’t appear to be a common coach. He occasionally puts the healthy scratches through battle drills personally on game days. He shovels snow off the ice and into the net himself while his assistants diagram various things on the whiteboard ahead of the special teams portion of practice. And he spent 25 minutes of one-on-one time on Wednesday talking to his sixth most frequently used defender.

Is it any wonder why this team has maintained such a high work rate all season?

The self-match

There’s an interesting quirk in Vancouver’s deployment this season; particularly, superstar centre Elias Pettersson and superstar defenseman Quinn Hughes are logging far less ice time with one another than they typically have under previous Canucks coaches.

This is intentional and there’s a reason for it. Tocchet and Canucks assistant coach Adam Foote are effectively self-matching their top line (centred by J.T. Miller) and their top defence pair with Hughes and Filip Hronek, utilizing the club’s two best puck-movers to help the Miller line battle toughs.

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“Well, first of all, it’s good that (Foote) agrees with me and the philosophy!” joked Tocchet after practice.

He then revealed the genesis of this idea, which traces back to something Mike Sullivan implemented in Pittsburgh when he took over for Mike Johnston in December 2015.

“I’ve got to tell you,” Tocchet began. “My experience in Pittsburgh, when we were struggling and then Mike Sullivan came in: We started to play Kris Letang with the Sidney Crosby line and our team turned over around Christmas time. So it’s a bit of experience from the past with me knowing that, but having those five guys to play against the opposition’s top line, and it doesn’t always happen, but for large chunks of this year we’ve had those five guys out against star players.”

As for Pettersson, who is logging a ton of ice time with Ian Cole when he used to play the bulk of his minutes with Hughes behind him, my strong suspicion is that Tocchet is using his most reliable play-driving centre to help mask this club’s most notable player personnel gap — the lack of quality blue-line depth. But when asked specifically about it on Wednesday afternoon, Tocchet suggested that he’s just going for familiarity.

“We want to play fast. We don’t want to take pucks back,” he said. “If you want to regroup a bit more it would probably be with the Pettersson line, but if Ian Cole and Tyler Myers or those guys are on, they know when they play with Petey that they want to play fast. So it’s just a more predictable game when you have play with certain lines.”

Hughes’ reading material

On Tuesday, as Canucks players arrived for the charter flight to Ottawa, the Vancouver social team snapped some candids and shared the arrival photos.

Notably, Hughes was carrying a hardcover book.

So what is the Canucks captain and one of the early season Norris favourites reading on the charter flight these days?

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“It’s Greg Harden,” Hughes told The Athletic after Wednesday’s practice.

Harden, a performance coach at the University of Michigan who has worked with Tom Brady, Desmond Howard and Michael Phelps, among others, has a new book titled “Stay Sane in an Insane World: How to Control the Controllables and Thrive.”

“He worked at Michigan and still does, for 40 years with all the athletes,” Hughes said of the book. “He has amazing stories in there. I’ve had some friends who’ve worked with him, so he sent me the book. I’ve read it, (my brother) Jack’s read it, it’s a really good book.”

Given that Hughes has already read the book, I had to ask if he’d been loaning it out to some of his teammates. And he has, although he wouldn’t divulge specifically who.

“I’ll leave that to you.”

The split

The Canucks have two days between games here prior to facing the Ottawa Senators on Thursday night. They’ll then play a quick, condensed three games in four nights on this road trip.

Once they return home to Vancouver, however, the club will again have two days off between games before hosting Bo Horvat’s New York Islanders back at Rogers Arena on Nov. 22.

Given the breaks on the front end and the back end, I was curious to see if perhaps the club might ride Demko on this upcoming road trip. They won’t, however, and it’s part of a larger vision of how to manage the split between Demko and Casey DeSmith this season.

“Casey is going to play,” Tocchet said when I laid out my logic to him. “Oh yeah, he’s getting in there.”

“We haven’t decided (yet), but it’s possible that he could play two,” Tocchet added. “We’re not scared of that.

“The good thing is Demko gets to work with Clarkie, so we’re just going to stick to our game plan. It isn’t a day-to-day thing.”

Vancouver has been very disciplined in giving DeSmith starts and making sure to rest Demko appropriately. It seemed bold in the second game of the season, and in Florida coming off of two consecutive losses. Now that the Canucks have amassed their red-hot start and sit 9-2-1, that discipline looks particularly sage.

For a team that’s now overwhelmingly likely to be playoff-bound this spring, everything that can be done now to make sure Demko is at his best in late April has to be strongly considered. That Tocchet and his staff are thinking in precisely this manner is just another thing to like about this Canucks start.

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16 off the top ropes

Canucks great and former president of hockey operations Trevor Linden caused a stir in the Vancouver market with some pointed commentary on Sportsnet 650 Wednesday evening.

Over the course of a fascinating interview with Satiar Shah and Dan Riccio, Linden discussed — among many items, including his favourite Canucks jerseys and ownership’s big-picture vision — the circumstances that surrounded Vancouver selecting Elias Pettersson with the No. 5 pick at the 2017 NHL Draft in Chicago.

“If Jim (Benning) had his choice he probably would’ve taken a different player,” Linden noted matter of factly.

Former Canucks general manager Jim Benning, who hasn’t spoken on the record since he was dismissed by the Canucks in December of 2021, was reached for comment by Sportsnet’s Raja Shergill and rebutted Linden’s assertion.

Benning also mentions how there were reports of him wanting another player over Pettersson (Cody Glass) and that was simply not true – and that he told Aquilini the night before the draft the pick was Pettersson.

— Raja Shergill (@Sher_Raja) November 9, 2023

I’ve done a lot of digging into this over the years, most notably in the wake of former Canucks director of amateur scouting Judd Brackett’s departure in late May of 2020 — this column and this podcast episode are the most notable instances — and most of what came out on Wednesday evening is a close match with what I’ve reported in the past.

There are conflicting accounts over how precisely the Canucks came to draft Pettersson. While I know which account I find more compelling personally, I prefer to deal in fact and based on my previous work there’s a basic set of facts that the principals involved all agree on. They are as follows:

1. Vancouver’s approach to amateur scouting and preparing the draft list changed after the 2016 NHL Draft, when key leaders — namely Linden, who admitted as much explicitly on Wednesday — became concerned the club’s process centred too narrowly on Olli Juolevi in 2016.

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2. Benning felt Cody Glass was too low on the Canucks list and pushed to move him up Vancouver’s draft board (I believe this is what he’s touching on when he tells Shergill that they needed more viewings and to do additional due diligence on other players).

3. As the process unfolded, Glass never surpassed Pettersson on the Canucks draft list.

4. Many people directly involved in the process — although notably, not all of them — felt that if Linden hadn’t been so committed to a more collaborative process, the pick would’ve been Glass rather than Pettersson.

You can read between the lines however you like, but ultimately none of this really matters at this point. It’s history.

The club had a fair bit of success at the draft table when Brackett served as Benning’s director of amateur scouting — the club drafted 12 players who played NHL games from 2016-2019, including two bona fide superstars while never selecting higher than No. 5 — so whoever deserves credit, or however the process actually functioned, it should be remembered as a successful partnership.

For me, more than anything, hearing Linden speak on Wednesday — and during an intermission interview he gave during the home opener this season — served as a reminder of how uniquely skillful he is as a hockey communicator in the Vancouver marketplace.

Given how savvy, well-spoken, uniquely likeable and credible he is as a communicator for Vancouver hockey fans, it’s disappointing that Linden only ever had the opportunity to hire one general manager. If we consider one of Linden’s peers in Joe Sakic, for example: When Sakic took over in Colorado, Sakic hired Patrick Roy as a highly influential coach with input on player personnel moves. It worked out terribly.

Sakic, however, was given the space to reset the decks, empower the right people (namely current Avalanche GM Chris McFarland), take a more analytical-driven approach and rebuild. The result? Sakic built a Stanley Cup winner and one of the best teams in hockey.

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Maybe Linden’s reset wouldn’t have been as successful as Colorado’s was, but it seemed like he was on a more interesting, insightful path based on the club’s moves — and the intelligence of the people Linden empowered (including Brackett, Jonathan Wall and Ryan Johnson) in the latter stages of his tenure — in his final two seasons as president.

Perhaps Linden needed time to grow into the job and simply never got it. For me, it’s another one of many Canucks “what ifs.”

(Photo: Bob Frid / USA Today)

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