Rick Tocchet is still keeping his cards close to his chest on the specific reason why he left the Vancouver Canucks.
But he was willing to reflect on his two and a half years as the team’s head coach.
Tocchet bolted to Philadelphia in May, after refusing to re-sign with the Canucks.
It was a surprise move after he could seemingly do no wrong in 2023-24, leading the team to a first-place finish in the Pacific Division and making the second round of the playoffs. But after everything went right that season, it all came crashing down in 2024-25.
In an interview with Spittin’ Chiclets, Tocchet admitted he listened too much to the “outside noise” heading into his second full season as head coach. He spent the majority of training camp trying to turn the Canucks in a “rush team,” he told hosts Paul Bissonnette, Ryan Whitney, and Keith Yandle.
Despite their success in 2023-24, the Canucks struggled to generate shots, ranking 26th in average shots on goal (28.4) during the regular season and dead-last in the playoffs with just 20.8 shots per game.
While Tocchet acknowledged that Vancouver’s seeming 24/7 media coverage of the Canucks is something nobody should complain about, he did detail the difficulties of managing it.
He said he spoke to his friend Craig Berube, before he became head coach of the Toronto Maple Leafs, and gave advice to Adam Foote, before he took over as the Canucks’ new bench boss.
“I kind of went in blind,” Tocchet said, who took over the Vancouver job in January 2023 after coaching stints in Arizona, Pittsburgh, Tampa, and Colorado.
“You’ve got anywhere from 15 to 25 guys reporting every day. They’ve got seven or eight different podcasts every day, nitpicking about Vancouver.
“I’ll be honest with you, there’s about 80 per cent of them, those guys are good guys. Listen, you’ve got to take the criticism. You take the good with the bad. But there’s the odd guy that I’ve had to pull to the side. I did pull a couple guys aside.
“It was cheap-shot journalism, what I thought. One guy went down a river that was just asinine. I’m a guy that can’t let it go. We had a talk about it. I was pissed. He was nervous, I’ll tell you that… Pulling a guy aside saying ‘that’s bullsh*t,’ why not?”
Tocchet saw the highs and the lows during his time in Vancouver, and it’s clear that the team’s playoff run left an impact on the 61-year-old coach. He even shouted out Surrey for its tremendous fan support.
“Great place to play. Risk/reward, I’ll tell ya, if you can win in that place,” Tocchet said before adding that Vancouver would be a top-five place to win a Stanley Cup.
“We just went to the second round and they acted like we were in the finals.”
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