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31 days, 31 questions: How much will familiarity matter for new Canucks head coach Manny Malhotra?
Photo credit: © Bob Frid-Imagn Images
By Elijah Ford
Aug 28, 2026, 14:00 EDTUpdated: Aug 28, 2026, 13:20 EDT
Welcome to a new series here at CanucksArmy, where over the month of August we’ll ask a new question each day about the Vancouver Canucks. We’re calling it “31 days, 31 questions”. Today, we’re examining how much familiarity will matter for new Canucks head coach Manny Malhotra.
We here at CanucksArmy have covered our “goals and expectations” series for each player for the upcoming 2026-27 season. In those pieces, the familiarity between new Vancouver Canucks head coach Manny Malhotra and many players on Vancouver’s upcoming roster has often been mentioned as a positive for their development.
Malhotra has already coached players such as Linus Karlsson, Max Sasson and Jonathan Lekkerimäki to some of the best hockey of their careers during his time with Vancouver’s farm team. Writers and fans alike are optimistic the Canucks’ new bench boss will be able to get the most out of Vancouver’s budding up-and-comers.
This tends to be the sentiment across sports when talking about familiarity between a player and coach. Typically, when a player has previous experience working with a coach or another person in a high-ranking position, the transition to their leadership style is often more seamless than it would be for someone who has yet to make a first impression. But is this actually the case in the NHL, or is it simply a narrative that has become accepted knowledge?
Malhotra is far from the first head coach to be promoted directly from the AHL to the NHL bench. In fact, over the past five years alone, there have been eight cases of this happening, either as interim or full-time hires. Let’s look back at those examples to find out how Malhotra might impact his former players during his first year and how that may affect his overall tenure in Vancouver.
The most prominent case study is likely former Toronto Maple Leafs head coach Sheldon Keefe. Like Malhotra, Keefe was the head coach of a Canadian organization’s AHL team for multiple years before being promoted to the NHL. He also directly tutored Malhotra, who spent four years under Keefe as an assistant coach in Toronto. Malhotra has often said that his time in Toronto, and Keefe specifically, influenced his coaching philosophy with the Canucks.
Keefe came in having coached several Maple Leafs during his time with the Marlies, including William Nylander. Nylander’s points-per-game rate increased to 0.93 under Keefe from 0.74 under Mike Babcock the year Keefe took over mid-season. However, because Nylander was already a premier prospect entering his early prime, it is difficult to determine how much of that improvement can actually be attributed to his former coach.
A better insight comes from players who weren’t necessarily expected to become high-end NHLers. The most prominent name in that group is current Edmonton Oilers forward Zach Hyman. Hyman was a fifth-round pick in the 2010 draft, coming out of a Tier II Ontario Junior Hockey League. He played four years of college hockey before turning pro with the Toronto Marlies under Keefe in 2015. Keefe quickly recognized a niche Hyman could carve out for himself in the professional game.
“After a few games we started calling him Shaq Hyman,” Keefe said. “He got to the paint more and better than anybody.”
Keefe used this to his advantage, playing Hyman netfront on the power play and putting him on a line with players such as Nylander who could get the puck to the middle of the ice. As the season continued, Keefe noticed even more potential in Hyman’s game, specifically his growing confidence with the puck.
“The thing that’s really impressed me is just the poise that he’s showing with the puck,” Keefe said. “He’s making plays himself, he’s not just, you know, winning puck battles, letting the others come in to clean it up, but he’s getting them the puck and actually moving into good spots.”
That newly instilled confidence helped propel Hyman to the NHL after only one season in the minors. He started slowly in his first year but progressively found his game under then-Maple Leafs head coach Mike Babcock.
When Babcock was fired in November 2019 and Keefe was brought in, Hyman’s game hit another level. Hyman was a solid producer under Babcock, averaging just under half a point per game on a blossoming young team. Under Keefe, he scored 0.76 points per game as he became an invaluable piece of the Maple Leafs’ top six, averaging the third-most minutes among Maple Leafs forwards during his time under Keefe.
“I had Sheldon before, he was my first pro coach when I started with the Marlies. So it was nice to see a familiar face,” Hyman said. “He’s an outstanding coach, I’ve learned a lot from him, he is a great communicator.”
A similar story can be found with current New York Islanders forward Pierre Engvall. Engvall was a seventh-round pick by the Maple Leafs in the 2014 draft. He spent a few years in Sweden before joining the Marlies in 2018, where Keefe quickly saw his potential.
“There’s so much to work with there,” Keefe remembered thinking. “When a guy with that physical package arrives, you’re pretty excited about him and you want to make him important.”
Engvall became a key component of Keefe’s Calder Cup-winning team in 2018, killing penalties and winning faceoffs in critical moments. A few years later, his NHL potential was realized when Keefe was brought on with the Maple Leafs. Though Engvall actually made his NHL debut in Mike Babcock’s final game behind the Leafs’ bench, it was Keefe, knowing him so well from their time together with the Marlies, who immediately used him on the penalty kill. Engvall scored his first NHL goal short-handed in Keefe’s debut and eventually made his way up the lineup. He scored six goals in his first 21 NHL games, giving the Maple Leafs a much-needed spark during an awful slump early in the year.
“I think when Keefe came in, he knew what I could do in the AHL and he believed that I could do it in the NHL, too,” Engvall said. “After first game there, I got my goal and I think from then I understand, like, what I did in the AHL maybe I can do in the NHL. I felt like he believed in me but also he could tell me I needed to play better. We had a pretty good relationship.”
Both examples illustrate the potential value of familiarity. Keefe already knew Hyman and Engvall’s best attributes, which allowed him to trust them with specific roles and put them in situations where they could succeed.
Another former head coach of a Canadian team who followed a similar path to Malhotra is Jay Woodcroft, formerly of the Edmonton Oilers. Before being named Edmonton’s bench boss, Woodcroft spent three seasons as the head coach of the Oilers’ AHL affiliate, the Bakersfield Condors. There, he coached players such as Evan Bouchard, Stuart Skinner and Ryan McLeod before they took the NHL leap. Bouchard was likely the biggest beneficiary of that familiarity.
When Woodcroft took over the Oilers, Bouchard was a fringe third-pairing defenceman with offensive upside. By the time Woodcroft left Edmonton, Bouchard was a point-per-game defenceman, contending for the Norris Trophy while quarterbacking one of the NHL’s best power plays. Woodcroft identified Bouchard’s unique skill set early in his AHL tenure.
“I think he has a natural poise about him,” Woodcroft said. “He’s a confident young man.”
Woodcroft was brought in halfway through the 2021-22 season after the Oilers got off to a slow start that left them barely above .500. In his first season with Edmonton, Woodcroft went 26-9-3, good enough to finish second in the Pacific Division. At the team’s end-of-season press conference, Woodcroft was asked how his familiarity with some of the roster from his time in Bakersfield helped ease his transition to the NHL.
“That’s an example of how your experience with that player allows you to make some informed decisions,” Woodcroft said. “For me, with those players, I not only have shared experience with them, but they have shared experience with me … it definitely helps speed up the process.”
That may be the biggest advantage of familiarity: not necessarily guaranteeing better player development, but allowing a coach to make more informed decisions faster.
That does not mean, however, that previous experience guarantees success. We don’t have to look very far into the past to see an example of a coach who had a path similar to Malhotra and did not enjoy much success in the NHL.
After coaching the Seattle Kraken’s AHL affiliate, the Coachella Valley Firebirds, to back-to-back Calder Cup final appearances, Dan Bylsma was promoted to the NHL bench in 2024. The Kraken hoped his experience with Seattle’s young core would help them take another step after a disappointing .500 season the year before. His relationship with former fourth-overall pick Shane Wright was specifically a factor behind his hiring.
Although Wright put up respectable numbers during Bylsma’s time with the team, he had a roller-coaster season, going from a healthy scratch to a bottom-six forward to a top-six forward seemingly night-to-night. Ultimately, the team finished with a worse record than it had the year before, and Bylsma was fired after only one season.
Overall, Canucks fans should be optimistic that Manny’s experience with many current Vancouver Canucks will prove beneficial, especially early in his tenure. A lot of training camp and early-season evaluation is spent understanding specific player tendencies and figuring out how best to deploy their talents. Malhotra should have a significant head start in that department.
It also stands to reason that he will be able to support his former players from an intangible perspective, as he should already have insight into what makes them tick and how to get the best out of them over the course of an 84-game season. That optimism, however, should not be mistaken for certainty that Malhotra will be a successful NHL coach because of his prior experience.
Of the eight coaches who were hired directly from the AHL over the past five years, three lasted one season or less. NHL head coaching is one of the most volatile jobs in the world. The old saying, “They hire you so they can fire you,” remains true today.
With that said, considering the praise heaped on Malhotra by every former player who has been asked about the hire, along with his history of player development, fans are right to be hopeful that he can be the coach to lead the Canucks through the testing times of a rebuild and potentially into playoff contention.
One could argue the gold standard of coaching right now is Jon Cooper, who was the head coach of Tampa Bay’s AHL affiliate before being hired in the NHL. When Cooper was brought in, the Lightning had missed the playoffs in back-to-back years and were below .500 the season prior. Within three years of Cooper’s hiring, the Lightning were in the Stanley Cup Final.
Those kinds of expectations would be wildly unfair to Malhotra at the Canucks’ current stage of team building. Still, one can wonder whether Malhotra, combined with Vancouver’s drastic offseason culture shift, can help propel the Canucks into an era of success similar to what the Lightning have enjoyed for the past decade.
Familiarity should allow Malhotra a quicker start behind the bench than most, but the Canucks are in a marathon right now, not a sprint. How Malhotra sustains the development of the Canucks’ young pieces, including players he hasn’t coached yet, will ultimately determine the length and legacy of his coaching tenure in Vancouver.
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