The new front office of the Vancouver Canucks, headed by GM Ryan Johnson and co-POHOs Henrik and Daniel Sedin, made their first big decision earlier this week when they relieved Adam Foote and the rest of the coaching staff of their duties.

It was a move that many felt was inevitable. Foote coached one of the worst seasons in franchise history, clashed with outgoing GM Patrik Allvin over the playing of young players, and achieved very little on-ice success with any individuals, never mind the team as a whole.

You won’t find many Foote defenders out there, because there’s not much on his coaching record to defend. But you may have encountered, and may still encounter, a few choice opinions about whether or not the Canucks should have kept him around for another year all the same. The thinking on that front goes that the Canucks pretty much need to tank for at least another season, so as to secure another lottery pick in the 2027 Draft. The thinking goes that Foote was a very effective “tank commander,” and so maybe it makes sense to keep him in place to oversee another season of constant losing. Why bring in a winner like Manny Malhotra, some will say, if the overall plan for next season still involves very few wins?

But this line of thinking doesn’t really work out for a few reasons. The first is that the Canucks already have plenty of pieces in place that they hope will play a long-term role in the rebuild. We’re talking Zeev Buium, we’re talking Tom Willander, we’re talking Liam Öhgren, we’re talking Elias Pettersson. As much as tanking next season is part of the plan, another crucial goal during this time is to have those young assets develop in a positive direction. And that did not seem to be happening under Foote. Buium took a step back after arriving from Minnesota, and only rarely seemed to regain it. Willander arrived pre-packaged for NHL success, but did not take that big step forward as a rookie. Pettersson very clearly regressed as a sophomore, and many laid the blame for that directly at Foote’s feet, what with his patent lack of blueline system and structure.

Simply put, the team could not afford another season of its next generation learning the wrong lessons, or existing in anything less than a positive developmental environment.

But the whole “hang on to Foote, wait on Malhotra” angle also falls apart as soon as one realizes that a new coach – a better coach, ideally – doesn’t have to mean the end of the tank. Not at all.

Look, Malhotra might be the next great NHL head coach. But even Scotty Bowman would struggle to come in and turn around this squad, which had a 14-point lead on last place in 2025-26.

The expectation will be for Malhotra to do the right things. To begin to instill his system, to begin to foster buy-in, and to work with his players to push their games to the next level, as he has seemed to do consistently in Abbotsford. All of those attributes are reason enough to hire him, to hire him now, and to allow him to begin that work as of the 2026-27 campaign.

But losing will also be part of Malhotra’s unstated agenda, at least for another season.

A somewhat natural worry, then, is that Malhotra will end up losing too much as a head coach. A few more cratered seasons, and will the Canucks have to move on from him, too, before they can really move on to a period of contention?

No, not necessarily. There’s precedent for a rebuilding team picking out their next, long-term coach in the midst of a tank, continuing on through that tank, and then having that same coach see them all the way back to playoff contention.

We turn our eyes, as we have so often lately, to the Montreal Canadiens. We already talked recently about all the lessons the Canucks’ rebuild could learn from Montreal’s, which now has them in the Eastern Conference Finals against Carolina. There’s a lesson to be found in coach Martin St. Louis, too.

The Canadiens identified St. Louis as their next head coach partway through a disastrous 2021-22 campaign. Montreal had gone to the Cup Final the year before, and then tumbled all the way down to last place in the standings.

Head coach Dominique Ducharme had the Habs in an awful position. Through 45 games, they had a .256 record, a number even worse than what the Canucks put forth in 2025-26. So, in February, Ducharme was fired and St. Louis was hired.

The Canadiens did experience a “new coach bump” with St. Louis, but only slightly. He and the Habs had a .432 record the rest of the way, which kept them in last place. They then won the 2022 Draft Lottery, and selected Juraj Slafkovsky at first overall.

The next year, 2022-23, was St. Louis’ first full season at the helm, and his record actually went down a touch. Through 82 games, the Canadiens sported a .415 record. Somewhat unfortunately, it was a big year for tanking, and so that put the Canadiens in fifth-last place. They wound up drafting David Reinbacher at fifth overall that year, who looks like a miss so far.

Then, in 2023-24, the tank continued for a fourth and final year. St. Louis’ Habs’ record ticked upward to .463, but stayed below .500, and kept them in the lottery territory. They again drafted at fifth overall in the 2024 Draft, where they selected Ivan Demidov, who is already a star for them.

It was only in 2024-25, St. Louis’s fourth season with the team, that Montreal climbed back above .500 and returned to the playoffs. And now look where they are, a year after that.

St. Louis is not the only example of this we can point to. There’s also Andre Tourigny in Utah. He was also hired back in 2021-22, when the Utah Mammoth were still the Arizona Coyotes.

Tourigny had records of .348, .427, .470, and .543 over the past four seasons. That led to picks like Logan Cooley, Dmitry Simashev, Tij Iginla, and Caleb Desnoyers at the top of the draft.

Then Tourigny and the Mammoth put together a .561 campaign in 2025-26, returned to the playoffs, gave the Vegas Golden Knights a run for their money, and seem to be on the way to bigger and better things.

And, so, a scenario in which someone like Malhotra takes over the Canucks, instills positive development in them, but still also tanks for another season or two, seems perfectly plausible. And it’s also perfectly plausible that, on the other side of it, Malhotra could still be in place as the coach who’s going to take this team back into the playoffs, and perhaps beyond.

Some keys to that are hiring the right kind of coach. Malhotra is said to be a development-focused coach, and similar things were said about St. Louis and Tourigny.

Another key is commitment. The Canadiens hired St. Louis with an expectation of keeping him around for a while, even if the losing continued. They committed to a rebuild, and to St. Louis seeing them through said rebuild. This is always important when it comes to coaches, as a ‘lame duck’ coach worried about their own firing can’t be expected to make good long-term decisions. Allowing them plenty of runway is vital.

This also seems to be something that the Canucks might already have in place with Malhotra. Obviously, there is a pre-established relationship and plenty of trust between he and the new Johnson-Sedin-Sedin braintrust. There’s a mutual commitment in the making there.

Firing Foote was the right decision under almost any scenario. But the Canucks don’t have to go from that decision to a decision between hiring their next long-term coach or embracing another season of tanking.

They can have it both ways. And, in fact, they probably will.