By Harman Dayal & Thomas Drance (The Athletic)
The first thing that changes when a new head coach takes over behind an NHL team’s bench is how various players on that team are deployed.
How a player is viewed internally, their ice time, situational usage — these are the items that instantly come into flux when a new bench boss comes to town.
The Vancouver Canucks are only seven games into the Rick Tocchet era, and the club has only been able to hold four practices. These are very early days, obviously.
The systems overhaul that we’ll ultimately expect under Tocchet isn’t quite installed yet.
The team appears to be playing better — and is controlling play extremely well at five-on-five since Tocchet took over — but the sample size is too small to be meaningful yet. And anyway, the short-term adrenaline burst that NHL teams tend to receive after a coaching change will subside in the near future.
By season’s end, we’ll have a better sense of what a Tocchet-coached Canucks team really looks like — from both a work rate and Xs and Os perspective.
In the meantime, Tocchet’s impact on player deployment has been significant and immediate. Who is on the ice, how often are they on the ice and when — these questions form the basis for an NHL coach’s most discernible quantitative impact on their team’s results.
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