Why the Canucks absolutely had to hire Manny Malhotra
The Vancouver Canucks made it official this week, hiring Manny Malhotra as the 23rd head coach in franchise history.
GM Ryan Johnson announced the move, but the real story behind it broke Tuesday night.
Elliotte Friedman reported that another team, possibly the Kings, had formally asked permission to speak with Malhotra.
Vancouver didn't deliberate. They gave him the job.
That's the part worth sitting with. This wasn't purely a case of the Canucks selecting their preferred candidate from a clean list of options.
They were forced to choose. And they chose fast.
Malhotra inherits a team that finished dead last in the NHL
The situation he's walking into is not subtle.
Vancouver finished 25-49-8 this past season, 32nd overall in the league.
The Canucks allowed 316 goals and scored only 216. That's a -100 goal differential, the kind of number that gets people fired, not hired.
Whoever took this job was always going to be coaching through a rebuild, not around one.
Now think about what Friedman's report actually means in that context.
A rival organization looked at this same roster, this same market pressure, and said: we want that guy badly enough to make a formal ask.
That's not nothing. That's a real signal about how Malhotra is viewed around the league, separate from whatever the Canucks think of him internally.
The concern with this hire isn't his credibility. It's the circumstances that triggered it.
When a team promotes from within because a rival came sniffing, you're not always getting the best decision. Sometimes you're getting the fastest one.
Malhotra knows Vancouver deeply. He knows the locker room, the fanbase, the weight of the market.
That familiarity is genuinely valuable when you're asking young players to buy into a painful process.
But a last-place team giving up 3.9 goals per game needs more than familiarity. It needs someone willing to make decisions that aren't popular inside the building.
Whether Malhotra can do that, nobody actually knows yet.
What we do know is that another team wanted him, and that's the main reason he's behind the bench now.
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YESTERDAY
JUNE 2, 2026
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| G | A | PTS | ||
| Shea Theodore | 1 | 2 | 3 | |
| Brayden McNabb | - | 3 | 3 | |
| Nikolaj Ehlers | 2 | - | 2 | |
| Brett Howden | 1 | 1 | 2 | |
| Jalen Chatfield | - | 2 | 2 | |
| Ivan Barbashev | 1 | - | 1 | |
| Shayne Gostisbehere | 1 | - | 1 | |
| Tomas Hertl | 1 | - | 1 | |
| William Karlsson | 1 | - | 1 | |
| Jordan Staal | 1 | - | 1 | |
| Jack Eichel | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Mitch Marner | - | 1 | 1 | |
| K'Andre Miller | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Colton Sissons | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Jaccob Slavin | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Cole Smith | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Sebastian Aho | - | - | - | |
| Frederik Andersen | - | - | - | |
| Rasmus Andersson | - | - | - | |
| Jackson Blake | - | - | - | |
| COMPLETE STATS | ||||