Midway through the 2023-24 NHL season, Patrik Allvin came to Adam Foote with a question: how do you see yourself as a coach in the future? Do you have ambitions to be a head coach, or are you focused on being a specialist assistant coach?
Foote’s answer was unequivocal: He wanted to be a head coach, he told the boss. And he told Rick Tocchet the same.
“When I told him a year ago, I think I want to do this, (be a head coach) he said he really wanted it for me,” Foote recalled Thursday.
Now, a year-plus later, he is. Perhaps a little sooner than he expected, but as Tocchet told him, these opportunities don’t often come around, so you’d best be as ready as you can be.
On Thursday, Foote said he’d learned a lot from Tocchet, who plucked him out of the hockey wilderness in January 2023, handing the ex-NHL defenceman his first professional assistant coaching gig.
Foote’s CV at that point was pretty short. He’d had a middling, at best, experience coaching in Kelowna for season and a half. He’d been a development coach and a youth hockey coach to that point.
But he didn’t coach in the two seasons following, before he was brought onboard by the Canucks. As a coach, Tocchet said Foote grew immensely over his 2.5 seasons with the Canucks. He learned how to run effective practices. He learned how to be a calming influence for his players.
He learned how an effective coaching staff works.
Thursday, after Foote met with the media for the first time as Canucks head coach, Tocchet said he’d really highlighted the need for collaboration in his conversations with his former assistant.
“Really empower your staff,” Tocchet said he’d urged Foote. “When you’re an assistant, you’re focused on your own stuff. But when you’re in charge, when you’ve got staff, give them the space. There might be things they know better than you, you have to feel comfortable in that.”
Newly appointed Vancouver Canucks head coach Adam Foote talks to media at Rogers Arena in Vancouver May 15.
The Canucks had a great 2023-24, but a terrible 2024-25. Management misfired on its player recruitment last summer. The coaching staff got swamped with the Elias Pettersson versus J.T. Miller situation. For long stretches the offence sputtered.
There were a lot of lessons to be learned.
For Foote, the question of how to fix the mess he’s been handed is simple: start fresh.
“We’re going to turn the page,” he said. “I’m my own person. Learned a lot from a lot of great hockey people on my journey. And we have ideas, and we’re going to apply them and get a game plan going here and move on.”
Top of the list, of course, is getting Pettersson back to where he needs to be. His been a star player before, but had a brutal season. The rift with Miller clearly affected him. He never really got his game going, even after Miller was traded in January.
And he was criticized by Tocchet and Allvin for his poor preparation heading into the season. Tocchet’s advice to Foote is simple: connect with Pettersson, help him manage his daily experience better.
“Have an itinerary for the day,” Tocchet suggested. “When Petey walks in the door and we have our hands on him, give him a plan: this guy’s gonna work with you for 15-20 minutes on the power-play side-wall. Then this is going to happen. And so on.”
“Footie, he’s going to have a fresh start with Petey. Footie was the defence coach, they didn’t have a lot to do with each other outside of the penalty kill,” the now-Flyers bench boss noted.
The other key lesson Tocchet passed along to Foote, which Foote learned very quickly, was to be a pillar of calmness. Tocchet was a fiery player who learned he couldn’t be fiery as a coach if he was going to have success.
Foote’s players have all noted how he calms down the bench.
That might come as a surprise to those who saw him play in Colorado or Columbus, or even coach in Kelowna, but it’s advice that Foote took to heart, Tocchet said.
“If you get frustrated, the players will see it,” Tocchet said he told Foote.
“I wasn’t even sure I wanted to be a head coach when I got here (in 2023),” Foote said. “I was so happy and lucky that I was under him. He taught me so much. … He was that confident of a man that he felt comfortable with my strong personality around him. And I felt like we really figured out how to work together really well. And it was something that I was really very thankful that I was under him.”
THE TRIAL — Asked about his son Cal’s ongoing sexual assault court case — Cal is one of five ex-Hockey Canada world junior players accused of sexually assaulting a woman in a London, Ont., hotel in 2018, Foote said he couldn’t comment on the legal case itself. He did say that what might or might not happen with the trial hadn’t affected his decision to accept the job. “I guess if this is going to happen in a week or two weeks, in a month or a month ago, that’s life. And you keep walking, you keep moving. And you know, it had nothing to do with my decision to take this on. I love coaching. I love the opportunity.”