VANCOUVER — It wasn’t the championship season in the minors that convinced Vancouver Canucks general manager Ryan Johnson he had the right coach for his National Hockey League team, but the American Hockey League team’s injury-ravaged, rubble-strewn losing campaign that just finished.

Manny Malhotra was the same coach in both: calm but demanding, thoroughly prepared, communicative and consistent in everything he did with the Abbotsford Canucks. And so Malhotra is now Johnson’s new NHL coach.

The only surprise in Malhotra’s promotion to Vancouver was that it took all of 13 days for the Canucks to announce that the coach-manager partnership that brought the Calder Cup to the organization one year ago would now lead the NHL team’s rebuild under co-presidents Henrik and Daniel Sedin.

In this context, Johnson’s singular focus on Malhotra was entirely understandable.

The new coach’s top priority, besides helping re-establish standards and culture that have eroded in Vancouver, is teaching and developing players who can lead the NHL team to something far better than this past season’s last-place finish.

“I think we all, having the opportunity to do this, we wanted to do it with the right people,” Johnson said Tuesday in a Zoom call from the NHL Scouting Combine in Buffalo. “We know how tough this is going to be. We know there's going to be some hard days. I think maybe because you guys see that there's a connection between Daniel and Henrik and myself and Manny, (it’s like). ‘Hey, you know, just some buddies getting together.’ That's not the case here. This is more of a mission, something that we see as an amazing opportunity to change a franchise, to build it the right way, to get it sustainable. 

“I really feel this is an amazing opportunity for a coach that has the makeup and everything that I could want in a coach ... to start........

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