Canucks' Manny Malhotra opens up about challenges of coaching his son
It won’t be long until the Vancouver Canucks’ top pick in the 2026 NHL Entry Draft, Caleb Malhotra, will have his father, Manny Malhotra, as his coach.
But it won’t be the first time.
Caleb won’t be at Canucks training camp this year, as classes have already begun at Boston University. The earliest he could play for Manny and the Canucks is in March, after his season ends with the Boston University Terriers.
The last time Caleb had his father as a coach was over five years ago, before he was playing AAA hockey with the Vaughan Kings in the Greater Toronto Hockey League. In his kids’ younger years, Manny volunteered to coach Caleb and his three other kids in hockey and other sports.
Manny opened up about the challenges and rewards of that experience with Scott Rintoul on the Better Sports Parents Podcast this week.
There have been a lot of questions about how Manny and Caleb will navigate their familial relationship when it comes to the Canucks. The upside is, they’ve already gone through this experience, albeit when Caleb was at a younger age.
“Especially as the competition got a little bit more competitive and the expectations became a little bit higher, we had to have a very serious conversation because we were butting heads outside of the arena based off of what happened at the arena,” said Manny. “My wife was the one that acknowledged, ‘Hey, it’s either you’re going to stop coaching him, or we’re going to have a new way of dealing with this situation.'”
Manny’s wife is Joann Malhotra née Nash, the sister of Steve Nash, and is an elite athlete in her own right. Figuring out the boundaries between parent and coach was something she also had to navigate as she coached her kids in soccer, so she knew when she had to step in and help Manny and Caleb figure out a solution.
“That’s where that whole mentality of ‘coach at the rink, dad at home’ kind of thing came to be,” said Manny. “And it was on me to be the adult and realize that the child is going to act like a child. I have to be the adult and be more mature about this.
“But once we had that understanding, it was a much better relationship, both away from the ice — which is obviously the most important one — but also at the rink, where there was a very clear understanding that I’m not treating you any different than any other player. You are not to treat me any different than you would any other coach. And that goes along with being respectful to your coaches, listening to what they say, paying attention, being mindful, all those things.”
“We didn’t know who was going to be happier, him or me, that I wasn’t his coach anymore”
When Manny took a job as an assistant coach with the Toronto Maple Leafs in 2020 and moved the family to Ontario, he no longer had the time to coach his kids in youth sports. That turned out to be beneficial for Caleb.
“We joked about it: we didn’t know who was going to be happier, him or me, that I wasn’t his coach anymore,” said Manny. “It was a great experience for him, just because he got a different voice, he got a different perspective, he got a different way of teaching things from the coaches.
“And, from my end, it was a relief, because I could let the reins go and allow him to be coached by somebody else, and it just allowed me to be dad and watch him grow as a player and as an athlete, which was super fun.”
The rule in the Malhotra household was that when one of the kids approached a parent to talk sports, they needed to decide whether they wanted to talk to mom/dad or whether they wanted to talk to their coach.
For a teenage Caleb, he always wanted to talk to coach.
“No teenager wants to hear it from their dad,” said Manny. “Regardless of what I say, it’s in one ear, out the other. So, I stopped trying to talk hockey with him and allowed him to come to me if he wanted to talk hockey.”
“I think from 12 to 13, it was kind of like, ‘I don’t want to hear from my dad,’ and then he made the correlation that, ‘Oh, my dad actually is a professional hockey coach, he may have some insight to this,'” he continued. “That’s when he really started to ask, ‘Okay, what does coach think? What would happen in this scenario? How would the pros play this in this scenario?’
“So, he was very astute in that regard, wanting the information, but there was definitely a clear time in his youth sports where he just did not want to hear it from dad, period. And I understood that.”