Welcome Matt: Canucks' Tocchet offering rarely seen tactical insight with new line combos

Feb 15 2023, 8:45 pm

sekeres and price

One thing we can say about new Canucks head coach Rick Tocchet: he’s going to teach us all hockey.

No, I don’t mean yesterday’s “grade school” practice, a getting back to basics session for the players after a humiliating 6-1 loss to Detroit Monday. I mean this coach’s willingness to communicate the finer points of the game.

And you don’t get a lot of that in hockey in comparison to the other sports, where coaches are far more likely to talk Xs and Os, and where media are far more likely to craft reporting around tactics. We’ve had many a coach come through town and not necessarily explain why they are playing certain forwards or defencemen together.

Part of that is because hockey is less strategic, more reactive to the spontaneous bounces of a frozen rubber disc. And I suspect part of it is because some coaches are paranoid and don’t want to talk state secrets, while others simply don’t have the patience for fans and media.

Tocchet, however, has made a decision with regards to Vasily Podkolzin on Elias Pettersson’s wing, and I applaud the way he laid out his rationale yesterday.

He explained that he wants a north-south player on Petey’s wing, as opposed to an east-west player because most opponents defend the centre (or the “guts”) of the ice. Coach said he learned that from Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux, who wanted predictable north-south linemates, adding that he believes Podkolzin and Pettersson can develop a give-and-go game.

He thinks that’ll make the game easier for Pettersson, and that Podkolzin will benefit from a simplified brand of going to the net and playing off his centreman.

Now Tocchet has forgotten more hockey than most of us will ever know, so in coach we trust until proven otherwise.

You also wonder if that’s part of the problem with Andrei Kuzmenko. The Russian rookie is a far more north-south, net-area player than he was billed, but there is still some of that east-west European style to his game.

In any event, left wing beside Pettersson is good real estate for Podkolzin, and the Canucks need a good final third of the season from the second-year forward, who was demoted to the minors earlier this season and has just one goal in 21 NHL games.

If it works out, then Tocchet will have fixed one problem on the Canucks’ to-do list. And he’ll have taught us all a good lesson about why certain players mesh.

Matthew SekeresMatthew Sekeres

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