The Vancouver Canucks announced the hiring of their assistant coaches last week,
accompanied by a press availability over Zoom with head coach Adam Foote from, of all places, a Toronto Blue Jays game.
Appropriately, it was a “Work from Dome” game at Rogers Centre in Toronto, with sections of the stadium set up for remote work, so Foote fit right in by taking a work call during the Blue Jays’ 9-1 win over the Philadelphia Phillies.
Foote and the Canucks announced three additions to the team’s coaching staff, along with a couple of departures to go along with Yogi Svejkovsky heading to the Philadelphia Flyers to join Rick Tocchet.
The Canucks’ three new assistant coaches are Kevin Dean, Brett McLean, and Scott Young, while defensive development coach Sergei Gonchar and video coach Dylan Crawford will be leaving the organization. Daniel and Henrik Sedin will remain with the Canucks, as will goaltending coach Marko Torenius and skills coach Jason Krog.
The Canucks looked for assistants with head coaching experience
The primary question for the Canucks’ new coaching staff is one of experience.
Foote is a first-time head coach at the NHL level, with just two-and-a-half years of experience as an assistant coach, all with the Canucks. His one previous stint in a head coaching role was in the WHL and lasted less than two seasons.
That leads to a lot of uncertainty over how well Foote will perform as a head coach, with some expecting the Canucks would aim for more experience among his assistant coaches to make up the difference, perhaps even someone who had already been a head coach in the NHL.
Instead, none of the Canucks’ three new assistant coaches have ever been a head coach at the NHL level, though not for lack of trying.
“It’s hard to find a head coach out there that had that experience and can help and support the group in an assistant role,” said Foote. “I had [Joe] Sacco in Colorado when he was a rookie coach, always connected with him and had a great relationship, and we didn’t know what was going to happen in Boston there in the end, but he was someone we were looking at, and David Quinn as well.”
Sacco spent four years as the head coach with the Colorado Avalanche before spending a decade as an assistant coach with the Boston Bruins, then was promoted as the interim head coach with the Bruins last season. Quinn has five years of experience as a head coach with the New York Rangers and San Jose Sharks.
While the Canucks pursued both Sacco and Quinn, the two former head coaches chose to join the Rangers as assistant coaches under Mike Sullivan.
In other words, the Canucks were aiming for a couple of assistant coaches with high-level experience to help support Foote. They just couldn’t get them.
Kevin Dean has extensive experience as an assistant coach
That’s not to say the new additions to the Canucks’ coaching staff are lacking in experience. In fact, they have a wealth of experience in different roles, just not as NHL head coaches.
Kevin Dean is the most experienced of the three, primarily as an assistant coach in the AHL and NHL. Dean spent nine years as an AHL assistant coach with the Lowell Devils and Providence Bruins and has spent the last eight years as an assistant coach, first with the Boston Bruins, then with the Chicago Blackhawks.
Along the way, Dean spent one season as a head coach in the ECHL with the Trenton Devils and one year as the head coach in the AHL for the Providence Bruins, and was also an assistant coach at the 2025 World Championship, where he helped Team USA win gold.
That’s nearly two decades of coaching experience at the professional level and an extensive amount of experience as an NHL assistant coach working with defencemen, particularly young defencemen like Charlie McAvoy, Matt Grzelcyk, Wyatt Kaiser, and Kevin Korchinski.
“The defence coach is really what I wanted to deal with first,” said Foote. “As a penalty kill and defence coach, I always liked how Chicago killed penalties, and I was wondering what that connection was. When I got this position, I looked into it deeper.”
Over the last three seasons under Dean, the Blackhawks’ penalty kill steadily improved, going from 22nd in the NHL at 76.2% to 14th in the NHL at 79.3%. That’s still merely average, but some of that might be attributed to a young group in Chicago. In the five seasons Dean was an assistant in Boston, they were one of the top penalty-killing teams in the NHL.
Foote noted that he will also continue to work on the penalty kill as head coach.
“Everything that I learned about Dean, I liked it more and more and more,” said Foote. “We actually opened up the relationship really early. We spoke almost every day throughout the World Championship. He did a great job with [Conor Garland] on that PK, and Garly was hopping over the boards as the first PK unit guy over there.”
Brett McLean is "head coaching material"
Like Dean, Brett McLean has also spent a brief amount of time as a head coach in the AHL.
McLean’s entire coaching career has come with the Minnesota Wild organization, first spending three years as an assistant coach in the AHL with the Iowa Wild, then three years as an assistant coach in the NHL, then two years as a head coach in the AHL.
That’s a solid eight years as a professional coach, and he comes highly recommended from his former bench boss, Dean Evason, who is now head coach of the Columbus Blue Jackets.
“[Evason] was the one, along with Billy Guerin, who asked Brett to go down to the minors and be a head coach,” said Foote. “They felt that he was head coaching material.”
The Wild, however, hired John Hynes as head coach when they let Evason go last season, leaving McLean without an opportunity to move up in the Wild organization. Foote and the Canucks gave McLean a chance to get back behind the bench in the NHL.
Foote said that the Canucks were far from the only team trying to get McLean.
“Anaheim was after him real hard,” said Foote. “Joel Quenneville, who coached me, someone who knows pedigree and what a great coach he is, him going after Brett as well, can show everyone and validate how I put him on such a high pedestal.”
McLean will be more focused on the offensive side of the puck, including the power play. It should be noted that in the three seasons when McLean was an assistant coach in Minnesota, the Wild averaged 3.29 goals per game, which ranks 7th in the NHL during that time.
Of course, that also happens to coincide with Kirill Kaprizov entering the league and becoming a superstar for the Wild, so it’s hard to know just how much credit to parcel out to McLean.
Still, Foote likes the elements that McLean can bring to a practice.
“He’s a great addition, a little bit younger than maybe a couple guys we were looking at, which I love,” said Foote. “He’s got the energy, great practice plan, he can dig and show guys the things that maybe Yogi or the Sedins would show on a regular basis. We’re really excited to have him.”
It should also be noted that the Wild power play was at league average in two of McLean’s three seasons as an assistant coach in Minnesota and below average in the third.
Foote expects Scott Young to be the "glue guy"
McLean won’t be the only one working on the power play, however, as the team’s third assistant coach, Scott Young, will also be helping out.
“Brett will have the power play, but Scott Young is a power play guy, did it for the Olympic team, and his eyes will be on it as well,” said Foote. “All our eyes will be on it.”
Young is the most inexperienced member of the coaching staff, as this will be his first coaching job in professional hockey. But Young comes with a cornucopia of experience in hockey.
Young played 1,181 games in the NHL for seven different teams, including a 40-goal season with the St. Louis Blues in 2000-01. He won two Stanley Cups as a player: one with the Pittsburgh Penguins in 1991 and one with the Colorado Avalanche in 1996, which happened to be with Adam Foote.
After retiring from the NHL in 2006, Young took a break from hockey to spend time with his family before getting back into coaching with the same high school prep program he played for as a teenager, St. Mark’s School.
Young spent four hears as head coach at St. Mark’s School, then joined Boston University in the NCAA, first as director of hockey operations for one year, then two years as an assistant coach under head coach David Quinn.
“If [Quinn] was going to get another head coaching job, the first guy he was going after was Scott Young,” said Foote.
After Boston University, Young was hired by Jim Rutherford to be the Pittsburgh Penguins’ director of player development. He spent five years in that role before rejoining Rutherford in Vancouver in 2022 as the Canucks’ director of player personnel.
All the while, Young wanted to get behind the bench. Now, with his kids grown up, he feels he’s ready.
“Scott’s kind of in a situation where I was with Rick, where we did a lot of other things because we weren’t ready to put that time in to be a coach, the time that’s needed, because we both wanted to be with our family,” said Foote. “He’s in a situation now where he can put that time in.”
Foote sees Young as the “glue guy” in the coaching staff, who can have input in every area. As a player, Young was a scoring winger, who used his heavy shot on the power play, but he was a defenceman before he was a forward, and occasionally filled in as a defenceman in the NHL. That gives him a wide range of knowledge he can impart to the players.
“He’s there to support all of us in that coaching group,” said Foote. “I think he’s a big part of this, a big piece.”
“Scott will be looking at the whole group,” he added. “Special projects with the Sedins and Kroger, who’s our skills coach, and supporting the whole group — that glue guy, the relationship guy. I believe it’s a good group and I’m excited in the roles they will have.”
It should be said that Young has coached at a high level before. He was an assistant coach with Team USA at the 2018 and 2022 Olympics, though those Olympics did not feature NHL players.
How much does experience matter?
The Canucks’ new coaching staff, then, has a range of experience in a variety of roles. But how much does experience even matter?
As pointed out when Foote was first hired, rookie head coaches can have a range of results, from dazzling to disastrous. And not every rookie head coach brings along assistants with a wealth of experience.
Just look at Martin St. Louis with the Montreal Canadiens. His assistant coaches in his first full season as head coach were Stephane Robidas, Trevor Letowski, and former Canuck Alex Burrows. For every single one of them, it was their first coaching job in the NHL. Three years later, St. Louis is a finalist for the Jack Adams Award.
That's the extreme end of coaching inexperience in the NHL, but you can look at the Stanley Cup Final for some more moderate examples.
Paul Maurice is in his 27th year as an NHL head coach as he looks to lead the Florida Panthers to back-to-back Stanley Cups; Kris Knoblauch is in his first full season as an NHL head coach after he was hired by the Edmonton Oilers a month into last season.
That's about as wide a range of experience as you can get, though Knoblauch spent four years as a head coach in the AHL before the Oilers hired him.
Their assistants also represent a wide range of experience. The Panthers have two assistant coaches who had never been behind the bench in professional hockey when they were hired: Myles Fee, who spent years as a video coach and is now in his third year as an assistant in Florida, and Tuomo Ruutu, who had only been an assistant coach for the Finnish world junior team before the Panthers brought him on.
But they also have Jamie Kompon, who is in his 18th year as an NHL assistant coach, and Sylvain Lefebvre, who has 17 years behind the bench: six as an NHL assistant coach, six as an AHL head coach, and five as an AHL assistant coach.
The Oilers have two assistant coaches for whom this is their first NHL job: Paul Coffey and Mark Stuart. But they also have Glen Gulutzan, who is in his tenth year as an NHL assistant coach and was also an NHL head coach for four years.
A wide range of experience is pretty normal on a coaching staff, then. The experience of the Canucks’ coaching staff is not far off from that of the Oilers, with nearly three decades of professional coaching experience between Dean and McLean.
Anyone judging the Canucks’ coaching staff at this point, for good or ill, is jumping the gun. The coaching could be fire or they could all get fired, but until the team is actually tested during the regular season and beyond, it’s impossible to know.
At the very least, their level of experience shouldn’t be an issue.
