Tocchet prepared to push Canucks through harder season with expectations higher

PENTICTON, B.C. — Bad syntax doesn’t necessarily make a bad slogan.

“Embrace the hard,” Rick Tocchet says, floating ideas for the Vancouver Canucks’ motto this season. “Embrace hard, I don’t know. Hard is good?

“Whatever it is ... like, I don't believe in 'Hey, you work hard today, it'll be easier tomorrow.' It's always going to be hard. That's just the way it is, so why not condition your mind? I talked to the players after a game in the playoffs. You know, you're limping, you've got an ice pack (after winning). That's the best feeling in the world. But it's not going to get easier tomorrow. It's going to be even harder. That's the way I look at this season.”

After surprising the National Hockey League and re-igniting their long-suffering fan base with 50 wins, 109 points, the Pacific Division title and a 13-game playoff run that was the team's longest in front of fans since 2011, the Canucks must find ways this season to be even better.

And it starts, Tocchet explained in a Sunday sitdown with Sportsnet, with players and everyone in the organization understanding that this season will be harder.

Dealing with success — and deride the franchise all you want for not winning a Stanley Cup, but last season was wildly successful for the Canucks — can be trickier than dealing with failure.

“Embrace the hard,” as halting as it sounds, will be the head coach’s message to players when they gather here Wednesday on the eve of another training camp — ahead of a season when winning games won’t merely be a pleasant bonus for fans and opponents won’t be under-rating the Canucks as they did a year ago.

Tocchet calls last season’s performance a “half-decent result,” which tells you something about his mindset and expectations for this one.

“It'll be signage around the room and stuff,” the reigning NHL coach-of-the-year says of the yet-to-be-determined slogan. “We'll probably do T-shirts. I've got a couple of ideas with hats and stuff. I don't know, we're kicking these ideas around. But I like visuals. I like stuff on a T-shirt or hat. I think when a guy puts it on ... there's a pride factor.

“We made strides (last season). Let's face facts; we made strides. But if we only do the same thing we did last year, we're going to get the same result. So our expectations have to be higher, and we have to embrace that it's going to be harder.”

Tocchet will be harder, too.

“We had a few mistakes last year, and sometimes you try to overlook them and keep playing (the players who made them),” he says. “But I'm expecting more from them. Like, I don't expect those same little mistakes. Yeah, they're going to make mistakes... but I expect less mistakes than last year. I put myself in the same boat as the players.

“This year's expectations are higher, and it's going to be harder. So the two things for me: How are we going to handle expectations? And how do we condition ourselves that it's going to be hard?”

Canucks president Jim Rutherford famously said before last season that everything had to go right for Vancouver to be a playoff team. And almost everything did.

The Canucks began the season 10-2-1 and, by Christmastime, were first in the NHL at 23-9-3. Until goalie Thatcher Demko hurt his knee in March, none of the team’s star core players was injured.

Defenceman Quinn Hughes had 17 goals and 92 points and won the franchise’s first Norris Trophy. Demko was a runnerup for the Vezina. J.T. Miller had 103 points, Brock Boeser scored 40 goals, defenceman Filip Hronek and wingers Dakota Joshua and Nils Hoglander had breakthrough seasons, and general manager Patrik Allvin hit on nearly every transaction. The Canucks were sixth in scoring and fifth in goals-against.

No wonder Tocchet won the Jack Adams Award just 17 months after becoming the coach of a team that, in 2023, was hopelessly on its way to missing the playoffs for the seventh time in eight seasons.

But then, where exactly are the Canucks supposed to find improvement this season?

They can score more, especially as their offence withered over the final third of last season. And their special teams, especially the power play, can be better. Their power play finished tied for 10^th at 22.7 per cent, but sunk steadily over the final four months.

It would take a book — or at least a series of essays — to explain all the ways Tocchet and his coaching staff are looking at making the Canucks more productive. A lot of it has to do with risk-reward decisions, generating more scoring chances on the weak side and what the coach describes as the “connectedness” of his players (another future column).

It is obvious to everyone, however, that Elias Pettersson is a massive key to any uptick for the Canucks this season. One of the best players in the NHL, and now one of the richest after agreeing to an eight-year, $92.8-million contract extension last March, Pettersson had 34 goals and 89 points last season.

That hardly constitutes a disaster. But Pettersson managed just six goals and 17 points over the final 27 games of the regular season, before the 25-year-old centre scored just once in 13 playoff contests at the most critical time of the year.

“Whether it's my expectation or my relationship with Petey, he's going to be a driving force for the way we do things,” Tocchet predicts. “I need him right there with me. I expect in pressure games and stuff like that, he's going to be there for the team and for his teammates and for himself. I expect that because I've seen it.

“Two weeks ago, when he was in Sweden, we talked for about half an hour. It felt like a very vibrant guy. We talked about hockey, but we talked about a lot of things. He seemed really upbeat. He's got a lot of good things happening (in his life). He just sounded excited. Last year when I talked to him, he was very subdued. We're all different people. Like, Petey is not a guy that's going to scream and yell. But he's a pretty witty guy, he's got a good personality, and a lot of players love him. He's a fun guy, and I felt that on the phone. I think he sounds excited about coming into this year.”

Pettersson hasn’t spoken to the media since returning to Vancouver earlier this month.

Neither has goalie Demko, whose uncertain health status after a mysterious summer setback in his recovery from a knee injury, has clouded all pre-camp discussions about the Canucks. The NHL team should provide some clarity after players undergo physicals on Wednesday.

But Tocchet said this on Sunday: “I've had a couple conversations, and he's really excited about his progress. So that's what I go by. I told him — and he knows it — we don't have a target date. There's no targeting. He's getting better every day. I've noticed the last two or three weeks, he's getting better every day, and that's what we want.”

Allvin told Sportsnet if Demko is unable to fully participate at camp, the Canucks have temporary goaltending options lined up so that there are six netminders available to stock the three training groups Tocchet plans to use in Penticton.

Allvin made it clear these options are about filling the roster for training camp, and not about another NHL goalie joining the organization.

Tocchet is right. It is always hard.