As Rick Tocchet and the Vancouver Canucks part ways, what comes next for both?

It should come as little surprise that Rick Tocchet wanted to move on from the Vancouver Canucks.

The franchise is now seeking its fourth coach since Dec. 2021, and the level of dysfunction that bubbled to the surface under Tocchet leaves you wondering about a sort of chicken-and-the-egg scenario. Did all this drama, and all this need to rectify things, become public because Tocchet and the management team was powerless to stop it, or because Tocchet and management spent much of the last year or so hoping it would go away and then it never did?

Neither answer reflects well on the organization or the coach.

Let's think about the first scenario, starting with the JT Miller/Elias Pettersson feud, which was apparently an issue when Bruce Boudreau was running the team and, presumably, as far back as the Travis Green days. That is, it was a long-festering, known, but maybe not quite yet toxic situation. I don't think it's fair to say that situation in and of itself led to any coaches getting fired, or the team underperforming expectations — the roster isn't as good or as healthy as it needs to be to compete for the playoffs consistently — but if you want to talk about how "distraction" and "noise" in addition to other issues can derail a season or three, I mean, you can't really name a bigger one in the NHL over the last several years.

Add in the fact that every other detail of dissatisfaction with the team, from the lack of a practice rink on down, seems to be pretty well known to the local media and then goes public, in a way that just doesn't really happen anywhere else, and it's easy to see why Tocchet just didn't want to deal with it anymore. Regardless of any other potential job offers out there — and it would appear as though there are several — or the fact that every Insider around the league got the message that the Canucks offered him big money and term, it's easy to understand anyone just not wanting to sign up for another three, four, five years in this organization. All the issues just seem bigger than any coach can fix.

But the other side of the chicken-and-the-egg scenario is straightforward: Was everyone so focused on trying to get back into the playoffs after the unsustainable success of the 2023-24 campaign that they were just saying to themselves that "winning fixes everything" and that includes a years-long feud between two very temperamentally different star forwards? When the winning went away, which it was always going to, it feels like everyone in the organization was plain ol' out of answers. (And, frankly, it seems like they all kinda thought Miller was the right horse to back in the spat, but couldn't move Pettersson because of the enormous contract they gave him just 11 months earlier.) Again, maybe there's no one on earth that could have gotten Miller and Pettersson on the same page — Boudreau says ex-Canuck Tanner Pearson was good at it way back when, but the passage of time may have made things too acrimonious, and he hasn't played for the Canucks since before Tocchet took the job — but it's gotta be disappointing for basically everyone involved.

We have to be left with two questions coming out of this parting of the ways: First, knowing everything we know, what actual name-brand coach would want to take the Canucks job, where there are so many obvious problems? And second, why are half the teams with coaching vacancies falling all over themselves to hire the guy who just kinda threw his hands up and couldn't win with what everyone thinks should have been a more competitive roster?

Just the facts here, but a well-regarded coach just turned down a contract that reportedly would have made him among the highest-paid among his peers because, it seems, he just didn't really want to deal with everything. Again, no practice rink, which was such a big issue that team president Jim Rutherford was talking about it in his last two press availabilities (and it is again notable that he seems to have a lot more to say than general manager Patrik Allvin). A star player management seems openly frustrated with. An elite defenseman who looks like he has one foot out the door (and was really attached to the coach he lost). An owner who doesn't really seem to have a positive impact on the people he pays to run the team. A franchise that churns through coaches at a phenomenal rate. A team that doesn't seem to draft or develop especially well and therefore have a middling-at-best prospect pool. A team whose inability to sign a first-round-pick defenseman out of college because of squabbles over bonus structures is extremely well publicized. An organization that has made just three of the last 12 postseasons. The list goes on and on and on.

Yup, there are only 32 of these jobs, so someone's always going to be interested. But there are eight vacancies league-wide right now, and another 11 teams have hired a new coach since the start of 2024. Where on the list of open jobs — Anaheim, Boston, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Seattle, and Vancouver — would the average coach with NHL experience place the Canucks? You gotta think the shelf life there is pretty short, just because history says you're not making it very far beyond two years behind the bench there. And you gotta think you're not gonna have a huge opportunity to win, especially in a division with Vegas and Edmonton. So what's the allure of the job beyond "it's one of only 32?" It's just really tough to see a scenario where any coach can get reliably better results than Tocchet did last season — again, fueled by the second-highest shooting percentage and seventh-highest save percentage in the league — and even that resulted in a second-round exit, which is good but not great; half the teams that make the playoffs get that far.

Meanwhile, Tocchet's tenure with the Canucks didn't exactly scream "competent management," which makes you wonder why so many teams are seemingly being eagerly connected with him. While he certainly has a longer coaching history than people might give him credit for — 638 games behind the bench has him in the top 60 all-time — his teams average just under 85 points per 82 games. Now, two of the three teams he coached were the rebuilding Lightning and the late 2010s-early 2020s Arizona Coyotes, so some of the poor record can certainly be forgiven. Under his watch, the Canucks had the 11th-best points percentage in the league. And that's with all the debuffs that come with coaching the Canucks, plus (some of) his players seem to really like playing for him. That alone would probably be a nice change of pace in, say, Philadelphia, where he has been rumored to be heading even before he chose to stop coaching the Canucks.

But I don't know that a lot of teams aspire to be 11th in the league over 200ish game stretches, and if even if we're throwing out the Tampa and Arizona years, that's saying the best Tocchet can do for you is get you into the playoffs at an average of 99ish points per season, there's something attractive in that. If you have aspirations of going beyond that, however…

It's easy to understand the argument that he is just the best candidate available right now, but that kinda speaks to how shallow the pool is. With all that aforementioned turnover league-wide, is Rick Tocchet the best you can do? He's certainly not a bad coach, but exactly how good he is, and how far he can take a team with even a strong roster, should be more of an open question than it seems to be.