THE Vancouver cannucks Hope to have an answer this week on the future of head coach Rick Tocchet.
Speaking at a press conference at the end of the season on Monday, the club management said they would not exercise a club option to bring Tocchet next year. But they said they wanted him to come back and always work to try to sign a new agreement.
“We will not exercise the team option for it to stay. We don’t think it is just to have someone here who could have their mind elsewhere,” said Jim Rutherford, president of hockey operations.
Rutherford said communication with the Tocchet camp had been good all year round and even better since the end of the season. He added that the management was satisfied with the work of the winner coach of the Jack Adams Trophy this year, despite the regression of the team of last season and in the middle of the locker room of the locker room which finally ended with the JT Miller trade in the New York Rangers.
“With everything that happens, how he managed the situation and how he managed the team was really good,” he said. “So I give him that his staff congratulations for the work they have done this year.”
Rutherford also discussed the complaints of fans concerning the increase in ticket prices after a disappointing year, some subscription holders saw their packages increase by 20 to 30%.
Rutherford said that part of the reason for this increase was to pay ups in an aging arena in Rogers. The growing salary ceiling, as well as the low Canadian dollar, are also part of the equation, he said.
“I understand frustration. I don’t like to pay more for anything either. None of us do it,” he said.
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“Not being in playoffs after an increase in prices is difficult to understand for people.”
In the heels of a 2023-2024 campaign which saw the Canucks win the Pacific division and appear in a match of the Western Conference final, Rutherford admitted that fans had a “disappointing season” this year.
He said that the JT Miller-Elias Petterson Rift was a large part of this, resulting from an “unhappy incident” at the start of the season which “harm the team’s chemistry”, which led to a job that the club “did not expect to do and did not want to do”.
The club had hoped that the problem could be resolved internally, but finally realized that he could not and went to Miller to present a profession, he said.
The managing director Patrick Allvin said that Pettersson, for his part, has proven that he was more than capable of being a front line center, but that his dead last year played in his lower performance this year.
He also had difficult words for the star, whose game began to fall at the end of last season in the middle of what he said was a knee tendonitis.
“What I would say is that there are many players from the National Hockey League who play by various injuries, different parts of the year,” he said.
“Part of the professional part is that you have resources to manage different things. For the moment, Elias is healthy and is back. ”
Pettersson was back in the right direction before getting injured again towards the end of the season, added Rutherford, but still has work to do beyond the score.
“Can you be a team rivaled with your best player who gets points? And I can answer this question. The answer is no, you can’t. So he’s going to have a full player. He will have to join hard work,” he said.
“I can give you good news. It’s a small step, but it is here working every day for a few days now. And that’s what we like to see.”
Allvin also refused to exclude the possibility of negotiating Pettersson before his exchange without exchange was triggered on July 1.
“We always believe in him. But I would be, I suppose, stupid not to keep my options open, because we are sitting here,” he said.
Under the perspective of the professions, the management also left a comment to slide towards the end of the presser to raise eyebrows – this time about the captain of the team and the defender of the Hughes Quinn stars.
Hughes has two more years on his contract and is eligible for an extension at the end of next year. Rutherford said the club was ready to offer him the “type of contract he deserves” to keep him in Vancouver.
“This is the only thing we can prepare for. And that may not be summed up with money with him. He said before wanting to play with his brothers. And it would be part of our control. Under our control if we brought these brothers here,” said Rutherford, before recognizing that he should “be careful with falsification (exchange)” and “probably crossed the line” with the commentary.
“This franchise cannot afford to lose a guy like Quinn Hughes and we will do our best to keep it here, but in the end, it will be its decision.”
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