This Solves A LOT for Vancouver...

This solves a lot for Vancouver as one of the newest coaches on the team reveals the truth on his approach with a new team and new players to build relationships with as well as improve the game of Vancouver's players to elevate this team back into a playoff contender. We're going to break down all that in this episode of Canucks Digest, but first if you're enjoying this Canucks content and you want to stay up to date make sure to hit that subscribe button and the bell icon so you don't miss any and all updates surrounding the Canucks as we get closer and closer to the start of the preseason. With that, let's hop straight into it, which is Kevin Dean is ready to work. So on a recent episode of the Canucks Insider Podcast with Chris Faber, Kevin Dean was talking about a bevy of things, if you guys want to check it out I'll link the episode down below, but the main things he was talking about is coming to Vancouver and adjusting to a new team with new players and speaking on some of the players that he's going to be coaching with and talking about the defensive core as a whole as well, saying that you're looking at Tyler Myers, Quinn Hughes is an elite defenseman, Derek Forward has been around a long time, Marcus Pedersen has been around a while now, so that experience is going to be a totally different ballgame for me, from what I've heard they're great people, every one of these guys is just an awesome person, so I'm excited to dig in and work. Now Kevin Dean is going to be the assistant coach for the Vancouver Canucks and as well as the defensive coach, so he's going to be working with these guys a lot closely throughout the course of the season and is getting used to seeing a lot more guys rotate in and out of the lineup, whether it be guys that are mainstays in the NHL, or guys that are in our Abbotsford system that are getting called up and sent back down, he's going to work with them all the same. And as far as his coaching style, he did talk about that as well, saying that everyone's a little bit different, how they want to be approached and how they want to be coached. I want to convey to them that if you want a lot of video, I'll give you a lot of video, if you want a lot of video, if you don't want a lot of video, you want me to be hard on you, I'll be hard on you. He just goes into it saying that yeah, I'm just going to do whatever the players want of me. Not in a sense of a pushover style, but just adapting to each player's style and what they are used to and how they like to be coached and making sure that he's not overstepping or just getting through them in a way that they're not used to or in a way that isn't actually getting through and it's just deflecting off of them like a closed off door, or a closed off metal door basically. So he's just saying hey, what are these players' styles? What are their learning capabilities or how do they learn best? How do they excel best under pressure or how do they excel best in practice? That is my job to figure out and however it works best for them, that's how I'm going to do it. It's not them molding to my coaching style, it's me molding to them as players in the right way, not in the pushover way and making sure that they can be the best players they are without feeling like I'm trying to change them too much. And as far as player trust as well, he says I want them to feel comfortable and say hey Kevin, can we do more of this, let's do less of this and try to have a good open communication so that I know where they stand and they know where I stand. So overall, this is exactly what you want to hear as far as from one of your coaches on your coaching staff, not someone who's going to come in here and just be a dictator and just say hey, this is how things are going to go, it's my way or the highway. I know he's not a head coach so he's not going to have that power anyways, but just within those positions and with those guys, you want to make sure that hey, you're acting as if you are a head coach in a certain sense with how you want to run things and how you just want to be with the players and show them that you are a player's coach. And this also comes off the heels of Kevin Dean having won a Stanley Cup in his playing career with a pretty decent playing career with the New Jersey Devils in 95 and felt fortunate to experience that in his first spray into the NHL. He spent the 94-95 season between the AHL and NHL and won the Calder Cup with the Devils affiliate, the Albany River Rats, before joining the Devils in the conference finals of that season. So this is a guy who knows what it takes to win and has been on winning teams, so now it's a matter of bringing that winning mentality to the Vancouver Canucks when you look at his long tenure in the NHL, a very long time. It is a 20-year tenure, which is crazy to think, even though considering I'm only 27 years old, looking at that and seeing 2006 and 2007 as being 20 years away, I remember watching players back in that day, watching Sacra Cueva, Sheldon Suri, and all those kind of guys in that era, and Marcus Naslin, Todd Bertuzzi, and now you think back and that was 20 years ago, which is absolutely insane. But looking at that long resume, Kevin Dean has been working. He's bounced around from the AHL to the ECHL, up to the NHL, and then as well on the world stage. But you see there where most of his time was spent in the Boston Bruins system, whether with the Providence Bruins, with a brief stint as a head coach in one season, and then as well with the main club as well as an assistant coach before going off to Chicago for 3 seasons and then coming to Vancouver for this season. So he has a history of developing guys in the defensive area where Boston, they had a pretty solid decor for those years that he was there. Chicago, he was helping a terrible Chicago team rebuild and try and get some young guys up to snuff to be able to win some more hockey games. Unfortunately, he wasn't there to finish the rebuild job and now comes over to Vancouver where he's in a much more stable environment as far as where players are and developing players into making sure that these guys are already ready to go in our NHL made instead of making them NHL ready. They're already going to be there and now it's a matter of saying, hey, I've been through one system where we were able to go to a cup final, it worked out pretty well, we didn't win the Stanley Cup, but we were able to at least get there. Now it's time to translate some of that over to a Vancouver defensive core who definitely doesn't need a ton of help, but you can always get better. There's no point in being complacent with just good enough, you can always get better. So obviously you see there with Quinn Hughes and Phil Hronick, those guys are a tag team that is not going to be going anywhere. Marcus Pedersen who we talked about being around for a while now and being in Vancouver for a lot longer as well, having signed that 6 year deal. Then you have Tyler Myers who's a veteran guy, he's getting up there in age, he's at 35 so he's not going to be around too much longer, but that's where you have as well as DPD Elias Pedersen who can move on to that right side as well and fill in when he goes away or if Vancouver finds that replacement for him whether it's in free agency or a trade at some point this season. Who knows and maybe they extend Derek Forbert for an extension in the short term until he's ready for retirement. But that is the big thing here is you do have a lot of veteran guys and some young guys. You have a good blend of both of them, it's just a matter of how long are those guys going to be there. Myers and Forbert, they probably only have 2-3 more years if that left in their careers so there's not going to be too much time for Kevin Dean to work with them there if he's there for that long time, but at least he's there establishing a relationship with the veterans to help these new guys really break through and be even more ready than they are. DPD, he had a great season last year and he's going to build on that even further this year with Kevin Dean as that position coach. Then you have Quinn Hughes, he just gets better and better every year. He doesn't need much coaching, but of course there's always going to be that little bit extra that is going to go a long way and then of course Tom Willender coming up through the system and then there's some other moves that Vancouver made as well and some other draft prospects where Kevin Dean, if he's able to work with them in the NHL when they get those opportunities, he's going to make sure they go back to Abbotsford having learned a lot more than what they did before they got there and had that opportunity with the big club and it's just going to be even more useful for Manny Malhotra. But looking at this D-Corps as well, it was a unit that we didn't think could get much better really, but as far as finding a coach that can match that, they went out and they found a guy that would be perfect for it. We did cover this hiring back when it happened a few months ago, so if you guys want to go and check that out on the channel, it is still there where we talked about the bevy of hirings that they made because it was a big question of who Adam Foote was going to have as his coaching staff for this team and what kind of approach he was going to take as far as coaches he was going after. So they bring in Kevin Dean, another former player who went to coaching, which I do love this trend that we're seeing of more and more coaches having played before. This is something where back in the older days, it was guys that didn't necessarily have long playing careers or didn't really have successful playing careers, but they were able to just have a knack for coaching. We're seeing that start to go away with the way that locker room morale and player-coach relationships have needed to be even stronger over the years and with social media and things like that, it's led to pros and cons on both sides, however within that, these coaches, they need to be able to connect with these players a lot easier or in a certain way that some of those old school guys didn't really necessarily, like Backpock being one of them, But then you have as well with these guys, Adam Foote, Rick Tocket, and some other guys around the league, where they've been there, they've been to the Stanley Cup Final, they've either won it, or they've played in it, or they've played in playoffs, or they've had success at certain levels of the NHL, and that's what we need as far as for these players to show them, hey, who better to learn for as far as what it takes to get to where you want to get to for your career than somebody who has been where you want to get to and can have the tools to show you what it takes to get there, not only as a coach, but also as someone who did it as a player, so that's what I really like about Vancouver's mentality over the past couple of years with hiring coaches that have played before and have had success playing in the NHL, not just guys that flashed for a little bit and then went away or showed some potential but didn't reach that potential, but coaching was really their knack, it's just more so these guys have had success in the NHL, they've played in big games, they've won big games, and now it's a matter of translating that onto coaching with these players a lot more naturally and building those stronger relationships than we've seen in years past with some more old school coaches, but what do you guys think about what Kevin Dean had to say? What do you think about the quotes that we covered in this episode? Let us know down in the comments down below, and do you guys think that this decor is going to be even better than it was last season? Let us know what you guys have to say about it, but that's going to do it for this episode of Canucks Digest. I've been your host Griffin. Take care.