Patrick WilliamsTheAHL.com Features Writer
Winning a Calder Cup will change a man. Even one as experienced as Manny Malhotra.
The 45-year-old Malhotra is entering his second season as head coach of the Abbotsford Canucks with his name already on the Calder Cup. His team went a combined 60-32-2-2 over last year’s regular season and playoffs, capping that streak with the first championship for a Vancouver affiliate.
A brief offseason finally gave Malhotra a chance to reflect on his rookie season. Part of that was about processing what he had learned. And of course, part of it meant enjoying a victory that took 96 games to capture.
“When you’re going through it at that moment,” Malhotra said, “there’s really no time for reflection because right now, every day is ‘Groundhog Day.’ Prepare, analyze, rinse, repeat. You don’t have a chance to step back and look at what you’re doing.”
Malhotra was not a novice before last June’s championship. He was selected seventh overall by the New York Rangers in the 1998 NHL Draft, beginning a career in which he played 991 NHL games before retiring in 2016. He even won a Calder Cup along the way, a quarter century ago with the Hartford Wolf Pack.
Malhotra went into coaching immediately after the end of his playing career. He spent four years with Vancouver in both developmental and coaching roles, followed by another four seasons as the Toronto Maple Leafs assistant coach before taking the Abbotsford position in May 2024.
He returned to the Canucks organization ready to run his own bench. After all, there’s no substitute for learning the ins and outs of an AHL season. How do you handle when your top players get a call from the NHL club? What about managing a disappointed player who has been sent down? Road trips that criss-cross the AHL map? The winning streaks, and perhaps more importantly, the losing streaks? Veterans. Rookies. Players at the crossroads of their respective careers.
Malhotra handled it all. Below .500 in January, the Canucks managed to rally and become arguably the AHL’s most dangerous team the rest of the way, winning 46 of their last 65 games. They avoided an early exit from the playoffs with a winner-take-all victory in the first round against Tucson. They defeated the two-time conference champions from Coachella Valley and won a decisive Game 5 on the road in Colorado. They outlasted Texas in a six-game series of conference finals, including three overtime games, to set up a meeting with the red-hot Charlotte Checkers for the Calder Cup.
Charlotte entered the finals on an eight-game winning streak, but the Canucks claimed Game 1 on the road in double overtime en route to taking a 3–1 series lead. A fortuitous OT goal by the Checkers in Game 5 prevented Abbotsford from capturing the championship on home ice – another delicate situation Malhotra had to deal with. Instead of skating the Cup in front of their fans, they had to fly back to Charlotte for Game 6, where the Canucks fell behind 2-0 early. It was starting to look like this championship chase was going to unravel.
But Malhotra stuck to the game plan. His team scored three goals, held off a late, desperate Checkers attack and won the Calder Cup.
“It was a daily learning process,” Malhotra said of his first campaign with his own AHL team, “whether it was from the point of view of understanding systems or how to teach systems or how to analyze the game, how to make in-game adjustments, manage lines, manage the room. It’s kind of keeping my finger on the pulse of everything that’s going on. For me, it was something new every day and something I could relate to. was adapting to, and I really enjoyed that aspect of it.”
A lot has changed since June. Players scattered, some graduating to Vancouver, others elsewhere. However, Malhotra still resides in Abbotsford – although he was a candidate for NHL vacancies this summer. That’s to be expected, of course, as NHL organizations see what Malhotra has done. Vancouver, in turn, picked up Malhotra’s contract option for the 2026-2027 season.
Now it’s year two. It will mean a different kind of learning. There are of course new players. There is also the pressure that comes with being the defending champion. Opponents will be ready for Abbotsford every night.
But now Malhotra can gain much more knowledge from his coaching process.
“This year coming into it, it’s a little easier for me to have a little more familiarity with the schedule and the travel and the teams and how everything works,” he said. “But that mentality of wanting to learn, grow and get better at coaching every day is still my priority. I don’t want anything to change in that regard.”
“I still want to learn more and get better at coaching these guys.”
At TheAHL.com, writer Patrick Williams has been covering the American Hockey League for two decades. Writer Patrick Williams also currently covers the league for NHL.com and FloSports and is a regular contributor on SiriusXM NHL Network Radio. He received the AHL’s James H. Ellery Memorial Award for his outstanding coverage of the league in 2016.
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