Patrick Williams, TheAHL.com Features Writer
Winning a Calder Cup will change a guy. Even one as experienced as Manny Malhotra.
The 45-year-old Malhotra goes into 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 the regular season and playoffs last year, topping off that run with the first championship for a Vancouver affiliate.
A brief offseason finally allowed Malhotra a chance to look back at his rookie season. Some of that was about digesting what he had learned. And, of course, some of it meant savoring a victory that took 96 games to lock down.
“When you are going through it at the time,” Malhotra said, “there’s really no time for reflection because in the moment every day is ‘Groundhog Day.’ Prepare, analyze, rinse, repeat. You don’t have a chance to take a step back and see what you’re doing.”
Malhotra was no novice before last June’s championship. He was selected seventh overall by the New York Rangers in the 1998 NHL Draft, the start of a career in which he played 991 NHL contests before retiring in 2016. He even won a Calder Cup along the way, doing so with the Hartford Wolf Pack a quarter-century ago.
Malhotra went into coaching immediately after his playing career ended. He put in four years with Vancouver in both development and coaching roles followed by another four seasons as a Toronto Maple Leafs assistant coach before taking the Abbotsford post in May 2024.
He came back to the Canucks organization ready to run his own bench. There is, after all, no replacement for learning to manage the ins and outs of an AHL season. How do you deal when your top players get the call to the NHL club? What about managing a disappointed player who has been sent down? Road trips crisscrossing the AHL map? The winning streaks, and perhaps even more importantly, the losing streaks? Veterans. Rookies. Players at the crossroads of their respective careers.
Malhotra dealt with it all. Below .500 in January, the Canucks managed to rally and become perhaps the AHL’s most dangerous team the rest of the way, winning 46 of their final 65 games. They avoided an early playoff exit with a winner-take-all victory in the first round against Tucson. They knocked off 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 conference finals series that included three overtime games, setting 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 fluke OT goal by the Checkers in Game 5 prevented Abbotsford from clinching the championship on home ice – another delicate situation that Malhotra had to manage. 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 started to feel like this championship pursuit might be unraveling.
But Malhotra stuck with the game plan. His team rallied for three goals, held off a late, desperate push from the Checkers and hoisted the Calder Cup.
“It was a daily learning process,” Malhotra said of his maiden campaign running his own AHL team, “whether it was from an understanding systems standpoint or how to teach systems or how to analyze the game, how to make in-game adjustments, lines, managing the room. It’s kind of having a finger on the pulse of everything going on. For me, it was daily something new and something that I 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. Malhotra, however, is still in Abbotsford – although he was a candidate for NHL vacancies this summer. That is to be expected, of course, as NHL organizations see what Malhotra has done. Vancouver, for its part, picked up Malhotra’s contract option for the 2026-27 season.
Now it’s year two. It will mean a different type of learning. There are new players, of course. There is also the pressure that comes with being the defending champion. Opponents will be ready for Abbotsford every single night.
But now Malhotra has that much more knowledge to tap from his coaching journey.
“This year coming in, just having a little bit more familiarity with the schedule and the travel and the teams and how everything works is a little bit easier for me,” he said. “However, just that mindset of wanting to learn and grow and get better at coaching every day is still at the forefront for me. I don’t want anything to change in that regard.
“I’m still hungry to learn more and get better at coaching these guys.”
