The Vancouver Canucks will have another hole to fill behind the bench for next season.
Yaroslav "Yogi" Svejkovsky will be leaving the Canucks and signing with the Philadelphia Flyers, according to and . Svejkovsky will be sticking with former Canucks head coach Rick Tocchet after he last month.
Assistant coach Yogi Svejkovsky is leaving the for Philadelphia to join Rick Tocchet.
— Rick Dhaliwal (@DhaliwalSports)
Canucks did not want to lose him but he has a great relationship with Tocchet.
Believe Svejkovsky had an option in his contract to leave.
Svejkovsky spent one season as an assistant coach for the Canucks after three seasons as a skills coach in Abbotsford and Vancouver, working on skills development with players throughout the organization, as well as working on the ice with players recovering from injuries. Beyond the Canucks, Svejkovsky had worked in Vancouver for nearly two decades, both as an assistant and skills coach with the WHL's Vancouver Giants, and as a head coach with the Delta Hockey Academy and St. George's School.
Now the former first-round pick of the Washington Capitals is heading back to the United States.
The Canucks have yet to officially hire any assistant coaches to build out the staff of , though reports indicate the Canucks will be hiring Kevin Dean, formerly an assistant with the Boston Bruins and Chicago Blackhawks. Dean is a defensive coach first and foremost, with a reputation for working particularly well with young defencemen.
Svejkovsky's responsibilities with the Canucks lay more on the offensive side of the ice, as he played a large role in coaching the power play and with certain elements of the Canucks' offensive systems. When Svejkovsky was initially promoted to assistant coach, Tocchet said that Svejkosvky had already had , translating systems into tangible skills for players to work on in practice.
“Yogi and I spent a lot of time with each other the last year,” said Tocchet at the time. “He knows I like wall stuff — how do you handle coming out of the corner with body position? How do you defend in this position? How do you take the puck this way? How do we tip pucks? He listens to what I like and he molds it in teaching the players what I want."
That close relationship makes it understandable why Tocchet and Svejkovsky would want to stick together.
The Canucks were already going to be looking for a more offensive-minded assistant coach, given that Foote and Dean, also a former defenceman, are both so focused on the defensive side of the ice. Svejkovsky's departure makes that even more imperative.
That said, the Canucks' offence wasn't particularly great last season under Tocchet and Svejkovsky, so there's plenty of room for improvement.
The Canucks were well below average in scoring, ranked 23rd in the NHL in goals per game. As for the power play, it was essentially right at league average, ranked 15th in the NHL at 22.5%.
In fact, the Canucks' success rate on the power play isn't entirely reflective of how well they performed with the man advantage. They were 30th of 32 teams in shots per 60 minutes on the power play, as they were frequently far too hesitant to shoot the puck.
Incidentally, the team that was 32nd in shots per 60 minutes on the power play was the Flyers. It will be interesting to see how the Flyers' power play performs under Tocchet and Svejkovsky next season.
