“Vancouver” put on the Russian defense – Newspaper Kommersant No. 12 (7457) of 01/24/2023

The problems that the Vancouver Canucks are going through this season have allowed one of the few Russian coaches in the history of the league, Sergei Gonchar, to return to work in the NHL. He entered the new coaching staff of the club, who fired the former mentor Bruce Boudreau.

NHL club “Vancouver Canucks” announced sacking head coach Bruce Boudreau. The reason for parting with Boudreau, who headed Vancouver for a little over a year, was the club’s poor results in the regular season. At the moment, Vancouver, with 18 wins in 46 games, is only in sixth place in the Pacific Division and is already very far from the playoff zone. Rick Tocquet became the team’s new mentor, and Russian Sergey Gonchar was appointed his assistant along with Adam Foote. And this is a very remarkable event.

The fact is that for the NHL, in which there are always a lot of Russian players (this season, more than fifty of them have already played in the regular championship), a Russian coach is a rarity.

The status of the head coach has not yet been given to any of them, and the club coaching teams, occupying positions of various functions and importance, included only seven. These are Vladislav Tretyak, Zinetula Bilyaletdinov, Vasily Tikhonov, Vyacheslav Fetisov, Evgeny Nabokov, Sergey Brylin, who has been working in the New Jersey Devils since last summer, and also Sergey Gonchar.

Gonchar, a famous former defensive player who played intermittently in the NHL from 1994 to 2015, was a high-scoring player (811 points in 1,301 regular season games, 90 in 141 play-off games), five-time All-Star Game, and having won the Stanley Cup with the Pittsburgh Penguins 14 years ago, he already has quite a wealth of coaching experience in North America. He began this part of his career, in fact, immediately after completing the part of the game. In 2015, Pittsburgh entrusted Gonchar with the role of defensive development coach, and soon experienced another spectacular rise. Two seasons in a row – in 2016 and 2017 – the club won the Stanley Cup, which by the standards of this century is an extraordinary achievement.

After the second success, Gonchar was promoted to one of the key assistants to the head coach. And he left Pittsburgh after the expiration of the contract in the summer of 2020 against the backdrop of a club misfire. Gonchar’s team failed to overcome the so-called play-off qualifying round, introduced due to a change in the format of the draw due to the coronavirus pandemic.

After that, Sergei Gonchar briefly returned to Russia. He was a member of the coaching staff of Alexei Zhamnov in the national team during preparations for the February 2022 Olympics in Beijing and at the Olympics itself. At the Beijing Games, in which NHL hockey players did not take part, the Russian team won silver, losing to the Finns in the final.

In Vancouver, Sergei Gonchar, as he once did in Pittsburgh, will be in charge of defense. And this is an extremely responsible area, given the situation.

Vancouver has a fairly powerful offense, thanks in part to the Russian players. There are three forwards from Russia in the club. But if Vasily Podkolzin does not have a solid place at the base, then Ilya Mikheev and Andrei Kuzmenko are on the list of leading strikers. And NHL rookie Kuzmenko is currently the team’s fifth scorer with 41 points for performance. At the same time, she has huge problems with defense. In terms of the number of goals conceded – 183 – Vancouver is in third from the bottom position in the league. Only the Anaheim Ducks and the San Jose Sharks have more.

Alexey Dospekhov