What the coach knows and believes hockey players are capable of is at the centre of much of what he says about his Vancouver Canucks.
Take his 1992-93 season, for example. Playing with Mario Lemieux, he scored 48 goals, a career high. He also, somehow, amassed 252 penalty minutes.
Tocchet played hard. Let’s be clear on that.
Tocchet gave no quarter. If he was near you, he was on you.
So when you hear him say he wants his players to go through the opposition, that’s what he means. Don’t get near your opponent, get on top of your opponent. Deny them the space to operate.
He was a guy who didn’t need to be wound up to play — he was always wound up and ready to go.
In similar terms, when you hear him calling out his players for not being up and ready to play, that’s a personal thing for him.
He’s a coach who tries to understand his charges. Obviously, the Zoomers he is coaching are very, very different from the Boomers and Gen Xers he played with and was coached by. The madness of Mike Keenan, he experienced that first hand. Iron Mike’s whole philosophy was to keep his players on edge — he would intentional berate players in front of their teammates, in a belief that those who were feeling anxious would work harder so as to avoid being berated.
Tocchet played for Scotty Bowman, who wasn’t know for being over the top in the way Keenan was, but he operated using psychological pressure on his players, using assistant coaches to find out what his players really thought, and then using that information back on them.
Both those approaches would never work now. Players are too attuned to either speak up for themselves or to simply switch off. To be a successful coach in today’s NHL requires a more player-centred approach — you first win the trust of the player by helping them understand the terms of the process they’re embedded in, then finding a way to lead them beyond what they thought they’re capable of.
A modern coach understands that all players have a capacity beyond what the player’s instincts tell them is possible. That can be about simple conditioning or about being able to add more to their skill set.
When Tocchet talks about players who are passengers, or who aren’t pulling on the rope, he’s speaking to notions like this.
He is also intensely dialled into how top teams develop their own culture. He looks beyond hockey, to teams like the New Zealand All Blacks. He knows that when the All Blacks talk about “sweeping the sheds” after a game, they literally do that — the players get the brooms out and clean up their own change rooms.
There is no hierarchy in the All Blacks. The players are helping the support staff. A team that has players who think there are staffers who are beneath them is going to struggle for ultimate success. Tocchet knows this.
That’s why he references talking to the elite players he knows, such as Wayne Gretzky, to understand better how the elite players in his charge might think. He knows, as Phil Jackson did 35 years ago with the Chicago Bulls, that if you are going to get the whole team to buy into a philosophy, you need the star players buying in above all else.
All teams are going to need some managing of personalities. That can be easier on some teams than others.
In Tocchet’s world, it’s everything. He knows his team has the talent. This season it will be about getting everyone pulling on the rope and not worrying about how the others are doing so.