Canucks notebook: Abbotsford coach Manny Malhotra's success, winger Jonathan Lekkerimäki's playoff struggles
It's a notable silver lining in what's been a trying, difficult year for the Vancouver Canucks franchise.
On Friday night, the Abbotsford Canucks, Vancouver's American League affiliate and top minor league club, will face a buzzsaw Charlotte Checkers in the franchise's first-ever appearance in the Calder Cup Finals.
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The Checkers, who advanced to the finals in just 10 total games, have home ice advantage in the series and are narrowly favoured to win in the outright markets. To do it, though, they'll have to defeat an overachieving, hard-working, deep and well-coached Abbotsford that's been building toward this moment patiently and with discipline since relocating from Utica, N.Y., to the Fraser Valley in the spring of 2021.
How did Abbotsford get here? How did Manny Malhotra pull this off in his first season as a professional head coach? And what comes next for some of the best young players on this team?
Let's open the notebook and set up the Calder Cup Finals.
Given the Vancouver market's obsession with NHL-level hockey, the on-ice success the club has manufactured, and a significant change in the organization's approach to its top farm team, Abbotsford, has largely flown under the radar. In truth, it's been somewhat fascinating to watch.
When the club operated in Utica, in partnership with president Robert Esche, the Utica Comets developed a reputation for being a scrappy but underfunded outfit with diehard fan support in the Mohawk Valley. Utica enjoyed some intermittent on-ice success, like when Travis Green and Jacob Markstrom led the club to the Calder Cup Finals in 2015, but the roster was often pieced together with tryout players and the like.
The American League, in contrast with the NHL, isn't capped. Come playoff time, Utica could bump into a Toronto Marlies squad, where the Comets' combined roster salaries totalled a sum less than what the Marlies were icing on their first power-play unit.
When Utica first relocated to the Fraser Valley at the tail end of the COVID-19 pandemic-shortened 2021 season, things suddenly changed. Challenged with effectively building an American League team from scratch, with little in the way of in-house prospect depth to speak of, general manager Ryan Johnson and the organization signed nearly a dozen American League veterans.
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The goal was to make a splash in a new marketplace, one that had a difficult history with American League hockey. The approach of building an expensive, veteran-laden roster, however, was also driven by necessity. The club didn't have enough developmental prospects to properly staff a competitive roster.
Over the past few years, as Abbotsford has churned through coaches and knocked on the door as a consistent American League playoff team, that's begun to change. And it's in part because of the team's deliberate approach to sign high-scoring, undrafted Western Hockey League players, including Abbotsford captain Chase Wouters, and pest forward Tristen Nielsen (who has since signed an NHL-level standard player contract).
With a push to acquire free agents out of Europe, the collegiate ranks and the CHL, Abbotsford has slowly but surely developed a nucleus of younger, cost-controlled players who have formed this team and pushed its way to the finals.
More than any other factor driving this run, a group of mid-20s NHL prospects highlighted by Arshdeep Bains, Linus Karlsson, Max Sasson and Artūrs Šilovs, all of whom have played more than 100 games with Abbotsford over the past few years, have bound together and, in the organization's view, decided to pursue this long run in business-like fashion.
Culturally, there's a real sense of honesty and self-awareness at the core of how this team has forged its identity.
An understanding that everyone in the American League's goal is to work their way to the bigger stage. To get out.
Explicitly, that's the big-picture goal. The point of all this is to learn and improve. To get better, to graduate and ultimately to leave.
There's a notion that if you're still here in four or five years, and this standard applies to everybody in the organization, from coaches to equipment staff to the players themselves, then the organization hasn't succeeded.
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Somewhere throughout this season, the honest, business-like mentality has congealed into something resilient. A deep team focused on the day-to-day routine and the workmanlike rhythms of trying to graduate from the American Hockey League, the pressure of playing an elimination game or facing a third-period deficit has appeared to melt away.
'Forget the result (of this finals),' Johnson told The Athletic this week, when asked if he has any expectations for his group as they prepare to play the biggest games in Abbotsford's history. 'I expect this team to leave it all out there. And they have throughout this entire run. …
'Honestly, I wouldn't say I have a ton of expectations, though. It's just about staying the course and doing what we've talked about from day one of the regular season. … If it's not enough, it's not enough, but at the end of the day, what this group has decided to do is to go for it. And I know they will.'
Playoff Diaries: Western Conference Finals Game 6 🎥
Abbotsford advances to the Calder Cup Finals for the first time in franchise history! pic.twitter.com/oLwXUTKRQJ
— X – Abbotsford Canucks (@abbycanucks) June 10, 2025
When an American League team succeeds at this level, it tends to garner some attention from the industry at large.
Calder Cup playoff success results in players being more marketable as free agents and in the departure of coaches. That's especially true when the coaches in question are highly regarded, thoughtful and charismatic, the way first-year bench boss Malhotra has proven to be during stints as an assistant coach in Vancouver and Toronto, and over his first full year as a head coach in the Fraser Valley.
It hasn't always been a smooth process. A coach serves as something of a metronome for a hockey team, setting schedules, dealing with travel planning and doing an awful lot of work beyond the day-to-day grind of preparing a team.
Until you've been through a full cycle, there are a million little things that you can't possibly know until you've experienced them. It's little details like not scheduling special teams meetings and practices for early in the week, because in the American League, an injury at the NHL level in a Thursday night game might, and probably will, alter your gameplan that weekend when your best player is called up to dress for the big club as an injury replacement.
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Even beyond finding his voice and vision as a head coach, Malhotra had to undergo a crash course in all of that this season. And the results have been tremendous.
In addition to the success of his approach on the ice, Malhotra's first season in Abbotsford has been accompanied by a significant appreciation for the flow and energy level of his practices. It's a factor that the club has come to prize internally, but has also been noted by various agents representing players at the AHL level.
'Manny's commitment to the process and consistency, his practice delivery and attention to detail day to day, it isn't just about winning hockey games,' said Johnson. 'It's about getting down to our process. It's about professionalism and the quality of our players as teammates.
'Manny felt if he got that down, then the rest would follow. And this run is a result of those things.'
In the process, Malhotra, who was a finalist to succeed Rick Tocchet before the Canucks opted to hire Adam Foote, has put himself squarely on the map as a top candidate in the next NHL head-coaching hiring cycle. And maybe even sooner.
There are only nine left-handed defenseman under six feet who appeared in over 50 NHL games this past season. And many of the shorter, left-handed defenders in the NHL, like Quinn Hughes, Lane Hutson and Shayne Gostisbehere, are high-scoring offensive defenders. Mainstays on the power play.
They're one-man breakout machines and attacking engines from the back end, generally speaking.
There are a few exceptions; players like Dmitry Orlov, Matt Grzelcyk and Samuel Girard are the rare breed of defensive-minded, shorter left-handed defenders. They're the exceptions that prove the rule, however.
A 2022 seventh-round draft pick, first-year professional defender Kirill Kudryavtsev has already overcome long odds to make it this far. He's enjoyed a strong first professional season, even earning a call-up to the NHL down the stretch.
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What Kudryavtsev has done for Abbotsford in the playoffs, however, is altogether different. He's been Abbotsford's best two-way defender, helping the Canucks outscore their opponents by a lopsided margin in his five-on-five minutes on their run through the Western Conference.
It's the sort of breakout performance that can change how a player is perceived by their organization and by the wider industry. Rare profile or not, there's something real there in Kudryavtsev.
Throughout the playoffs, Abbotsford's best players have been fringe NHL-level players in their mid-20s, like Sasson, Bains and Victor Mancini.
Vancouver's younger, higher pedigree prospects, aside from Kudryavtsev, have mostly been peripheral to Abbotsford's playoff success.
In the case of top blue-line prospect Tom Willander, his absence has been business-related. He's missed out on this playoff run due to a protracted contractual standoff following his graduation from Boston University. Aatu Räty has been limited by injury, appearing in just six of Abbotsford's 18 playoff games.
Meanwhile, promising young forward Jonathan Lekkerimäki, who captured the imagination of Canucks fans with his 24-game run at the NHL-level this season, has been a regular healthy scratch as the club approaches the finals. He's struggled to manufacture offence or shots at the same auspicious rate he managed during the regular season.
A rocket from Lekker! 🚀
Jonathan Lekkerimäki's first NHL goal is the first RE/MAX Canada Move of the Week! pic.twitter.com/byLXksxGPI
— Vancouver Canucks (@Canucks) November 18, 2024
Despite Lekkerimäki's playoff struggles, his first professional season in North America should be regarded as a mostly unqualified success. As a 20-year-old player, he scored at the rate you'd hope to see from a future top-six forward at the NHL level and didn't look out of place in the NHL when he got a look there.
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That he hasn't been at his best in the Calder Cup playoffs, truthfully, hints at the ground that Lekkerimäki still has to develop physically enough to be an impactful NHL-level goal scorer.
While he is a strong skater, he's not NHL-level fast at this stage of his career. There's no technical reason that he can't be, in time, but he'll need to build considerable, functional core strength to improve his power and top speed as a skater.
Lekkerimäki is an undersized player and doesn't yet have the strength to cut back or protect the puck along the wall the way most undersized forwards — the Canucks' Conor Garland and Nils Höglander are potent examples of this — need to to succeed in the NHL.
For whatever reason, Lekkerimäki has hit a wall in the Calder Cup playoffs. There are lessons for him and the Canucks in that, but it shouldn't be viewed as a concern that would adjust how we rate Lekkerimäki and his progress.
This is a gifted player with a couple of NHL-ready traits, including his perimeter shooting skill, and his nuance and skill on the flank with the man advantage, and a lot of work is needed to enhance his physical development if he hopes to succeed during the toughest time of year in the American League. And eventually as a full-time top-six contributor at the NHL level.
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