Manny Malhotra Reflects on Abbotsford’s 28-37-4-3 Collapse
Manny Malhotra called Abbotsford’s second season a tale of two seasons after the Canucks finished 28-37-4-3 and missed the playoffs. A year after winning the Calder Cup, the defending champions slipped to three points ahead of last place in the AHL.
Manny Malhotra’s second season
Named the third head coach in Abbotsford Canucks history on May 24, 2024, Malhotra led the club to its first Calder Cup victory in its fourth season. This year brought the opposite result, with the roster unable to turn that title run into a playoff defense.
“Our opening mindset was we wanted to get back to where we were, that being said, we had the understanding that we had to start a foundation of our game and work on things from the ground up,” Malhotra said. “And then, through a series of unfortunate events and injuries and that which is the AHL, the constant change, things obviously got a bit sidetracked and derailed what we had set out to do.”
Abbotsford’s roster churn
The churn showed up fast. By November 12, Abbotsford had used six different goaltenders by its 14th game of the season, and the club eventually had 52 players suit up in at least one game.
That was up from 39 players in Malhotra’s first year behind the bench. No player stayed in the lineup for all 72 games of the AHL regular season, and only Chase Wouters reached that mark last season.
The results tracked with the turnover. Abbotsford scored 68 fewer goals than it did in 2024-25 and allowed 30 more goals against, while the team’s 13-game win streak and 11-game losing streak sat on opposite ends of the same year.
Lessons from the Calder Cup defense
Malhotra said the staff had to keep reteaching new players the basics of the system, then adjust when the group finally settled in. “But as the season went on, give the guys credit, they adapted to the system and made it look the way it needed to, just took us a while to get some traction and get it to the point where it was looking like our system,” he said.
He said he took a lot from how the staff handled those shifts. “From a coaching standpoint, I took a lot away from how we taught things and when we needed to teach things, when we needed to get on the gas and lean into the guys, and when they needed more time to digest things or just needed a rest.”
Abbotsford’s season closed with a title hangover in the standings, not a repeat run in the spring. Malhotra’s summer now starts with the same question every defending team faces in the AHL: how to keep a roster together long enough to build on what worked once.
