Canucks: How Manny Malhotra may be a boon to analytics staff

It is clear that even during a few short chats, Manny Malhotra is an attentive listener, a coach keen to figure out how the game he has known forever works.

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As an assistant coach in Toronto, he was on a staff that paid attention to what their team’s analytics staff brought to the table, for instance. His former colleague Spencer Carbery, now head coach in Washington, has spoken more than once about how useful the observations of the analytics team in Toronto — and now in Washington — can be.

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As a player, Malhotra became one of the NHL’s best faceoff men. That came from endless study of how the game works, mostly in an era before data was widely available. But as data came online near the end of his career, especially during his Vancouver stint, he became a literal experiment in player deployment — to the advantage, you’ll recall, of his current bosses the Sedin twins.

“They were key to a lot of early analytics work,” a league source who has worked with Malhotra in the past point out.

It’s no surprise that someone as interested in building up his knowledge base, in getting better at his own craft, is so willing to listen to those around him.

That is something Canucks GM Ryan Johnson highlighted Tuesday, when asked about how Malhotra stood out as a leader.

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Malhotra understands the cultural strength of empowerment.

“You hire good people around you, and then you inspire them, and you bring energy and you give them a plan. Then you let them execute what they’re good at,” he said.

Malhotra has worked for coaches who led the way in that regard. With Travis Green in Vancouver and Sheldon Keefe in Toronto, he saw first-hand a pair of coaches who expected a lot of their staff — they were given a task and then expected to bring utility to the table.

Malhotra is inheriting a director of analytics in Aiden Fox, for instance, who delivered on what his head coaches wanted. He found a true groove with Green, and the head coach would regularly reference data items that Fox had identified.

It’s fair to assume this relationship will continue.

Of course, you also wonder if the Canucks’ small analytics team might get bulked up in all this. The Canucks were once ahead of the curve in looking at data, but most teams have now surged past them in staffing — recognizing there are a lot of questions to be asked all the time, which can only be raised by pushing out your original thinking, not just regurgitating ideas that have already been processed.

In the end, the Malhotra-Johnson-Sedins project will be a people project, and they will be successful because they are empowered to find success.

“In Abbotsford, we were one, we were connected, everybody had a voice, everybody had an opinion,” Johnson said. “Manny is a good listener. He takes in the information, but at the end of the day, I always encouraged that this is your team.The final decision is you.”

pjohnston@postmedia.com