Vancouver Canucks

Vancouver Canucks name Nolan Baumgartner, Newell Brown as assistant coaches
June 7, 2017, 3:14 PM ET [66 Comments]
Carol Schram
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The Vancouver Canucks coaching staff is now set for the 2017-18 season.

The team announced on Wednesday that Nolan Baumgartner and Newell Brown have been added to Travis Green's staff as assistant coaches.

Additionally, Manny Malhotra has moved up the rankings from development coach to assistant coach. Doug Jarvis returns as an assistant, Dan Cloutier continues as goaltending coach, Ben Cooper will be back as video coach and Glenn Carnegie returns as skills coach.

Both Baumgartner and Brown have previous ties to the Canucks.

Originally selected 10th overall by the Washington Capitals in the 1994 draft, Baumgartner was a defenseman who played four years of junior with the Kamloops Blazers, where he won back-to-back WHL championships and Memorial Cups in 1994 and 1995 on teams that also included Shane Doan, Jarome Iginla, Darcy Tucker, Tyson Nash and Jason Strudwick.

He also played on Canada's gold-medal winning World Junior teams in 1995 and 1996, and served as captain of the 1996 squad.

Unlike his high-profile teammates, Baumgartner wasn't able to make a smooth transition to the NHL, in large part due to a serious shoulder injury. After spending his early pro years with the Capitals and Chicago Blackhawks organizations, mostly in the AHL, the 6'1", 200-pound defenseman was signed as a free-agent by the Canucks during the summer of 2002, as the West Coast Express years were starting to take hold.

Baumgartner played eight regular-season games and two playoff games with the Canucks in 2002-03, spending most of his year once again in the AHL, this time with the Manitoba Moose. At the beginning of the 2003-04 season, he was briefly claimed on waivers by Pittsburgh but was quickly re-claimed by the Canucks and returned to Manitoba, where he captained the Moose for the rest of the year.

Coming out of the 2004-05 lockout, Baumgartner cracked the Canucks main lineup and had his best NHL season, playing 70 games and going 5-29-34 as Vancouver's leading scorer from the blue line. He became an unrestricted free agent at the end of the 2005-06 season and signed with the Philadelphia Flyers, but his time with the team was short-lived and he quickly found himself back in the minors once again.

In July of 2008, Baumgartner returned to the Canucks organization for a third time and played another four seasons with the Canucks' AHL affiliates, finishing his playing days with the Chicago Wolves in 2011-12.

Now 41, Baumgartner transitioned directly from the ice to the bench when he retired, taking a job as an assistant with the Wolves in the 2012-13 season. When the Canucks switched their AHL affiliation to the new team in Utica to start the 2013-14 season, Baumgartner also made the move, and has been Travis Green's assistant with the Comets for the last four seasons.

Ben Kuzma explains in The Province that the seeds for Baumgartner's coaching career were sewn with the Moose during the 2008-09 season.

“I got hurt and Scott Arniel was our coach in Manitoba,” Baumgartner told Kuzma. “I asked if I could go on the road and go on the bench, because Jay Wells was our other coach and had a medical problem, so he couldn’t make the trip. It was a great experience and I got to do it for a couple of games.

“I had started thinking when I was done playing, did I want to get into coaching? I was a student of the game and loved it. Just standing behind the bench and watching the games, it was a different feeling right there, and then because it (coaching) was always in the back of my mind.”

Baumgartner also namechecks former Canucks assistant general manager Lorne Henning and his old Kamloops Blazers coach, Don Hay, as mentors who guided and encouraged him.

Kuzma relays a great story that's worth a read, about how Baumgartner was an emergency recall for the banged-up Canucks defense in Game 7 of the 2011 Stanley Cup Final. He didn't dress for the game but was with the team on that fateful night.

As for Newell Brown, the 55-year-old is best known around these parts as the Canucks assistant coach, who was in charge of the power play, for three seasons between 2010-11 and 2012-13. In that first season, the Presidents' Trophy-winning Canucks had the best power play in the NHL, connecting at a rate of 24.3 percent, though that number dropped to 20.4 percent in the playoffs. In 2011-12, they fell to fourth at 19.8 percent, then they dropped to 22nd with a 15.8 percent success rate before Brown was dismissed, along with the rest of Alain Vigneault's coaching staff, at the end of the 2012-13 season.

Brown initially came to Vancouver with more than a decade's worth of experience as an assistant coach, with Chicago, Anaheim (twice) and Columbus. Since leaving the Canucks, he has spent the last four years in Arizona, where he was let go at the end of this season.

Brown's history with the Canucks actually stretches back much further. A 5'9" centre in his playing days, Brown was originally drafted in the eighth round by Vancouver back in 1982. He went the college route and played one season with Vancouver's then-farm team, the Fredericton Express, but never made it to the NHL as a player.

Brown does have some strong hockey bloodlines:




Does that put the Canucks back in the mix for a possible Matt Duchene trade?

A detailed press release from the Canucks outlines how the duties among the coaching staff will be broken down next season.

Brown and Baumgartner will join Green on the bench, taking the lead with the forwards and defencemen, respectively. Doug Jarvis will continue to be an integral member of the staff as an assistant coach and Manny Malhotra will assume additional responsibilities in his new role as an assistant coach. On the special teams front, Brown will oversee the power play and Baumgartner will oversee the penalty kill. Glenn Carnegie will move in to an expanded role, developing prospects in the system. Dan Cloutier and Ben Cooper will continue in similar capacities for the 2017.18 season.


Sounds like Doug Jarvis will be moving off the bench and upstairs—perhaps in a similar role to the one that Perry Pearn had played over the last couple of seasons.

I'm happy to see Manny Malhotra get a promotion and to hear that he'll be more involved with the players. His work with the team in the faceoff dot was one of the few areas of improvement in the 2016-17 season.

I enjoyed this interview with Malhotra by Randip Janda, part of the Hockey Night Punjabi team: