Todd Nelson led the Hershey Bears to an AHL record ninth straight playoff series victory this past weekend. The former NHL defenseman is in his third season as head coach of the Bears and has already guided the club to back-to-back Calder Cup championships in his first two years.
Given the tremendous amount of success that he has had in Hershey and the six head-coaching spots still vacant in the NHL, Nelson’s name is starting to get thrown around as an interview candidate this summer. One of those six teams without a head coach is the Vancouver Canucks and CHEK’s Rick Dhaliwal recently stated his belief that Nelson is “in the mix” for the job.
“I think the Canucks could be looking for a guy with a mixture of American Hockey League and National Hockey League experience,” Dhaliwal said last week. “What do you get with the American Hockey League guy? [He] works with the young kids. What do you get with a veteran in the NHL? He knows how to run a veteran club. So we’ll keep an eye on that.
“Todd [Nelson] is in the mix, Manny Malhotra is in the mix, Adam Foote will get his interview with the Canucks.”
Nelson has been very open about his desire to return to the top spot of an NHL club after his lone prior experience, 46 games with the Edmonton Oilers during the 2014-15 campaign, came solely on an interim basis as a midseason replacement of Dallas Eakins.
The 2024 AHL Coach of the Year seemingly didn’t attract any concrete interest last summer, seeing names like Dan Bylsma, who Nelson beat head-to-head in two straight Calder Cup Finals, rise from the AHL over him. The Seattle Kraken recently fired Bylsma after just one year in charge.
“I haven’t heard anything and I’m not holding my breath,” Nelson said last year. “I’ve been down this road many times. I’m just focused on the task at hand. Whatever happens, happens.”
After a 44-20-8 finish with the Bears atop the league’s Atlantic Division this year, Nelson has collected 450 total wins as an AHL bench boss, ranking fifth all-time. With the Bears alone, he has 141 wins, which ranks seventh in franchise history, and his .704 win percentage ranks first.
Since taking his post in Hershey, Nelson has helped players like Aliaksei Protas, Connor McMichael, Beck Malenstyn, and Dylan McIlrath graduate to being NHL regulars. Other players like Ethen Frank, Vincent Iorio, Hunter Shepard, Clay Stevenson, Ivan Miroshnichenko, and Pierrick Dubé also received their NHL debuts with the Capitals after spending time with Nelson in Hershey.
Earlier this season, Nelson coached his 1,000th professional game, with 722 coming in the AHL, 46 in the NHL, and 232 in the UHL. Before being hired as head coach in Hershey, Nelson’s prior coaching resume included stints as bench boss of the Oilers (NHL), Grand Rapids Griffins (AHL), Oklahoma City Barons (AHL), and Muskegon Fury (UHL). He won the 2017 Calder Cup with the Griffins and two championships with the Fury (2004, 2005).
When he won the Calder Cup with the Griffins in 2017, Nelson became the third person ever to win the Calder Cup as a player (1994), assistant coach (2008), and head coach (2017), joining Bob Woods and Mike Stothers. He is also the first person ever to coach in four AHL All-Star events.
In the NHL, outside of his time in Edmonton, Nelson was an assistant with the Atlanta Thrashers for two seasons and an assistant with the Dallas Stars for four seasons. He has been coaching professional hockey for 24 years straight since his first role as a player assistant in the UHL during the 2001-02 season.
Outside of Nelson, Dhaliwal also mentioned former Chicago Blackhawks head coach Luke Richardson and current Capitals assistant coach Mitch Love as potential candidates for the Canucks job. Love, a British Columbia native, is reportedly “generating interest” from several teams with head-coaching vacancies.
