Canucks: Could Mike Yeo be in play for Bruce Boudreau’s assistant coach?

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When Mike Yeo replaced Alain Vigneault as bench boss of the injury-ravaged and floundering Philadelphia Flyers in December, the promoted assistant said all the right things as the new interim head coach.

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Yeo talked about getting back to work, the importance of teaching, consistency and being hard to play against. All the elements that are crucial to structure. Five months later, Yeo was shown the door as the Flyers went 17-36-7 under his direction.

On Friday, Philadelphia signed former Vancouver Canucks coach John Tortorella, who was working as an ESPN analyst, to a four-year contract and he basically sounded a lot like Yeo.

Which tells you a lot about the business. Talk is cheap. Results matter.

“I think one of the most important attributes of a head coach is to find and teach the structure away from the puck,” Tortorella told reporters. “That’s a huge part of winning, as you see in the playoffs right now. It’s a huge part of being who you want to be and I think it really develops a standard of being a hard team to play against.”

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Which, of course, gets us back to the Canucks and Yeo.

It raises a curious question.

If Yeo, 48, is indeed the favorite to supplant the departed Scott Walker, and work in unison with head coach Bruce Boudreau, is this a case of finding the right fit for now and maybe a bigger role in the future? Boudreau enters the option portion of his two-year deal in the fall.

Yeo also has a connection to Canucks general manager Patrik Allvin and, in a connect-the-dots business, that’s significant for possible fit and feel.

Yeo was an assistant with the Pittsburgh Penguins from 2006-10 when Allvin was the club’s director of amateur scouting. Yeo has been successful in that coaching capacity in Pittsburgh, St. Louis and Philadelphia.

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Staying in your coaching lane and playing to your strengths are crucial, and if that’s the hockey operations department thinking here on Yeo, then that’s understandable. After all, head coaches often have a shelf life when their messages fall on deaf ears and losses mount. Yeo has had his moments of him.

After all, everything you accomplished as a player can seem moot when trying to sell that experience and a coaching vision. Yeo had 34 goals and 66 points as a winger in his final OHL season with the Sudbury Wolves. He went undrafted and would grind out six minor-league seasons to make coaching seem like a more enticing and viable alternative for the Scarborough, Ont., native.

Not that it was easy.

Yeo was the bench boss in Minnesota for five seasons and coaxed his club to three-straight playoff appearances before being let go in February of 2016. The Wild had lost eight straight, 13 of 14 and were 23-22-10. Yeo then joined the Blues as an assistant and they made the playoffs the first two seasons before he replaced fired head coach Ken Hitchcock in February of 2017.

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However, when the Blues were 7-9-3 to start the 2018-19 season, Yeo was replaced by assistant Craig Berube on an interim basis. Berube would guide the Blues to a Stanley Cup championship and the interim label was removed.

The trickle-down effect of what may or may not occur in Vancouver could also depend on what plays out in Chicago.

The Blackhawks were granted permission two weeks ago to interview Canucks assistant coach Brad Shaw, along with Montreal Canadiens assistant Luke Richardson, for running Chicago’s bench. But interim Chicago coach Derek King remains a strong candidate.

If Shaw is not the Blackhawks’ choice, he would likely be No. 3 in the pecking order with the Canucks and continue to prop up the penalty kill and the defense. He did work with Tortorella for five years in Columbus and they had their moments — especially with a stunning first-round playoff sweep of the Tampa Bay Lightning in 2019.

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Would Shaw consider a Tortorella meeting if offered an assistant position? Seems like a stretch. He wants to finally run his own bench, and if that doesn’t come to fruition now, picking up where he left off in Vancouver would probably be the more prudent play as opposed to perhaps more unknown in Philadelphia.

But in the coaching business, you never know.

Shaw and Tortorella knew they had to cook up something special against the Lightning, which had won the President’s Trophy. The Lightning had four of the league’s top-six scorers and were held to eight series goals. That was made possible by a staying-above-the-puck approach and mucking and grinding through the neutral zone.

Shaw logged 377 games with four NHL teams as a dutiful defenseman. The Blue Jackets sported the best penalty kill in 2018-19 and Shaw helped Seth Jones, Zach Werenski and Vladislav Gavrikov develop into top-tier NHL defensemen.

In Vancouver, Shaw encouraged the introduction of skill and will to the penalty kill in Quinn Hughes, Elias Pettersson and Bo Horvat, and Hughes saluted his articulate approach which made it easier to buy in.

How all this plays out might be a waiting game. NHL commissioner Gary Bettman doesn’t like hiring announcements to steal any thunder from the Stanley Cup Final.

So stay tuned.

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