Did former head coach Rick Tocchet quit on the Vancouver Canucks when times were tough and things were looking rough? Well, it depends on who you ask.
In his latest interview on "Donnie & Dhali," Tocchet vehemently denies accusations that he quit on his team, but he acknowledges that such strong opinions of him aren't based on nothing.
"I understand it. I can explain to them I'm not a quitter, but I understand where they're coming from. Sometimes in life, Rick, you have decisions you got to make," Tocchet told Rick Dhaliwal in an interview on "Donnie & Dhali" Tuesday morning. "You hit the crossroads, and you got to go right or left. Sometimes, you make the right decision and sometimes you don't. You got to go with your conviction."
Tocchet again avoided getting into the details of his divorce from the Canucks, but insisted that this was the right decision for him for the right reasons.
"It wasn't a quit thing. It was just something I felt, for me, to evolve and just in my life, this was the right decision. And there's other things, I'm not going to dive into it, but I just feel like this was the time," said Tocchet. "I understand. They're a passionate fanbase, they want a winner. You want to be in a pressure cooker, because if you can win in that town, the rewards are just...
"If you won the Stanley Cup, of all the 32 teams, I would say the top three or four cities, Vancouver is in one of them if you won the Stanley Cup. How they would react in the celebration, the aura, I just can't even put it into words. We went to the second round, Game 7, I couldn't believe what I saw inside the city. I couldn't even imagine winning a Stanley Cup there. I couldn't imagine it."
Tocchet won't be on staff to see such a day going forward, with his former assistant, Adam Foote, being hired by the Canucks to replace him.