“I’m here to watch hockey,” Ilya Vorobyov said, revealing nothing else about his week in Vancouver.
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What Ilya Vorobyov was doing in Vancouver remains a very open question.
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The veteran Russian hockey coach returned to Russia after spending a week “watching” the Vancouver Canucks.
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During his week-long visit to Vancouver, he attended three Canucks games at Rogers Arena: October 27 against the St. Louis Blues, October 28 against the New York Rangers and October 31 against the Nashville Predators.
Vorobyov traveled a lot. He played for Russia at the 1995 World Juniors in Alberta. His father’s coaching career, a famous coach, also took him around the world in his youth.
He played in Germany for years – he was Canucks commentator Dave Tomlinson’s current teammate with Adler Mannheim in 2001-02.
But it was his first visit to Vancouver, he admitted to Postmedia.
“I’m here to watch hockey,” he said, revealing nothing else about his week in Vancouver.
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One would assume he’s looking for work, but if it involved the Canucks, no one is saying. The Canucks themselves have said they will not hire the former Metallurg Magnitogorsk coach in the KHL, despite at least one report in Russian media.
“I was fired very late,” he said of how his time with Metallurg ended and why he wasn’t picked up by another KHL team in a short time of time.
He has a pretty impressive coaching background: he led Magnitogorsk to the Gagarin Cup in 2016, taking over from Mike Keenan at the start of the year. Metallurg reached the final a year later.
He was fired at the start of the 2017-18 season after Metallurg stumbled, but was hired by SKA St. Petersburg for the 2018-19 season. At the same time, he was hired to coach the Russian national team.
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For whatever reason, that season didn’t work out, even though his team won 49 games and reached the conference finals. But he had a young Andrei Kuzmenko on that team – and 17-year-old Vasily Podkolzin also wore the uniform three times.
“Oh yes, my old trainer. It was nice to see him,” Kuzmenko told Postmedia on Saturday. But he shrugged when asked if he thought his old coach would be back in his life.
After his only season with SKA, he returned to Metallurg, leading them back to the finals in 2022. But the team announced at the end of the season that they were going in a different direction.
He has another connection to the Canucks: Canucks defensive development coach Sergei Gonchar played half a season for Metallurg during the 2012-13 season, when NHL owners cut the players. This was Vorobyov’s first season as a KHL assistant coach under Paul Maurice, who coached Magnitogorsk for that single season.
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Was it Gonchar who made the connection? Who knows.
In the end, there was only one question left: Would he like to coach in the NHL?
“Oh yes of course. It’s the NHL,” he replied with a smile.
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