The Vancouver Canucks named three new assistant coaches on Thursday.
Kevin Dean, Brett McLean, and Scott Young were the three men added to the hockey operations line-up.
With additions come subtractions:
The team also announced Assistant Coach Yogi Svejkovský, Defensive Development Coach Sergei Gonchar, and Video Coach Dylan Crawford would not be returning.
Dean has 19 seasons of professional coaching experience, including the last three as an assistant with the rebuilding Chicago Blackhawks. In very recent news, Dean was an assistant coach for Team USA at the 2025 World Championships, a team that won the Gold Medal and included Canucks’ players Conor Garland and Drew O’Connor.
He won both a Stanley Cup and a Calder Cup as a lefty D-man in the New Jersey Devils organization.
Young has the most prominent background as a player, twice winning Stanley Cups, once with the Pittsburgh Penguins in 1991 and again with the Colorado Avalanche five years later. The right wing played close to 12-hundred games with a total of seven different NHL clubs. He was part of Team USA that won the ferocious World Cup of Hockey in 1996 and is enshrined in the US Hockey Hall of Fame.
The Canucks organization and those in it know him well. He’s been Vancouver’s Director of Player Development the last three seasons after coming over from the Penguins where he worked with his present GM Patrik Allvin and President Jim Rutherford.
McLean spread his pro playing career as a lefty forward across North America and Europe between 1998 and 2017. He’s spent the last eight years as a coach in the Minnesota Wild organization, the last two as the head coach of the Iowa Wild in the AHL. Remarkably, both seasons finished with the identical losing record: 27-37-and-8.
McLean is a Comox native who played junior hockey in Tacoma, Kelowna, and Brandon of the WHL.
