By james art It took Conor Garland a long time to earn Rick Tocchet’s trust.
When he finally did, Garland was traded to the Vancouver Canucks and had to start all over to earn the trust of a new head coach. And then another new head coach. Fortunately, his third head coach with the Canucks was Tocchet again and he didn’t have to start over.
But the Garland that Tocchet saw when he came to the Canucks was a different player than he was with the Coyotes.
“I had it in Arizona — it totally changed,” Toshe said. “Over the last year, as much as everyone talks about his offense, he’s really turned out to be a good defensive player. Maybe three or four years ago, you probably wouldn’t have said that. So I give him all the credit for wanting to learn.”
Tocchett credits Garland’s “willingness to change as a player” as the main reason why he has become such an important part of the Canucks’ lineup. For Garland, that desire started from a simple place: He wanted to be on the ice.
“I think my first year at Arizona, if I was going to play 13-15 minutes, we should have been down and lost,” Garland said. “Then I’ll try to go out and tie it up for us. But if we had a lead, I would always move around 10-11 minutes.
“I just didn’t think it was sustainable. Obviously, this is not someone you can win with if you can’t trust them in those moments.
“I wanted to gain Toshe’s trust and I told him I would work with him as much as I needed”
Garland was drafted by the QMJHL for his incredible offensive talents. In his second year in the draft, Garland led the league in scoring with 129 points — 27 more than the next best player — so the Coyotes took a chance on the undersized wing with significant question marks surrounding his defensive game and whether his offense would translate to the pro game. .
Certainly when Garland turned pro, that didn’t translate. He played two seasons in the AHL with the Tucson Roadrunners with limited offensive production and had to completely reinvent his game just to perform in the AHL and earn a roster spot with the Coyotes, then had to do even more to earn the trust of his NHL head coach so he could get more minutes.
“It’s hard work,” Garland said when asked how he did it. “Just hard work. I wanted to win [Tocchet’s] trust and I told him I would work with him as much as I needed — video, going through steps on the ice, whatever I needed to do to earn his trust.
“It doesn’t take one weekend or a three-game homestand; it takes 40, 50, 60 games. I think after maybe that 49 game season in Arizona I had his trust and then I was gone. But I thought I won it pretty quickly here and now I think I’m just a different player.
As a result, the ice age has increased for Garland. While previously expected to play just 13-15 minutes per game, he is averaging 18:24 per game this season – third among Canucks forwards behind JT Miller and Elias Peterson.
That includes moving up to the first unit on the power play in recent games, but Garland has also upgraded the defensive side of his game to the point that Tocchet has started using him on the other side of special teams.
“I’m actually trying to get him into the penalty mix and I think he’s done a good job there,” Tocchet said. “He’s a student of the game. He’s always on the rink trying to get better, and so Gar prepared for those moments of tension. He did a great job for me.”
In about three minutes of penalty kicks for Garland so far, opposing teams have had just one shot on goal. Most often, Garland chases them up ice or in the neutral zone.
“That’s just the pain of being the lesser man: you have to prove it every day”
Earning that trust on defense has been a long stretch for Garland, especially because it’s an uphill battle as a smaller player – listed at 5’10”, but more accurately 5’8″. Kyle Wellwood once told me he felt he was a much better defender than he’d ever been given credit for, but it was hard to convince coaches that someone from the smaller side who looked and played the way he did can be effective in a defensive role.
“As a smaller guy, you have to do it so many times in a row,” Garland said. “You can have nine good plays and one bad one – if you’re a little boy, usually that one bad one sticks out. But that’s just the pain of being a lesser person: you have to prove it every day. You can’t take a day off, and I come into training camp knowing full well that as a young kid you have to prove that you can play in this league again.
“And it’s a fun challenge, but it’s obviously difficult.”
Fortunately, that work was rewarded this season with a role in the top 6 alongside Elias Petersson and Nils Höglander, as well as time on special teams.
“The coach is trying to make the best decision for the team and you want to be that decision,” Garland said. “You want him to say, ‘I’ve got to get him out there for us to win.’ But it’s not where I want to be yet. I want to get better and better at it.
“That’s what everyone strives for, is perfection. You’ll never achieve it, you’ll never reach your potential, but you’re just trying to work for it.
“The cheating aspect is fun”
That desire to be “the solution” for his coaches stems from Garland’s competitive nature, which is clear on the ice but doesn’t shut down when he’s off the ice. He comes from a competitive family that still competes when they gather around the table for board game dinners.
“My sister is a three-time All-American, my dad was a soccer player in college and then played minor league hockey in the MHL — we came from an athletic background, a competitive background, so we still compete. That’s how I was raised,” said Garland, who then joked, “I married the polar opposite of a guy like me, she doesn’t do any of those things.”
Garland said his family’s main game growing up was Trouble, but these days they’re more likely to reveal the unnamed dice game he and his family invented earlier in the summer, which was featured in his Canucks “Going Home” video along with his love of sharks.
“We just made up a stupid game. It’s just rolling five or six dice and counting and calculating your scores, and we play like four or five rounds,” Garland said, before revealing what he likes most about the game: “The cheating aspect is fun. You can try rolling the dice if no one is looking or lying about the number. So that’s the fun we have in it.
Somehow finding out that Garland is cheating on family game night is the least bit surprising.