It's official, Rick Tocchet has left the Vancouver Canucks

UPDATE: It's official, Rick Tocchet is leaving the Vancouver Canucks effective immediately.

“After a very long and thorough process, unfortunately Rick has decided to leave the Vancouver Canucks,” said President Jim Rutherford. “This is very disappointing news, but we respect Rick’s decision to move to a new chapter in his hockey career. We did everything in our power to keep him, but at the end of the day Rick felt he needed a change. He is a good friend, a good coach, and we can’t thank him enough for all he did for our organization. Toc is a stand-up guy, and we wish him nothing but the best moving forward.”

Last week, Vancouver Canucks president Jim Rutherford addressed the media following the conclusion of the team's season and was very upfront and honest about how the organization is currently approaching their situation with head coach Rick Tocchet.

The Canucks of course have a team option that they could exercise in order to force Tocchet to remain as head coach for another year, but Rutherford made it abundantly clear that the team had no interest in going down that path.

"We will not exercise the team option for him to stay," admitted Rutherford. "We don't feel it's right to have somebody here that may have his mind somewhere else."

Today, NHL insider Elliotte Friedman reports that Tocchet, in fact, will NOT return to the Canucks next season.

Check it out:

Like Friedman says, add Vancouver to the list of teams looking for a new head coach.

Needless to say, this puts the Canucks' entire offseason into a blender.

Rutherford praised Tocchet for the job he did behind the bench this year, even going so far as to suggest that Tocchet's work was exemplary despite the way the team struggled compared to the previous season.

"We believe that Tocchet and his coaching staff did as good a job coaching this team this year as they did the year before," said Rutherford.

It seems that Rutherford felt the issues on the Canucks roster this year were player-driven rather than anything that came as a result of the coaching staff.

"He was dealt a totally different hand this year... this year we've talked enough about the incident that happened, it affected the chemistry of the room and it affected the play of the team in the first half and forced a trade," admitted Rutherford.

Rutherford seemed genuinely impressed with how Tocchet handled the team through all of that adversity.

"With all that going on, how he handled the situation and how he handled the team was really good," said Rutherford.

The Canucks president was even up front about the current contract talks the team has had with Tocchet.

"As for his contract, we've gone through a process, we've negotiated, and I would suspect sometime this week you'll have a decision," said Tocchet. "We have gone a long ways from where coaches have been compensated with the Canucks for years... forever actually."

It seems the ball is now fully in Tocchet's court, with Rutherford admitting that he hopes Tocchet will return next season with a new deal.

"We're hoping that he takes that contract and stays," admitted Rutherford.

You can hear the Canucks president address the elephant in the room in the short video below: