The Coach is a Problem, Not THE Problem

The New York Rangers are once again at an impasse philosophically and practically. The team wants to win a Stanley Cup more than anything. It’s tied up considerable resources in expensive, older players. Just six players: Mika Zibanejad, Artemi Panarin, Chris Kreider, Vincent Trocheck and Barclay Goodrow represent more than 50% of the NHL’s $82.5 million cap ceiling.

The team’s management of coaching and roster construction reinforced this contender mindset. Dismissing two coaches in three years, firing a GM and president while turning over a significant portion of the roster in a short period of time. Clearly owner James Dolan had grown impatient with the lack of fruit from his team’s rebuild and wanted validation.

That’s where the present day problem starts. An owner who didn’t want to play the long game the way rebuilds often require. The Rangers made the second round of the playoffs in 2017, sold off at the 2018 and 2019 deadlines. Then picked second overall in 2019 with some ping pong ball luck.

Then, the world entered a once in a century pandemic, the team looked woefully underprepared for the bubble playoffs against the Carolina Hurricanes and it was pretty apparent Quinn would not be the one to bring the Rangers into a contending window.

But fate threw another win the Rangers way, inexplicably, New York won the draft lottery and selected Alexis Lafrenière first overall. Picking second and first overall in consecutive years. Selecting cheap, potentially high end talent, gave the Rangers cap space to sign more expensive players and extend in house guys.

Somehow, the team that picked that high in the draft multiple years in a row was being coached as if the expectations were sky high. I vividly remember recording a podcast during the 2021 season curious as to why Quinn was managing his lineup so aggressively.

Hell, I wrote this on April 6th of 2021

The real frustration is, during both of the four-game losing streaks this season, Quinn himself used the team’s inexperience and youth as a reason for the struggles. Essentially saying that if the team is the youngest average aged team in the entire league, there are going to be ups and downs.

Now suddenly that the playoffs seem plausible to Quinn, he’s running a short bench at the expense of those young players. The short-sighted nature of his lineup decisions is just the latest in a long-term pattern that’s cause for concern.

The Rangers were one of the youngest teams in the entire league that season. Yet, neither Kakko’s sophomore or Lafrenière’s rookie campaigns featured significant power play time. They were ninth and seventh in even strength ice time respectively that year. The luminary that pre-empted them in the top six?

Colin Blackwell who scored 12 of his 27 career goals during the 2021 season.

Yes, the Rangers gave priority to a then 27-year-old who’d averaged 9:44 and 10:57 in ice time in his first two years in the NHL over players it selected first and second overall.

That season ended in spectacular disaster with a cleaning house reminiscent of the Red Wedding. Tom Wilson of the Washington Capitals woke Glen Sather up from whatever hole he was hiding in, whispered in Dolan’s ear that these guys (Quinn, Gorton and Davidson) didn’t know what they were doing, and he had the perfect replacement in mind.

The organization was grooming then assistant general manager Chris Drury for six years at that point. Both the Pittsburgh Penguins and Buffalo Sabres had offered Drury their GM jobs prior to 2021 and he declined both. He knew there were forces at play that could be beneficial and bided his time.

Everything is extremely delicate with the Rangers right now because of how Drury got the job. There’s a clear line from the owner to this current power structure where Drury is both GM and President. All it takes is Drury making one decision that Dolan doesn’t agree with and suddenly who’s coaching the team doesn’t seem as urgent.

Oh…and about that.

The elephant in the room

Following the game 7 loss to the Devils, I was almost certain Gerard Gallant would be dismissed. It took five additional days and the organization phrased it as a “mutual parting of ways,” but I’ll take that as one for the correct prediction column.

Thankfully, the Rangers will also not be pursuing the disgraced John Quenneville even if his name was out there. From the way I understood Elliotte Freidman’s comments on Monday’s “32 Thoughts,” Quenneville may eventually gain reinstatement to the NHL but it wouldn’t be fast enough to take a job for this upcoming season.

In the aftermath of a playoff series, the knee jerk reaction is to look for a culprit. identify and vilify. Who can the public latch onto, blame and exile. The prevailing blame is centered around the aforementioned Gallant and Panarin. One of these individuals has a full no movement clause and is on the books for $11.642 million per year.

No decision happens in a vacuum and it’s why I think the Rangers are painfully stuck.

I could make an argument that Gallant is a better coach than the pool of re-treads currently available. Peter Laviolette, Mike Babcock, Bob Hartley, Mike Yeo, Claude Julien and Bruce Boudreau are not exactly the ‘27 Yankees of candidates.

I thought the Rangers were in real danger of repeating the 2017 offseason. Remember that New York team bowed out in six games against the inferior Senators team. It was pretty clear that Alain Vigneault would not get the Rangers that elusive championship. But New York re-rolled that group and brought Vigneault back.

Similarly to Gallant this year against the Blues, that fall of 2018 featured a win or your out edict early in the season. On Halloween night, Gallant and his Vegas Golden Knights came into Madison Square Garden and saved Vigneault’s job. That season was undone by injuries, but by mid January, it was pretty clear that the team wasn’t a contender and the coach had overstayed his welcome.

The now departed Gallant clearly couldn’t get the desired outcome from this group. Whether that group is unwilling or unable to is entire other discussion, which leads me to my post game 7 conclusion: there’s no point in keeping the coach if he can’t do the job.

Yet, the longer I think about it, the more troubling this entire situation is. While I think Gallant deserves a good amount of blame, there’s also the underlying issue that the roster simply isn’t well constructed.

The group of expensive veterans realized that there were no consequences for misplays. The Goodrow fiasco against the Devils back in January where Gallant gave one of his guys a free pass.

So we’re in a situation now where the Rangers clearly didn’t have the right coach, thee roster lacks flexibility to improve and the ace in the hole, the young guys they drafted aren’t ready to be significant contributors. Oh and the established veterans that can’t be moved lack a motivation to play with an attention to detail requisite for a deep playoff run.

It runs down hill

I’ve found myself a lot more understanding of both Gallant and Quinn lately. This isn’t to say I think they’re good coaches, they’re not. At best Gallant is slightly above average. But I do think the fact that the same problem has popped up under multiple coaches indicates it’s coming from above.

I expressed dismay at the time when Quinn was giving Lafrenière less than ten minutes of ice time per game in his rookie season. The Rangers weren’t expected to be a playoff team in 2021. The front office publicly said it’d be nice to make the playoffs but it wasn’t the goal.

Clearly that public and internal messaging did not lineup.

Hell after the season, the official narrative was that Quinn, Gorton and Davidson were all fired because they didn’t make the playoffs. I’m supposed to believe a team that played Brendan Smith, Libor Hajek, Phil Di Giuseppe, Kevin Rooney and Blackwell was supposed to make the playoffs?

That’s what makes the present all the more demoralizing and frustrating. The Rangers as an organization prioritized making the playoffs in a year that it didn’t make a ton of sense. Even if New York somehow snuck in that last spot, it was looking down the barrel at a first round series against the Pittsburgh Penguins, a team they went 2-4-2 against in the regular season.

So not only did the development of key players get put on the back burner, that subsequent offseason set up the present day failures. The new GM prioritized guys who played “the right way,” and only one of those guys from that offseason is still with the organization.

Yes, the first order of business to improve a flawed team was to acquire Sammy Blais, Ryan Reaves, Barclay Goodrow and Patrick Nemeth. This inserted two players, Blais and Goodrow, into the pecking order for the new coach, Gallant, to prioritize over Lafrenière and Kakko because it was his job to win games.

The one guy still with the organization, Goodrow, is likely on his way out the door too. Whether it be buyout or trade, he’s simply the only veteran making a decent amount of money that doesn’t have a full no-movement clause in effect this summer.

The stubborn insistence to play low risk veterans who are average or worse over young players who might also be bad is a fatal flaw in the sport’s brain trust. This isn’t uniquely a Rangers’ issue. But, New York insisting on playing Goodrow and Dryden hunt in the top six in Gallant’s first year as coach reflected the organization’s mindset.

We expect to win, we don’t have time for growing pains or mistakes. We want low risk players in the lineup, the star players we do have will win in the minutes those low risk players aren’t on the ice. And whatever happens with Chytil, Kakko and Lafrenière, we’ll take it.

The caste system in two years under Gallant allowed a bad mindset to spread and bad habits to set in. The appeal of Gallant was his substitute teacher nature, everyone likes playing for him because they won’t get reamed out nor will he be on their case about details.

Every single profile of Gallant upon his HIRING mentioned that he was not a good Xs and Os coach. That he struggled with tactical adjustments and was reliant on his support staff to make changes. Doesn’t sound like the Gallant I know.

The Rangers came out swinging in both series against Tampa Bay and New Jersey, taking the first two games. The team had mirrored opportunities to win in game three and then unraveled the longer the series went. New York had no counter punch. They saw their own blood after getting hit and panicked.

It’s really hard to adjust when you’ve been performing an action for an extended period of time. The hardest part of picking up new habits is developing the habit forming behavior. If the team goes about its entire season with a lackadaisical, inconsistent “we’ll figure it out when we need to,” it’s more than likely never going to get it together.

Remember being in college and saying “yeah, I’ll get up early to get this done,” and you’d sleep till your normal time and just not do the assignment? That was the Rangers this season. That second gear, that higher level of hockey that developed last season was eternally put off. They waited till the morning the assignment was due and just never turned it in.

It’s not only on the coach

I was pretty resolved to skewer Gallant. He’s stubborn, he’s condescending, and he’s arrogant. He treats talking the media as a burden and treats the public like idiots. As if we’re beneath him and honest an direct answer would be asking for too much.

We get it Gerard, you played with Steve Yzerman and were a pretty good player in your own right. That’s not what this is about.

Speaking to the media is an imperative component of coaching in the 21st century. Gallant’s inability to articulate his thoughts or ideas in any meaningful way to the media and by extension the public, isn’t a good reflection of his communication skills. The best coaches in today’s league are master communicators and able to connect with all different types of people.

The days of one size fits all, my way or the highway coaching are over. It’s simply not a sound practice to employ this mindset with so many different types of people involved on teams now. There needs to be a meaningful, collaborative relationship that’s tailored to every individual.

All of that said, I still think Gallant is the sacrificial lamb for the mistakes of the front office and ownership. While he definitely got more out of veterans like Kreider and Zibanejad, his inability to supplement their production with the development of Kakko and Lafrenière has put the team in a difficult situation.

Now, the Rangers are feeling the weight of their decisions. The Zibanejad and Fox extensions, Trocheck, Panarin, Trouba. Instead of playing the long game and gradually build up and acquiring the supporting cast, the Rangers had to acquiesce to their owner’s impatient demands for success.

That trickled down, it forced both Gorton and Drury to acquire more expensive talent that would raise the floor and expectations for the team at large. It forced Quinn and Gallant to coach every game with winning as the utmost priority

But now that the Rangers don’t have the cap space to acquire more talented players to make up for their most expensive piece’s deficiencies, they still can’t count on Kakko or Lafrenière to produce at a level commiserate with their draft pedigree.

So yes, the organization is at this difficult point because the owner can’t help but get in his own way. So while I don’t feel bad for Gallant getting fired, I don’t think putting the lion’s share of the blame on him is entirely fair. He’s an imperfect coach but he was doing what his superiors told him to.

Who’s fixing this mess?

There isn’t exactly a slam dunk hire sitting around waiting for a phone call. The best candidates of the last two cycles, Jim Montgomery, Bruce Cassidy and Barry Trotz all have new jobs now.

It’s funny, I mentioned Vigneault in that fatally doomed 2017 season earlier. I remember when the Boston Bruins fired Julien the morning of February 7th because I was going to the Ranger game against the Ducks that night. At dinner, I vividly recall saying “Julien’s a better coach, they’re probably not good enough to win the cup either way, but I’d hire him right now.”

It’s the exact same argument I half-heartedly made during the 2022 playoffs when the Islanders and Bruins fired Trotz and Cassidy respectively. Both were clearly better than what the Rangers had at the time, Gallant, and could close the gap between New York and the other contenders.

Too bad sports don’t work that way. Finding the right NHL coach is a game of musical chairs. There are always 32 chairs and 42 candidates. No matter how many years go by or organizations turn over, it’s very rare that a team goes outside the old boys club for a coach.

In my mind, the biggest issue the Rangers have is credibility. Right now, Larry Brooks of the New York Post and Arthur Staple of The Athletic are circling Laviolette as the most logical candidate because he’s gonna instantly walk into the room and command the respect of the group in the way a first time coach wouldn’t be able to.

Like most former Stanley Cup winning coaches, Laviolette is still trading on that one championship. Of course, that one championship came the first season after a lockout with third string goaltender Cam Ward going nuclear for a few months during the second term of the George W. Bush administration

That’s a pretty long time ago. Laviolette has been continuously in the NHL as a head coach every year since 2001. There wasn’t any time away from the game, time as an assistant or opportunities to refine his strategy. Typically to get another opportunity as a coach in the NFL, coaches have to go through the obligatory dog and pony show emphasizing what they learned since their last opportunity.

There is almost always a new coach bump when a team brings in a different voice. Laviolette’s record supports that, for the most part. Three cup final appearances over 21 years averages out to once every seven years with his most recent coming in 2017.

How many years apart are 2024 and 2017?

Anyway.

Since a hockey coach has far less impact on the outcome of a game than football, it’s a lot easier for teams to simply justify the hiring based on results at previous stops. There’s no glaring deficiencies in Laviolette’s tenure, he’s by all accounts a solid professional who occasionally overlooks young players in favor of lower risk veterans.

Sounds familiar.

All Laviolette’s emergence in a crop of mediocre candidates proves to me is that the Rangers aren’t looking to correct the fundamental organizational flaws. Of course, this is all subject to change, maybe Jay Leach of the Seattle Kraken or Chris, “Don’t call me chuck,” Knoblauch of the Hartford Wolf Pack ultimately gets the call.

However, Friedman also said “We’d have to see it to believe it,” about the Rangers potentially hiring an NHL coach without experience on Monday’s 32 Thoughts. My educated guess is that’s tied to the organization’s recent experience with Quinn and his tenure.

That said, I still think Quinn and subsequently Gallant were put in impossible situations to succeed. Unrealistic expectations from ownership down put both in situations where meeting goals was going to be a challenge. Yeah, I’m still harping on the owner and not the GM.

Finding credibility

The GM was handpicked by the owner and his consigliere, Glen Sather. Drury is there to do what he’s told, if he doesn’t, he’ll simply get discarded and another patsy will be brought in to execute the desired vision.

Bolting on credibility from other organizations has long been standard practice. Dolan will happily throw money at the problem instead of being patient. Instead of fostering an organic in house culture, the Rangers won’t put in the work and import talented players from other organizations.

I’d like to say the Rangers would have learned their lesson from the last two coaching hires. That it’s not so much the coach as it is the roster they’re given and the accompanying expectations.

Whoever the hire eventually is will reveal a lot about the organization’s thought process about the state of the roster. The problem with hiring someone like Laviolette is the assumption that he’d be able to do what made him successful in other stops with the Rangers without an understanding of what worked in those other places.

That was ultimately Gallant’s undoing. The Rangers felt since he was successful with Vegas, it’d be a simple one to one translation. The difference was the Golden Knights were equipped to play a tempo, straight line game reliant on foot speed.

The Rangers were not well situated to play Gallant’s preferred style and it fostered the disconnect between roster and coach.

This will likely be the last coach the Rangers hire during the peak production of Zibanejad, Panarin, Trocheck and Kreider. Two or three years from now when the next game of musical chairs starts, those four will likely be on the back nine of their respective NHL careers.

The next Rangers’ coach will have the severe task of trying to win a Stanley Cup on the back of that expensive veteran core while tapping into the next wave of young talent in Kakko, Chytil, Lafrenière, Miller, Schneider and those to come.

This high wire act has already undone two professional coaches with vastly different levels of experience and backgrounds. I don’t envy the next person to occupy the west bench at Madison Square Garden as coach.