New York Rangers: Would firing Alain Vigneault sooner solved the problem?

The New York Rangers had their worst season in eight years this past season. Could firing Vigneault after last season staved off the disaster?

Simply put, the Rangers front office did not expect to miss the postseason this year. Every move made last summer was oriented around contending for this season. The team dealt Derek Stepan to the Arizona Coyotes to free up $6.5 million in cap space. With that cap relief, the team was able to sign defenseman Kevin Shattenkirk to sure up the blue line. Whether or not the Stepan trade was unnecessary is a different argument.

But, the real problem with this year’s team was the defense. At every level, the unit was far and away one of the worst in the entire league. The Shattenkirk signing at best was inconclusive due to the defenseman’s meniscus injury. It was hard to judge just what the Rangers were getting because Shattenkirk played the entirety of the season on basically one leg.

Aside from the obvious injury issues, the unit had a structural issue. The way the defense’s system was supposed to work in theory was totally detached from reality. However, it was obvious that the team’s defensive issues from the 2016-2017 season were still there. In fact, they were even worse.

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This was in spite of the fact that the organization hired Lindy Ruff to replace Jeff Beuekeboom as the team’s defensive coach. This begs the question: If the team had fired Vigneault, could last year’s team have been better?

The dilemma

Now, for all of his warts as a hockey coach, Vigneault has had a measure of success in the NHL. Vigneault won three President’s trophies and made two Stanley Cup Finals appearances as a head coach in the NHL. An absolutely bad hockey coach would not have been able to have that level of sustained success.

Yet, a lot of the issues for the team from this season stem from his decisions. The largest problem hands down was player usage. Certain players were given roles seemingly at random on a nightly basis. The team lacked any cohesiveness and structure. In fact, for a majority of the season, the team would come out of the locker room and look totally unprepared to play.

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These mental mistakes all stem from a lack of leadership. Of course, this speaks to the type of coach Vigneault is. For the entirety of his coaching career, Vigneault was known as a hands off coach that relied on the players to police themselves. The problem with this mentality is that it does not work in a dressing room without veteran voices.

Last year’s team had some veterans, Ryan McDonagh, Rick Nash, Michael Grabner and Henrik Lundqvist have all been around the block more than once. Yet there was always this lingering sense of dread, that whatever could go wrong, would go wrong. There was never a time that Vigneault took ahold of the wheel when the season started to veer off course. The coach simply steered the team deeper into the storm.

The elephant in the room

The storm metaphor rings true for New York because of their total inability to address problems. Their ship was taking on water and instead of trying to dump off, the team was opening up bigger gaps. Down in the defensive zone, the Rangers could not get out of their own way. By design, the team’s system called for the defenseman to be on the same side of the net mouth. This of course would leave an open offensive player on the opposite side.

With certain personnel, this overload concept may have worked. In fact, early on in his Rangers tenure, Vigneault’s system worked fairly well. However, he no longer had strong defensive players that were able to quickly transition to offense. For the younger, less experienced players, they were being told to leave a player uncovered to try and spring offense. This was arguably the Rangers biggest flaw as a defense last season. Transitioning from defense to offense needs to be a quick and fluid process.

Instead, New York’s zone exits were clunky and troublesome all season long. That was even after acquiring Vladislav Namestnikov who is one of the best forwards in the entire NHL at zone exits.

How much is on the coach?

This is always the largest conundrum in the postmortem of any team in any sport. How much of a team’s failure falls on the coach even though the players are the ones in the game. Even in cases where a coach has legitimate grounds for termination, it is always easier to fire a coach than rebuild a roster.

Ironically, the Rangers have decided to do both at the same exact time. So, let’s jump into our time machine and say the team either does not bring Vigneault back after the meltdown against Ottawa last spring or fired him after the 2-8 start to the season. It is hard to predict how well New York would have done without knowing who the replacement would have been, but there are some safe assumptions to be made.

1. Instead of being broken up after one game, Shattenkirk and McDonagh are the team’s top pair.
2. Mika Zibanejad, Chris Kreider and Pavel Buchnevich serve as the team’s top line
3. Jesper Fast, David Desharnais and Michael Grabner serve as an elite checking line
4. Filip Chytil lasts more than 13 minutes at the start of the season
5. Nick Holden would not have played on the first pair at any point this season
6. Tony DeAngelo’s development would have had priority over playing Steven Kampfer or Holden
7. Brendan Smith would have been given a longer leash to figure out his problems
8. Henrik Lundqvist would not have taken the blame from the coach for the team’s struggles

Add up all of those improvements and the Rangers are a much different hockey team.

In conclusion

The Rangers were a deeply flawed hockey team last season. At best, they were probably a fringe playoff team. With their terrible injury luck, bad systems and odd deployment, they finished with the eighth worst record in hockey. Even with all of these terrible breaks, the Rangers were somehow still mathematically alive in the playoff hunt for a lot longer than they should have been.

There is a serious argument that if the team had just fired Vigneault earlier, the Rangers would not have had to blow up the team at the deadline. So, instead of starting over at basically square one this summer, the team would have sped up the process. Even from the jump of last season, it was clear that New York was not a serious team. Good hockey teams do not start the season with just two wins in their first ten games.

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With a coach that could have addressed these issues, the team would not have needed such drastic measures this summer. The Vigneault tenure was one of both triumph and utter destruction. The Rangers are uncertain ground right now, and it is due to the fact they tried to ride out the storm with their now former head coach.