Gallant’s coaching record year by year and what it means for the Rangers

The second NHL coaching job

On June 20, 2014, the Florida Panthers announced that they were hiring Gallant as their new head  coach, replacing Peter Horachek who had been interim coach after the firing of Kevin Dineen.  The season before Gallant took over, the Panthers had finished with 66 points, 29th of 30 teams overall in the NHL.

At the time, one big reason that Gallant was brought on board was his relationship with Panthers top draft pick Jonathan Huberdeau who had played for him in Saint John.

In his first year in Florida, the Panthers finished with a record of 38-29-15 for 91 points, the fifth highest point total for the team in 21 years.  Despite the solid record, they finished seven points out of  a playoff spot.

The next season Gallant led the Panthers to a first place finish with a record of 47-26-9 and 103 points. The top scorer was the ageless Jaromir Jagr (43-years-old) who had 27 goals.  But he also had a plethora of young players led by 19-year-old  Aaron Ekblad,  20-year-old Aleksander Barkov along with 22-year-old Huberdeau.

They made the playoffs for only the second time in 15 years, but they were bounced in the first round by the New York Islanders.  Gallant was a finalist for the Jack Adams Trophy, finishing second.

Despite the first place finish and the playoff appearance, Gallant was fired the next season after only 22 games with an 11-10-1 record. He was replaced on November 27, 2016 by General Manager Tom Rowe who led the team to a sub .500 record and another year with no playoffs.

The firing was an embarrassment for the Panthers. Gallant was let go on the road after a loss in Raleigh to the Hurricanes.  The team bus left the arena without him and he was left on the sidewalk, forced to call a cab to go to the airport.

It was unclear what caused Gallant to be fired.  There was some speculation that he didn’t embrace analytics and as a result clashed with Rowe, the new GM.   This what Gallant told ESPN after the firing.

“I wasn’t fired because of analytics,  I loved coaching the Florida Panthers and I’m a stubborn guy at times; maybe I said a little too much, maybe I gave my opinion a little bit too much. Maybe when they asked for my opinion, I have an honest opinion and sometimes it doesn’t help you. Maybe it wasn’t always what they wanted to hear. I don’t know where it went from there …”

Unprecedented success for an expansion team

Gallant didn’t have to wait long for his next head coaching job with Vegas GM George McPhee picking him to steer the newest entry to the NHL.  What no one could expect was that the Vegas Golden Knights would not only finish first with a 51-24-7 record, but they would go all the way to the Stanley Cup Final where they would lose to the Washington Capitals in five games.

Gallant has to get a lot of the credit for taking a team of unwanted players and motivating them to be the hardest working team in the NHL. It didn’t hurt to have Marc-Andre Fleury in net, but for his coaching job he won the Jack Adams Award.

In his second year in Vegas, the Knights dropped to third place with a record of 43-32-7 and 93 points and lost in the playoffs to San Jose in the first round.  They weren’t helped by an egregious call against the Golden Knights in Game Seven when Cody Eakin was called for a five minute major that was an obvious error.  The Knights were up by three goals with 11 minutes left in the series when the penalty was called and the San Jose Sharks scored four goals to take the lead and win the series by taking the game in overtime.

The question is whether Vegas would have fired Gallant the next season if his team had gone farther in the playoffs.  The Golden Knights fired Gallant on January 15, 2020, 49 games into the season with the team just three points out of a playoff spot.  True, Vegas had declined every year since their spectacular debut, but they had also spent time at the top of the Pacific Division and were not having an awful season.

It’s clear that Vegas GM Kelly McCrimmon, a former WHL coach for 16 years, was enamored of Peter DeBoer who had been fired earlier by the San Jose Sharks.  What it meant was that for the third time in three NHL coaching job, Gerard Gallant had been fired in his third season with the team.

That led to he longest gap in his career without a job in hockey, but when he came back, he was a winner yet again.