It’s the silly season of the NHL. General managers, coaches, and players alike are about to be sent here, there, and everywhere in an attempt to keep their jobs in this sport. For the Rangers, the current priority remains to search for the next head coach for the franchise after it was announced that Gerard Gallant will not be returning next season, departing by “mutual consent”.
Changes in this sport often have a knock-on effect and we can show that perfectly with the departure of Kyle Dubas from the Toronto Maple Leafs organization as general manager. When a GM leaves a team, it raises questions all around the club. For example, if the coach is not gone alongside the GM, how long does the coach have until the new guy comes in and perhaps decides to make a change?
I mention that because Sheldon Keefe, the head coach of the Toronto Maple Leafs at the time of writing, was hired by Dubas. If he was to get the axe in Toronto, there is every expectation that he would get an interview in New York after he finally got that star-studded roster through their first-round curse and into the second round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs for the first time in 19 years. We’ve also been able to see his style up front as fans in the All or Nothing documentary.
Again, working with Auston Matthews, John Tavares, Mitchell Marner, and some of the best names in sports means that he has a ton of experience when it comes to managing the big names on his roster. Being in Toronto, he’s also dealt with the high pressure of one of the major markets in the hockey world. It’s a candidate that would have a lot of good qualities to examine when considering him. Whether it should happen or not will depend.
On the other side of the same coin, if Keefe is replaced in Toronto, it means that one of the potential candidates for the New York Rangers job will be off the market. Keefe is still the boss in Toronto so there are no rumors, but for argument’s sake let’s say Peter Laviolette gets the job in Ontario. It means he can no longer be considered the next coach of the New York Rangers for obvious reasons.
There may also be potential coaching candidates that want to move into the management side of the game as we saw with Barry Trotz in Nashville taking over from long-term Predators general manager David Poile. There’s a chance that some of those coaches may be sick and tired of getting thrown out the door and back onto the carousel that is the coaching tree in the NHL and want a more stable management role somewhere.
This may all be worrying for nothing as the Rangers are getting ready to offer the job to Kris Knoblauch of the Hartford Wolf Pack, or it may be justified when Keefe gets fired and someone that had been heavily linked to the job from the outside such as Peter Laviolette gets hired by the Maple Leafs. At the end of the day, it’s in Chris Drury’s hands to get the best candidate in the door as soon as he can.