The Rangers go to their fourth coach since the 2020-21 season.
Peter Laviolette was relieved of his training duties on Saturday, the team announced, after the Rangers could not be classified for the playoffs in their second season to the helm. The Blueshirts became the sixth team to hire and say goodbye to the veteran coach, who ends his New York mandate with a regular season record of 94-59-11 and a Playoffs 10-5-1 record.
The associated chief coach Phil Housley was also fired, according to the team.
This is the second consecutive coach of the Rangers to be fired after only two campaigns, with Laviolette coinciding with the timeline of his predecessor Gerard Gallant. Before Gallant, David Quinn (2018-2021) was the last coach of the Rangers to last more than two seasons behind the Rangers Bank.
Everything seemed to go well in the first Laviolette season with the Rangers.
The Rangers not only established franchise records for victories (55) and points (114) in a single season, but the club won the presidents trophy and moved away two victories from a final position of the Stanley Cup for the second time in three seasons in a final defeat of the East Conference against the eventual champions of the Stanley Cup, the Florida Panthers.
The Rangers also led the entire NHL in Victorias back (28) under Laviolette in 2023-24.
Laviolette became the first chief coach in the NHL’s story to guide six different teams to the Stanley Cup playoffs.
Everything seemed to go wrong this season for the Rangers, who have a tremendous step back in all facets of their game, since the postseason for the first time in four years were lost.
While there was not much that Laviolette could do about the outer noise that hunched on the locker room costumes since the beginning of the season, the 60 -year -old did not make exactly drastic changes in the alignment or the system to effectively remove the houses of blue from his funk.
Laviolette often trapped by her veteran players and kept faith in what had worked in the past despite little success. However, most of the fault of this disastrous season does not seem to fall on Laviolette’s shoulders.
That belongs to the construction of the President of the President and General Manager Chris Dury, as well as the insufficient efforts of the marquee players.
