2025 Rangers Report Card: The Coaches

This post is part of an ongoing series of Rangers Report Cards, grading the performance of each member of the 2024-25 New York Rangers. To view more report cards in this series, go here.

Oh boy, what a difference a year makes.

When Peter Laviolette was announced as the new head coach of the New York Rangers prior to the 2023-24 season, you'd have been hard pressed to find any truly enthusiastic reactions. Laviolette was a retread's retread, having coached five different franchises prior to joining the Rangers, including four of the other teams in the Metropolitan Division. He'd worn out his welcome in Washington after only three seasons, one of them shortened by COVID-19, prompting the Capitals to go in a completely new direction by bringing in Spencer Carberry, who'd never helmed an NHL bench before.

Those of us who predicted mediocrity, at best, from Laviolette had a lot of crow to eat after last year. In the regular season, he pushed all the right buttons, leading the Rangers to an all-time franchise best 55-23-4 record and 114 points, capturing the President's Trophy in the process. That luck ran out against the Florida Panthers in the Eastern Conference Final, around the same time that Laviolette stopped pushing all the right buttons, as evidenced by his stubborn insistence to keep playing an injured Jacob Trouba in high-leverage matchups that he couldn't handle.

Some stubbornness is baked into the cake with retread coaches like Laviolette. You just hope it doesn't become too much of a problem.

Unfortunately, it would.

Expectations

After a franchise-best regular season and a trip to the Eastern Conference Final, coming up two wins short of a Stanley Cup Final birth again, expectations for the Laviolette and the Rangers in 2024-25 were to get over that Eastern Conference Final hump, and over the final finish line to capture their first Cup since 1994.

The Rangers returned largely the same group of players from the previous season, so the charge for Laviolette was to get more out of them, and to use the experience and disappointment of last season to drive them further than the franchise had been since 2013-14.

Having Cup-or-bust expectations are never easy, but Laviolette knew what he was signing up for when he took over leading the team after two years under Gerard Gallant, one of which ended in the Eastern Conference Final and the other of which ended in an embarrassing first round exit at the hands of the New Jersey Devils. But this was the argument for a veteran coach who'd won a Cup before like Laviolette: that he'd been there, and done that, and that the team would benefit from an experienced guiding hand.

Performance

Well, that really could not have gone worse, could it?

This isn't to say that I don't have some sympathy for Laviolette and his staff. If you're only looking at the team's record when Chris Drury dropped his infamous Memo in November, they were a winning team. Drury was correct, however, in his diagnosis that the team was not good enough to achieve their real goal of winning the Stanley Cup, despite their record at the time. The cracks were already showing, the product of problems in roster construction, decline in player performance, and outside drama that was brought into the locker room by players like Jacob Trouba, frustrated with the attempt Drury made to trade him over the summer.

Then, the players quit, as Larry Brooks of the New York Post described it, "on their coach, they have quit on the organization, they have quit on each other." It was evident in their play. It was evident in their effort or, more specifically, their lack thereof. It's doubtful that there was anything Laviolette could have done at that time to right the ship. That's not so much an indictment of Laviolette as it is of the players. I don't think the incarnate combined spirts of Vince Lombardi, Red Auerbach, Knute Rockne, and Scotty Bowman (I know he's not dead, just go with me here) could have saved this self-sabotaging mess of a Rangers team.

But, the buck for on-ice performance stops with the head coach. As Larry Brooks contended in the piece quoted from above, the players quitting on their coach and everyone else was going to get the coach fired. I wrote on Dec. 30, 2024, that Peter Laviolette needed needed to go right then and there, even if the season up to that point was not his fault. And it wasn't. And, for the record, I understand the eminently logical arguments for why, even if the season was doomed (and, perhaps, especially because the season was doomed), it made more sense to stick it out with Laviolette behind the bench. But what we would see over the next several months and in the remaining games would only make clear why, even though Laviolette had been failed by a group of quitters, he was a failure all his own, too.

In this case, it's not as much the changes that Laviolette made as it was the ones he didn't. Power play one was a disaster for the vast majority of the season, but he largely stuck with the same group in the same configuration for the rest of the ride. It was obvious to anyone with eyes to see that Ryan Lindgren was an anchor tied to the Rangers' most talented defenseman, Adam Fox. But Laviolette stuck with that pairing until Lindgren was shipped to Colorado, much as he stuck with the K'Andre Miller-Jacob Trouba pairing long past its expiration date. The man-on-man defensive structure that Laviolette ran clearly wasn't working, either because of problems in the scheme, the personnel asked to execute it, or both. And yet, he stubbornly refused to make any adjustments, continuing to try to force the square peg of that man-on-man system into the square hole of the Rangers roster.

The final straw was healthy scratching top prospect Gabe Perreault for a three game stretch at the end of the season, after Perreault had signed and the Rangers burned a year of his entry-level contract. The decision to scratch one of the few players who is certainly a huge part of the Rangers' future is galling enough, but to do it under the harebrained theory that he was somehow icing the best possible lineup to fight against the inevitable tide of elimination from playoff contention was ludicrous, both from a near-term and a long-term perspective.

In the end, Peter Laviolette quit just as much as the players did. He was clearly check out by the end, clearly knowing he was going to be summarily fired when the flame of this lost season was finally extinguished. There might not have been much, if there was anything, he could have done to save this Rangers season. But that doesn't excuse in any way his poor performance, even given that reality.

This Report Card is title "The Coaches," and not just "Peter Laviolette," so I suppose I should say a few words about Phil Housley, Dan Muse, and Michael Peca. First, as Joe and I discussed before on the podcast, the boss is the boss. And the assistant coaches were not the boss. If you want to attach some blame to them for this season, I'm not going to fight you. But they were doing what Peter Laviolette wanted, implementing his system, running his power play, running his penalty kill, running his defensive structure, and running his offensive scheme.

This isn't to say they're all equally absolved. There's a reason, after all, that Phil Housely, who handled this team's abysmal defense, was fired along with Laviolette, and both Muse and Peca were given opportunities to interview for a forward-going role with the Rangers. Peca has already joined Jeff Blashill's staff in Chicago, and will probably get a head coaching opportunity somewhere in the near future. Dan Muse is still under contract with the Rangers, and might join new head coach Mike Sullivan's staff, which has yet to be announced. There's still a part of me that wanted to see Peca get a chance to see what he could do as interim head coach with the Rangers. But, again, I understand why that didn't happen.

Grades

Author Grade: F

Banter Consensus: F

Final Evaluation

It's not Peter Laviolette's fault that a group of this team's core players decided to give up in a fit of pique over Drury's memo. There are some things that even the greatest head coaches in the history of sport could not overcome, and Laviolette is certainly not one of those. But none of that excuses the decisions Laviolette made along the way that made things worse, or that were bafflingly stupid and shortsighted, like refusing to play Gabe Perreault through the end of the regular season. His "screw it, I'm gone anyway, so I'll do what I want" attitude made a bad situation even worse. And for that, he was a failure, and we should be glad he's no longer the head coach of the New York Rangers.