Joe's Reaction of the Week: Bad Season or Lost Season?

Is this a just a bad season for the New York Rangers? Or is it a lost season?

Yes, there is a difference between the two.

Peter Laviolette was recently back in our faces, talking about his tenure with the New York Rangers with friend of the site Jonny Lazarus.

While I don't want to get into the specifics about what he said—the opinions of a coach who refused to go in a locker room when things were hard could not be more invalid—it did remind me of something our good friend Chip said to me recently:

"There is a difference between a bad season and a lost season."

Two years ago was a lost season. Laviolette had zero interest in doing anything for the organization from really November on. He knew he was a dead man walking, and he elected to make decisions that actively harmed both the short- and long-term interests of the team.

Healthy scratching Gabe Perreault for three straight games when he first came up, not giving Alexis Lafrenière looks on the power play (Which he ironically defended by saying he spoke to Laf about a lot ... in a season where he didn't go into the locker room after games? Alrighty then), sitting kids in order to play Jonny Brodzinski on the second line, and so much more.

Not one of those things helped the Rangers in the short term, and they all actively harmed the Rangers long term.

Now, as I said above, Laviolette was a dead man walking and he knew it. He wanted to distance himself from the team in a major way to help ensure he could get some interviews down the road, which worked out really well for him. (Yes, I am still bitter.)

But the bigger point here is it was already a bad season. Laviolette's decisions were stupid at best and vindictive at worst, and put the Rangers in a position where they were going to miss the playoffs, ended up not having their first round pick, and got zero data on young players they needed to make decisions about that summer.

That might be why, in part, Urho Vaakanainen (to a lesser extent) and Juuso Parssinen (to a major extent) got two-year contract extensions that sort of made everyone shake their heads. And it forced a conversation that could have been done in a much more data-driven way on some of these guys to instead be done blindly.

Which brings us to this year.