Shuttered Island

[text_output]Call it the inevitable, call it a relief, call it an end-of-season godsend.

Call it whatever you’d like, but Alain Vigneault will no longer be the coach of the New York Rangers.

After an utterly disastrous run of play this year which prompted General Manager Jeff Gorton to take a long, hard look at his roster and decide a rebuild is necessary, management has (rightfully) continued that process by bringing in a new voice/system for behind the bench.[/text_output]

[text_output]Though we’ve piled on Vigneault for the better part of the last two years, let’s give credit where credit is due for a moment.

There was a time when AV was the perfect guy for the roster the Rangers constructed, and life was good. The run to the Stanley Cup Finals in his first year remains magical and special. Good, coherent arguments could be made that a slightly more healthy Ryan McDonagh and healthy Mats Zuccarello are the only things that kept the Rangers from beating the Tampa Bay Lightning in the Eastern Conference Finals and, possibly, beating the Chicago Blackhawks in the Finals. That was the Rangers most complete team with AV, and injuries betrayed the team at the perfectly wrong time.

It’s impossible to take a more optimistic look at Vigneault’s tenure than that, because you’d be ignoring all the issues he either personally created, or objectively ignored.

Keith Yandle should’ve been the missing puzzle piece for the Rangers, and he was relegated to an afterthought and glorified footnote. Eric Staal was buried (an argument – and a good one at that – can be made that Staal shouldn’t have been acquired by the Rangers in the first place). Kevin Shattenkirk was never paired with Ryan McDonagh for what can only be described as “reasons”. A litany of young players failed to properly develop under AV’s watch. A reliance on veterans who weren’t capable of playing up to their potential due to either injuries or age crippled this team’s potential.

Really, it comes down to an inability to adjust; a stubbornness from Vigneault to stick with a system that simply stopped working when the league made an adjustment of their own. His defensive system cratered, and his response to trying to right the ship was giving more time to net-negatives like Dan Girardi, Marc Staal and Nick Holden instead of revamping his system entirely. When the Rangers made moves to acquire more versatile defenseman like Yandle and Shattenkirk, Vigneault still refused to make any sort of adjustment, which put Jeff Gorton in the awkward position of having acquired square pegs for AV’s round holes.

When Alain Vigneault signed an extension, I didn’t understand it. It didn’t seem truly necessary at the time. Sure, it’s rare for a coach to finish out a contract without any protecting years behind it, but had Vigneault’s recent track record earned that extension? The Rangers crashed out of the playoffs in five games just months before, lost Keith Yandle and Eric Staal to free agency and traded Derick Brassard. A transition was happening, and the Rangers could’ve either rolled the dice one more time with Vigneault for a year, or ventured into a different direction entirely.

Instead, the team locked him up, and we witnessed what happened in the Ottawa series that sent the Rangers crashing out of the playoffs, except this time, they weren’t out-played. They were simply out-coached.

It was time to move on. It was painful that it got to this point. Now, the pressure is on Jeff Gorton to identify the proper candidate and continue this rebuild.

But this was the step that was absolutely necessary. This team wouldn’t have been able to move forward with Alain Vigneault remaining behind the bench.

Step 1 is done. On to Step 2.[/text_output]