What’s the value of an NHL coach?
The hockey offseason reaches a frustratingly long apex in mid-August when there’s a dearth of news. For all intents and purposes, the insiders are at the cabin, team executives are taking vacation time and there’s nothing to do but argue online.
Now, with NHL training camps open and pre-season games on TV, the excitement or dread — depending on who you root for— is beginning to build. For the New York Rangers, one of the youngest teams in the NHL, expectations are high, fairly or not.
The former head coach, general manager and team president were all dismissed during the spring for failing to make the playoffs according to the official record. While I may personally be skeptical of that narrative, there is a clear playoff mandate for the 2021–2022 New York Rangers.
Unfortunately for the Rangers, the highly-anticipated blockbuster trade didn’t manifest over the summer. Jack Eichel of the Buffalo Sabres still needs neck surgery and wouldn’t be able to play until January at the earliest if he were acquired as soon as you finished reading this sentence.
Instead, the Rangers’ brain trust opted to take a very role-oriented approach to the roster.
More specifically, the front office put an emphasis on acquiring players to fill one specific role. Barclay Goodrow for puck retrievals, Ryan Reaves for punching people, Sammy Blais for existing on the 2019 Stanley Cup champion Blues and Patrik Nemeth for being a third-pair defenseman who speaks Swedish.
Argue the merits of those moves, I have, ad nauseam. From my perspective, it seems like the front office believes better coaching will produce better results from the talent that was already in place last year. For the better part of four seasons, New York was using draft capital to fill out the organizational depth chart.
Now, Chris Drury will stake the 2021–2022 season on that draft capital panning out. In terms of pre-NHL experience, few teams can match what Gerard Gallant will have at his disposal. However, development isn’t linear and strong play won’t necessarily produce results.
If the Rangers are going to make the playoffs, the brunt of the burden will fall on Alexis Lafreniére, Kaapo Kakko and Vitali Kravtsov. That trio is tasked with replacing now St. Louis Blues forward Pavel Buchnevich’s point per game pace.
For those three top ten picks to produce, they’ll need a better environment than what the team was last season. The spiral at the end of last season validated my concerns about the culture of the team. Pretty simply, there was none, the players were left to their own devices and had no resilience in difficult situations.
Gallant’s attitude
The biggest difference to me between Gallant and Quinn is the former’s experience. The former NHL grinder has nine years of bench boss experience with professionals. Quinn was a college coach and in over his head pretty badly when it came to personality management.
Every single NHL coach ever hired has emphasized “playing hard” the way Gallant has so far. But, at the very least I feel like Gallant actually means it, unlike Quinn. When Quinn said it and the follow-up game was a stinker, the team seemed to be tuning him out.
Gallant is a coach who feels like he has a firm grasp on what’s required of him for a team to be successful. To take the expansion Vegas Golden Knights to the Cup final in the team’s first year of existence is a testament to Gallant’s ability to push the right buttons.
Instead of passive-aggressively bemoaning his team’s style of play like Quinn, Gallant actually will get the desired play. Gallant has burned out quickly in all three previous NHL coaching stops, on average three seasons, but he can get the Rangers going in the right direction.
That’s the dirty secret I’ve come to terms with over the course of the summer. The Rangers likely won’t be a genuine Stanley Cup contender for several years because of the moves during this past offseason. There’s simply too much dead weight that’ll be exposed against good teams.
However, Gallant imprinting upon these young impressionable players who desperately need direction will be an invaluable service. Gallant last coached the Florida Panthers during the 2016–2017 and that team didn’t make the playoffs until the 2021 season.
That team of course features the tandem of Aleksander Barkov and Jonathan Huberdeau who were both in their early 20s under Gallant. The hope is that Kakko and Lafreniére can reach that level of production down the road on a contender.
Gallant’s teams
Gallant’s Golden Knights played at the fourth-fastest tempo in the entire league for stretches of his tenure. For context, in his last full season in the desert Vegas created 62.52 scoring chances per 60 minutes of five-on-five ice time. Comparably, Quinn’s 2021 Rangers created 49.13 per 60 minutes.
To be fair, those Golden Knight teams were uniquely equipped to play at such a frantic pace. It’s hard to imagine a Rangers’ team that features Artemi Panarin in such a key role turning games into a track meet. In fact, that’d be minimizing one of Panarin’s best skills, zone entries.
My biggest complaint of Quinn’s entire tenure was the lack of team structure. The players often looked to be playing out of structure or freelancing entirely far too often. It’s why the team struggled in the neutral zone and struggled to sustain offensive pressure against good defensive teams.
New York was able to win open-ended games against teams that lacked defensive structure last season under Quinn. But, against the New York Islanders and Boston Bruins, the Rangers could not get the puck to quality areas of the ice, and the goals dried up.
That’s the barometer of success for the Rangers under Gallant. The team needs to create scoring chances consistently even when the easy ones aren’t there. Minimize the zone entries with a single scoring chance, get the puck below the goal line, and incorporate defensemen.
To be competitive in today’s NHL, a team needs to score. Period.
It’s pretty difficult for statisticians to quantify the impact of coaches on their respective teams. Micah Blake McCurdy of Hockeyviz.com has a statistical model that measures the impact of a coach on expected goals. However, even McCurdy himself admits we don’t have enough data to understand a coach’s direct impact.
Defense and goaltending have value, but goals are what win hockey games. It is impossible to win a game 0–0, it’s why offense will always be more valuable. This includes the bottom six which has a grand total of 152 goals in 1491 career NHL games.
Yes, Filip Chytil and Kravtsov should improve this ratio. However, banking on development is no guarantee. Chytil is in a crucial fourth season and Kravtsov has all of 20 NHL games of experience to his name. There will be growing pains, count on it.
The early part of the season
Anytime a new coach is installing systems, it will take time for the team to fall into place. If you’ll recall, the Rangers were outscored 20 to 37 under Alain Vigneault and 26 to 35 under Quinn in their first Octobers as coach.
Out of the gate, there will be a weird in-between. Until the players are able to get into a routine of what the systems require of them, it’ll likely result in disjointed play. You know those slow starts under Quinn where the other team scores within the first five minutes and the Rangers play catch up the rest of the way?
Expect some of that for at least the first couple of weeks of the season. We’ll know pretty quickly if Gallant’s people skills assuage the early hiccups. Under Quinn, the slightest inconvenience or mistake would snowball into a disaster.
The Rangers need buttons pushed in the right way. The hope is that Gallant’s coaching style will build up the confidence in the team’s young players. Whether or not Kakko, Lafreniére and Kravtsov reach their potential is the scale on which Gallant will be graded.
No matter what, all I ask out of Gallant is fairness in his usage of players. Veteran or rookie, if the player is consistently making mistakes, playing outside of structure, or causing problems behind the scenes, it cannot arbitrarily stand because Gallant likes them.
Quinn was guilty of playing favorites and allowing some players immunity from reduced ice time. Coming off of a serious bout with Covid-19, there was no way Quinn should’ve allowed Mika Zibanejad to play as much as he did in the first half of last season.
Sure, some of Gallant’s quotes to the media make me want to put my head through a wall because they’re just outright fallacies. But, as I wrote in June, I’m genuinely excited for someone other than Quinn to be behind the Rangers’ bench.
At the very least, I knew Quinn wasn’t the right coach for New York. I advocated for Gallant’s hire during last season to get the ball rolling on the future, I was just a couple of months off on my timeline.
A hockey coach’s impact is likely the least of the four major North American sports. The Rangers’ front office is hoping the difference between the 28th best coach in the league and the 12th best coach in the league is the bar to clear to qualify for postseason play. Time will tell if their gamble pays off.
