Is it ‘now’ for the New York Rangers under Gerard Gallant?

Scott Burnside
Scott Burnside
Jan 4, 2022, 08:00 EST
Is it ‘now’ for the New York Rangers under Gerard Gallant?

There is one question every emerging NHL team asks itself along the road to success: when is ‘now’?

It’s easily asked but not easily answered.

When is a team ready to be defined by more than just its promise?

When is a team ready to be more than just young and talented?

Sometimes the answer to another question has to be answered first, though, and that is ‘do we have the right coach for now?’

In New York these days the answers to lots and lots of questions about the New York Rangers seem to be being answered in a positive fashion.

And whether the Rangers are ahead of schedule or not – we’ll admit we had no sense this team was quite ready for now – it all flows from first-year head coach Gerard Gallant.

Coming off an impressive 4-1 win against the Oilers on Monday after impressively sweeping back to back games against the two-time defending Stanley Cup champion Tampa Bay Lightning over the weekend — including a convincing 4-0 win on Sunday — the Rangers are now tied with the Washington Capitals for the most points in the NHL.

The Rangers are not, as many — including myself — expected, scrabbling for a playoff spot as we approach the midpoint of the season, in spite of the fact the average age of the team’s forwards (according to CapFriendly.com) is 26.3 years, while the blue line corps clock in at a fresh-faced 23.6 average age. Goaltending? Youthful as well as starter and the team’s first-half MVP, Igor Shesterkin, is 26 and backup Alexandar Georgiev is only one year younger.

“I think so far the first 30 games, we’ve definitely taken a step here and things are going well, but it’s a long season yet to go,” Gallant said during a recent conversation. “We’ve got to continue to get better.

“We’re not a perfect team by no means, but we find ways to win hockey games and it’s just trying to be consistent and getting everybody on the right page, and so far it’s been pretty good for us.”

Gallant saw his tenure in Las Vegas – more on the Golden Knights in a moment – end in mid-January 2020, almost exactly two months before the NHL paused in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Gallant had other offers to join NHL teams along the way and naturally he spoke to his peers about what it was like to coach both in the bubble during the summer of ’20 and during last season’s COVID-truncated 2020-21 season.

But this season is a first for Gallant in dealing with what is the daily guessing game as to what new curve ball will be thrown at NHL coaches and their teams. Thus far he has navigated these treacherous waters with Gallant-like aplomb, as witnessed by this weekend’s sweep of Tampa Bay, which included the absence of top four defender Ryan Lindgren and sniper Artemi Panarin.

“Turk is doing the job I thought he would,” one longtime NHL executive said of Gallant.

Because the Rangers straddle that line between ‘on the rise’ like say a Detroit or Buffalo or Ottawa and ‘veteran contender’ like Tampa Bay or Pittsburgh or Washington, Gallant’s challenges are in some ways different than many other coaches in the league in terms of dealing with the COVID-19 fallout.

“I think like every coach, we like to practice and we like to do things on the ice,” Gallant said. “And that’s a big part of coaching but you’re having to make adjustments with players not being there because of the COVID and missing some time.”

So that means a little more video time in terms of teaching tools.

“I’m just saying that you don’t get as much practice time as you’d like, there’s no doubt about that,” Gallant said. “And after Christmas, with the schedule the games that are going to have to be made up, and it’s definitely going to be very, very, very little practice time so we’ll adjust to that.

“Just make adjustments day to day and you can’t worry about the things you can’t do.”

There is, of course, a blank slate element to this Ranger roster because of its youthfulness, as was there was when Gallant took over the Golden Knights bench in their inaugural season. shockingly guiding them to the Stanley Cup Final. But they represent very different coaching challenges.

“Definitely different,” Gallant said. “I mean it’s 100 percent different. The Vegas team was a very experienced team full of veteran players that had a lot of NHL games under their belt. Better team than we thought it was going to be. obviously. They really jelled together. We had a lot of veteran experience.

“Coming to this team, we had some real good veterans at the top end, but we’ve got a lot of young players as everybody knows. And they’re still making kid mistakes and that happens in parts of their games. But they’re getting better and they’re getting more experience. And the only way you get experience is playing games at the NHL level.

“I’ve loved what I’ve seen with our young players, our young core of players and like I said the more ice time they get the better our team’s going to be.”

Long-time national and Rangers analyst Joe Micheletti chooses his words carefully when asked if he’s surprised at what he’s seen from the Rangers to this point in the season.

Everyone knew the Rangers had a boatload of talented young players. But because they’re young, there is no straight line when it comes to taking the next step that all teams require of their foundational talent, especially when there are as many key young ingredients as there are on the Ranger roster.

Micheletti likes to point to a current Ranger veteran Mika Zibanejad, who was the sixth overall pick by Ottawa in 2011. In his first three seasons after being acquired by the Rangers he recorded 37, 47 and then 74 points, en route to becoming an elite NHL center. However, there was plenty of wondering about when, when, when it was finally going to happen for him.

“Three years, four years, five years is a lot of time for young players to be able to mature both mentally and physically,” Micheletti said.

But what about kids that are at the point Zibanejad was at when he first came to New York or who are even less experienced, who are even younger?

“I couldn’t realistically say this is going to be a top five team,” Micheletti acknowledged.

Could they be significantly improved? Sure. But that’s a bar that’s set relatively low since they have not made the playoffs in a regular season since 2017 (they were swept in the play-in round by Carolina during the 2020 bubble playoffs).

But Shesterkin has been lights-out, Micheletti said.

 “Adam Fox is better this year than he was a year ago when he won the Norris,” he added.

And there’s been the addition of experienced hard-nosed players like Barclay Goodrow, who won back-to-back Cups with Tampa Bay and Ryan Reaves, who Gallant also coached with the Golden Knights.

But what’s really different about this team is the coaching. And the coaching has produced a team that plays a different way and ergo is a different team altogether.

“It hasn’t been easy,” Micheletti said. “But this is a different look team that we didn’t see a year ago.”

It seems fair to say that not every coach can coach young. And maybe that’s doubly so when a young team is expected to win. To do so takes considerable trust on both sides of the ledger.

So, sure, the Ranger kids, like everyone else on the roster, has had to prove to Gallant and his staff they belong and they deserve what they get. But Gallant has to coach true. He has to do what he says he’s going to do and then not change his mind because he gets nervous because, damn, these are just kids.

“The kids have to be part of it,” Micheletti said.

What Gallant has done straddling the line of letting his young players learn in part by making mistakes, but at the same time holding them to a high standard because this team is all about the wins — as opposed to other teams, where moral victories are easier to come by than real ones — well, that’s impressive.

“What he has established with this team is that the young guys have a responsibility on the team for them to win,” Micheletti said. “That’s your responsibility and if you’re not playing there, then your minutes are going to be taken away from you and sometimes you won’t be in the lineup.”

In some ways Gallant is cut from a different cloth than many of his contemporaries.

He doesn’t have nor has he cultivated the art of story-telling for the media. He doesn’t talk the game with the eloquence that many coaches do because it’s not important for him to do so.

He’s known as a players’ coach, but he’s not here to be their pals.

Micheletti asked Gallant early in the coach’s tenure if he’d been talking to the players leading up to training camp or visited any of them in the offseason…nope.

“He said: ‘I’ll see them when we all get here. We’ll get to know each other on the bench,’” Micheletti recalled. “That’s him. He’s about as old school as it gets.

“I think he’s the most unique coach in the league in that respect. He doesn’t feel any pressure himself that he has to be like every other coach in the league. He has a very strong belief in who he is. To me there’s nobody else in the league who coaches like this.”

There is a chicken/egg element to all of this.

Do players with top-end pedigree like Alexis Lafreniere, the first overall pick in the 2020 NHL Draft, or Kaapo Kakko the second overall pick the year before, or K’Andre Miller the 22nd overall pick in 2018, adjust as well as they have under Gallant to having their ice time modified and their roles expanded or reduced periodically if the team isn’t having success? Or has the team enjoyed the success it has in part because those players have selflessly accepted those realities?

Gallant said they talk often as a group about steps forward and what that means on a nightly basis.

“We want these players to be a big part of our group — and they are a big part of our group — but when things aren’t going as well, you know most of these kids have only played 80-125 games,” Gallant said. “So you’ve got to make sure that they’re getting an opportunity, but also we’re talking about a team that wants to win every night, so the first priority is to win hockey games.”

On lots of teams, those kinds of kids get preferential treatment because management has invested high picks and lots of money banking on their success. But the Rangers have just emerged from a period of upheaval in part because they haven’t been a playoff team.

GM Jeff Gorton and president John Davidson were shockingly ousted by ownership with days left in last season. Chris Drury took over as GM and made a coaching change, firing David Quinn and replacing him with Gallant.

This is Gallant’s show.

“We talk about it all the time with the kids,” Gallant said. “We want to make everybody better players, but it’s all about winning the two points on that evening. And the kids know that.

“It’s about team; it’s not about Chris Kreider, it’s not about Shesterkin or Panarin; it’s about 23 guys on our team and whoever’s going to help us get those two points that night. Whoever’s playing the best hockey is going to be out there playing hockey. So that’s the way we go about it. And it doesn’t matter who it is, we want to win hockey games. And it’s all about the 23 men and the next guy up ready to go and ready to play hard for us and try and win these games.”

It’s not for Gallant to say whether the time is now for this team.

Lots of hockey left to play for that to be revealed. But what is clear is that no one on that Ranger team, no matter how young or how many NHL games they have under their belt, will offer any surprise at how this has unfolded.

“I think they believe in our team, that it’s a real good hockey team,” Gallant said. “I don’t think they believe that we’re lucky to be where we’re at in the standings right now.

“So as long as everybody continues to do their job and paly the way they’re playing I have no issue with our team continuing to win the way we’re winning.”

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