AV Ousted On Broadway

For the first time since 2010, the New York Rangers will be missing the playoffs. Somebody needed to take the fall for the Rangers having a bad year, as they finished last in the Metro Division this season. The players won't be let go, so somebody had to take the bullet for the way this season went. That somebody was Alain Vigneault, who was let go on Saturday after the Rangers loss on the final day of the season. After five years in New York, AV is now looking for a new coaching job.

Vigneault had taken over in New York after spending seven years in Vancouver, six of which resulted in division titles. Once leaving Western Canada, AV came to New York to replace John Tortorella, who, ironically enough, ended up going to Vancouver to take over for Vigneault. During his time running the Rangers, New York won the Presidents Trophy once, the Stanley Cup Finals once and the Conference Finals twice. Those good years came right at the start of AV's tenure as the bench boss here in New York. The team made the playoffs the two years following that, getting ousted by the Penguins in the opening round and the Senators in the 2nd round. This year is the year where the wheels came of for AV.

New York finished the year in last place in the Metro division, going 34-39-9, making it the first time the team had failed to make the playoffs since 2010. Rangers management told the fans that they were going to start working on rebuilding the team. Some in the organization weren't sure where AV stood with the plans, but at one point, GM Scott Gorton had said in an interview with ESPN in March "I want to sit down with AV at the end of the year and figure out what's best for him and what's best for us, and where it goes. How he sees it, and how we see it."

Clearly AV wasn't in the plans to rebuild. Lets be fair here, Vigneault had done a very good job with this Rangers team, he won 226 games as coach, which was the 3rd most in the history of the franchise. What we kind of saw with AV this year was that he struggles to be able to really connect with the younger talent. He works great with veteran laden teams, he knows how to be able to communicate with older players, but he struggles a little with trying to make that same transition to younger guys. Out of the 1,246 games AV's coached in the NHL, he's won 648 of them. That tells me that he knows how to be able to coach and to win.

When it came to the Rangers, he started to lose control a little during the year. A perfect case in point of that was when he decided to try and call out Henrik Lundqvist, the Rangers best player. I called him out for it earlier in the year on this very blog. I think the Rangers organization kind of started to see that too, which is why they decided to part ways with him. AV did great with what he had on Broadway, but it seemed like it kind of ran its course.

Now the search is on to find the new bench boss/