Rumor: The next Rangers head coach will likely be Peter Laviolette

According to Elliotte Friedman, Peter Laviolette is likely to be the next New York Rangers head coach. Laviolette has been a leading candidate for both the Rangers and the Columbus Blue Jackets openings and it seems like the Blueshirts have the edge for the once former Ranger. Given the rumors and relative “low risk” of hiring a retread like Laviolette, this seemed to be the best answer for Chris Drury.

Of all the retread options available to Drury to be the next Rangers head coach, Laviolette is the best amongst them. He’s one of the leagues most successful head coaches with over 700 career wins and a Stanley Cup victory on his resume. He has two other trips to the Stanley Cup Final as well. While Rangers fans, myself included, may have wanted the club to go in a brand new direction, bringing Laviolette in makes a lot of sense.

Laviolette has shown ability to get a lot out of his teams within the first the first couple of seasons, including some deep postseason runs. When he took over the Flyers in December 2009, he turned the club around and sparked them to a Stanley Cup Finals appearance against the powerhouse Chicago Blackhawks.

In his third year in Nashville he took the Predators to a Cup Final appearance only to bow out against the Penguins thanks to some terrible goaltending from Pekka Rinne. As everyone knows in his second career coaching stop he delivered the Carolina Hurricanes only Cup in franchise history during his second year with the club. Clearly Laviolette has a method that often produces immediate results.

With Chris Drury and James Dolan looking for a quick Cup, bringing in a man as the next Rangers head coach who has shown he can produce quick turnarounds might be the spark that this franchise needs. Laviolette has shown a propensity of being able to get the most from his high end talent, Claude Giroux, while also being able to bring along young talent, Sean Courturier, which is something this franchise sorely needs.

If Laviolette is unable to get through to the likes of Artemi Panarin or Alexis Lafreniere then it frankly won’t matter who’s standing behind the Blueshirts bench. That would make it three coaches for each of them, mind you.

A potential hiring of Laviolette as the next Rangers head caoch will also put a clock on this franchise to win a Stanley Cup. It also puts a clock on the timeframe of how much longer Chris Drury will be in the big chair at MSG. If there’s no Cup or Stanley Cup Final appearance in the next three years, then the Rangers will likely be searching for a new GM and head coach yet again. Only this time they’ll be saddled with some pretty bad contracts and an aging core while being back at square one yet again.

Again, this is all hypothetical until the the official announcement of Laviolette as the next Rangers coach, but with Elliotte Friedman reporting this it seems all but certain that Laviolette will become the 37th head coach in Rangers history. Perhaps this is a good thing. Many were excited about David Quinn and/or Gerard Gallant. With no one overly excited about Laviolette as the next Rangers head coach, maybe it’s a sign of good things to come?