The New York Rangers have finally had enough. After posting a 39-36-7 record during the 2024-25 regular season, general manager Chris Drury has announced the dismissal of head coach Peter Laviolette.
“After finishing with the best regular season record in the NHL a year ago and making a trip to the Eastern Conference Final, we came into this season with high expectations for ourselves,” Drury’s statement read in part. “Quite simply, we failed to meet those expectations. We must all do better – myself included. As we head into next season and beyond, I felt that a change was necessary in order to give us the best chance to achieve our goals as an organization. Our search for a new head coach will begin immediately.”
Associate head coach Phil Housley was also relieved of his duties.
It has been an up-and-down administration for Laviolette in Manhattan. Last season, they won the Presidents’ Trophy with 114 points and cruised through the start of the playoffs, sweeping Laviolette’s former team, the Washington Capitals, and downing the Carolina Hurricanes in six games before falling to the Florida Panthers in the conference finals.
But 2024-25 was a cruel reversal. There was a systemic downturn in player performances, most acutely in 31-year-old Mika Zibanejad and 33-year-old Chris Kreider. The Rangers were outscored 52 goals to 43 when Zibanejad was on the ice during five-on-five play.
New York’s power play ranked third place in 2023-24 but dropped to 28th this season as shot volume and finishing percentages dropped. Puck possession during even-strength play declined as well, from even in 2024-25 to 48.9 in 2024-25, when measured by shot attempts.
Off the ice there has been tumult as well.
Last summer, Drury played hardball to move Barclay Goodrow, a well-liked but no longer viable winger. The Rangers put him on waivers with the apparent foreknowledge that San Jose – who were on Goodrow’s no-trade list – would claim him. Rangers insiders described that move as having a chilling effect on the team, compounded when management let it be known they were willing to part with Ranger institution Kreider as well as team captain and 2024 Mark Messier Leadership Award winner Jacob Trouba. Kreider was not moved, but Trouba was shipped to Anaheim in December.
Meanwhile, Laviolette had become liberal with punitive healthy scratches. An early target: 23-year-old Kaapo Kakko. The Finnish forward was not demure about the situation. “I know you’ve got to do something as a coach when you’re losing games,” Kakko said after missing games in December, “but I think it’s just easy to pick a young guy and boot him out.”
That quote was unacceptable to the front office. The team traded him to Seattle a day later.
The intervention did not help. The team kept losing. In December they recorded just 23 percent of the available points. Here are the Metropolitan division points percentages by month:
| Team | Oct | Nov | Dec | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Capitals | 0.78 | 0.70 | 0.65 | 0.79 | 0.63 | 0.68 | 0.44 |
| Devils | 0.62 | 0.64 | 0.65 | 0.50 | 0.43 | 0.50 | 0.33 |
| Hurricanes | 0.78 | 0.63 | 0.50 | 0.73 | 0.29 | 0.79 | 0.28 |
| Penguins | 0.38 | 0.54 | 0.58 | 0.39 | 0.44 | 0.50 | 0.64 |
| Blue Jackets | 0.61 | 0.46 | 0.47 | 0.75 | 0.50 | 0.35 | 0.70 |
| Flyers | 0.41 | 0.64 | 0.42 | 0.47 | 0.57 | 0.30 | 0.42 |
| Islanders | 0.40 | 0.53 | 0.42 | 0.75 | 0.38 | 0.50 | 0.44 |
| Rangers | 0.72 | 0.50 | 0.23 | 0.68 | 0.56 | 0.50 | 0.50 |
Following a 5-1 loss to the Tampa Bay Lightning in April, Laviolette told the media he had no message for his team. “I don’t go into the locker room after the game,” the coach said. “We needed to win a game tonight. We didn’t win.”
During that losing streak, Laviolette scratched more young players. Boston College’s Gabe Perreault, signed at the end of March, and AHL Hartford’s Brennan Othmann both missed games in the final weeks of the regular season.
The Ranger’s eminent insider, The New York Post’s Larry Brooks, put it plainly. “The Rangers have quit on their coach,” he wrote in December. “They have quit on the organization, they have quit on themselves, they have quit on each other, they have quit on the fans who pay top dollar to fill the Garden and they have quit on New York.”
But Brooks also said that team management and ownership, specifically James Dolan, had “no stomach” to let their players fire another coach. The Rangers appeared to right the ship in January before ultimately settling at a 23-18-6 record following the story.
That column did not address the security of general manager Chris Drury’s position. Drury ascended to the position in the wake of The Tom Wilson Incident on May 3, 2021.
Tom Wilson given misconduct, 14 minutes in penalties, after starting line brawl with Rangers
The Rangers responded to that game with an organizational meltdown. One day later, they released this statement:
The New York Rangers are extremely disappointed that Capitals forward Tom Wilson was not suspended for his horrifying act of violence last night at Madison Square Garden. Wilson is a repeat offender with a long history of these types of acts and we find it shocking that the NHL and their department of player safety failed to take the appropriate action and suspend him indefinitely. Wilson’s dangerous and reckless actions caused an injury to Artemi Panarin that will prevent him from playing again this season. We view this is a dereliction of duty by NHL head of player safety, George Parros, and believe he is unfit to continue in his current role.
Two months later, the Rangers cleaned house, firing head coach David Quinn, general manager Jeff Gorton, and team president John Davidson. The new GM instituted a series of changes, some successful, some not, that reshaped the organization. One example: that summer they traded a draft pick to Vegas to acquire the self-proclaimed solution to their Tom Wilson problem, Ryan Reaves.
New York was outscored 36 to 17 during Reaves’ shifts. Drury did a stop-loss, dealing Reaves to Minnesota for a fifth-round draft pick.
The Rangers dominated afterwards, winning the Metro Division and Presidents’ Trophy in 2024, then sweeping the Washington Capitals in the first round of the playoffs. That success was powered by a mid-career renaissance by Artemi Panarin, who scored 120 points in 2023-24, and 2021-22 Vezina-winning goalie, Igor Shesterkin, who signed a record-breaking eight-year contract right after the Rangers moved Trouba.
While Shesterkin remained very good in 2024-25, saving 21.6 goals better than expected for seventh place according to MoneyPuck, Panarin’s individual, all-situation scoring dropped 20 percent from last season. Former dependable mainstays Kreider and Zibanejad were at times nigh-unplayable. Two notorious Caps-killers, both were outscored when on-ice against Washington in their October 29 blowout-loss to the Caps. That was one of three losses to the Caps this season – two in regulation, one in overtime – outscored 15 goals to nine. In ten games against conference foes Tampa, Florida, and Carolina, the Rangers won two. They were games 81 and 82.
The Rangers ranked 18th in expected goals percentage during five-on-five play with 48.8 percent, with similarly poor numbers in shooting percentages, especially from high-danger areas. Their power play finished in the bottom five, though their penalty kill ranked 11th and scored a league-leading 18 shorthanded goals. Six of those shorties came from Vincent Trocheck; four from Kreider.
Laviolette’s sixth stint as a head coach ties his shortest, the two years he spent with the Islanders to start his career. He followed that with five in Carolina, including their Cup championship, four and a fraction of a fifth in Philadelphia, six in Nashville, then taking over for Todd Reirden in Washington for three seasons until they “agreed to mutually part ways” in April 2023.
The Rangers closed out their season with back-to-back wins against the playoff-bound Florida Panthers and Tampa Bay Lightning, including a 27-save shutout for Shesterkin against the Bolts. That win came the same day The Athletic’s Katie Strang reported that Artemi Panarin had recently reached a settlement regarding a sexual assault allegation dating to December 2023.
For Laviolette, 60, while the future is unclear, his intentions were not.
“I’m here, and this is where I want to be,” Laviolette said before his employment status changed. “Those are things I can’t control.”
There are still 26 teams he has not coached yet.
