Chris Drury's third coaching hire as Rangers GM had better work this time, for his sake
Rangers GM Chris Drury speaks during a press conference prior to the jersey retirement ceremony for Henrik Lundqvist before a game bagainst the Minnesota Wild at Madison Square Garden on Jan. 28, 2022. Credit: Getty Images/Steven Ryan
Four years later, Chris Drury finally got the man he wanted all along.
On Friday, five days after the Pittsburgh Penguins moved on from their coach of 10 years, two-time Stanley Cup winner Mike Sullivan, Rangers president and general manager Drury acted quickly to box out all other suitors and lock up Sullivan to take over behind the Blueshirts’ bench.
It is Drury’s third coaching hire in four years on the job, but if he’d had his way, it would have been his first and only hire. He wanted Sullivan when he was looking for a coach in 2021 and again in 2023, but Sullivan was under contract to the Penguins, and Drury was forced to look elsewhere for his bench boss.
He hired Gerard Gallant in 2021 and then brought in Peter Laviolette after firing Gallant in 2023. This time, when Drury fired Laviolette on April 19, Sullivan became available a little more than a week later. And Drury pounced.
It had better work. Drury, who was given a multiyear contract extension a week ago, isn’t likely to get a fourth coaching hire if it doesn’t.
The Rangers were Presidents’ Trophy winners and Eastern Conference finalists a year ago under Laviolette, but they missed the playoffs this season and are something of a mess right now. There are a lot of problems on the roster that Drury will need to fix if they are to return to Stanley Cup contender status.
Drury will need to move some pieces that no longer fit, clean up the salary-cap situation and find a way to add some upgrades via trade or free agency this summer. But before he does all that, he needed to get a coach like Sullivan, who has won 479 games in his coaching career. Drury hopes he will be able to get the players on the roster to do some things that the previous coaches weren’t able to get done — at least not over the long term.
Gallant and Laviolette each had success in his first season — each man guided the team to the Eastern Conference finals in his first year — but both were undermined by a team that didn’t always forecheck hard, too often lapsed into risky east-west play, and was always spotty defensively and over-reliant on the brilliance of goaltender Igor Shesterkin.
Sullivan will try, as his predecessors did, to get the players to play better defense, play a more direct game and be grittier and harder to play against. History suggests they will do those things in his first season. But Sullivan will have to find a way of getting his message to resonate beyond that.
In the immediate term, he’ll have some things to figure out when training camp begins in September. High on that list will be deciding what to do with Mika Zibanejad, who struggled in the first half this past season and who, once J.T. Miller arrived from Vancouver in a Jan. 31 trade, no longer was the No. 1 center.
Given Zibanejad’s $8.5 million cap hit for five more seasons, playing him as a third-line center behind Miller and Vincent Trocheck doesn’t seem feasible. After the trade, Laviolette played Zibanejad on right wing with Miller and had success there. Will Sullivan do the same?
Another big question: Who should be Adam Fox’s partner on defense? K’Andre Miller, who had good numbers playing next to Fox early in the season, will be a candidate if he’s back, but as a restricted free agent with arbitration rights, he’s not a certainty to return. If not him, then who? Carson Soucy? Braden Schneider? Someone who’s not currently on the roster?
Obviously, Sullivan can only coach the players who are present when training camp begins, and so it’s up to Drury to have a roster in place that the coach will be able to work with. And Drury has a lot of work ahead of him this summer to do that.
But the first thing he had to take care of was to get the right coach. He thinks he’s done that in landing Sullivan, so he can take a breath now; the heaviest lifting has been done.
He can’t stop there, though. There’s still a lot left to do.
Parssinen gets 2-year deal
After they announced they’d hired Sullivan, the Rangers announced Friday that they had re-signed RFA Juuso Parssinen to a two-year deal that CapWages said is worth $2.5 million. Parssinen was acquired in the Ryan Lindgren trade with Colorado along with defenseman Calvin de Haan and a couple of draft picks. It was the second trade of the season for Parssinen, who started the season with Nashville and was dealt to Colorado in December.
“It’s been tough in a way,’’ Parssinen, who is playing for Finland at the World Championships, said at Breakup Day of being traded twice in the same season. “But at the same time, I’m in a great spot now. So I’m really happy about that.’’
Colin Stephenson covers the Rangers for Newsday. He has spent more than two decades covering the NHL and just about every sports team in the New York metropolitan area.
