NHL

Vigneault’s smiling optimism a case of Torts reform for Rangers

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Don’t let anyone fool you. The Rangers’ transfer of coaching power from John Tortorella to Alain Vigneault is as much about style as substance, as much about personality as advanced metrics.

It is about an easy smile replacing a perpetual scowl as the face of the hockey team, not only in public settings but, much more importantly, behind the closed doors of the locker room.

Glen Sather doesn’t want any coach’s metaphorical blood on his players’ hands, doesn’t want to be perceived as having been pushed into making a change that otherwise would have been avoided. That’s why the general manager has gone out of his way to deny the Rangers’ exit meetings were the motivating force behind the call to dismiss Tortorella.

Fair enough, and as someone once said at a different kind of forum, he (or the owner) paid for the microphone, but Sather doth protest way too much with his “No player said anything negative to me” bit of silliness at yesterday’s show at Radio City Music Hall at which Vigneault was officially introduced as Tortorella’s successor.

There was an absence of rhetorical flourish. No one made grand promises. With just about a week with which to study Vigneault’s philosophy between the time he agreed to coach the Rangers and the time he was announced as the coach of the Rangers, there were no surprises.

The key words, though, and the ones that most fundamentally explain why the change was made from one of two coaches in the NHL whose team won at least one playoff round each of the past two seasons (with the Kings’ Darryl Sutter the other) to a coach whose team was eliminated in the first round by a lower seed in each of the past two seasons, were these spoken by Sather:

“The players needed a fresh life and a more optimistic view of how to play hockey.”

There you have it. It wasn’t enough the Rangers were being hammered in their own end of the ice, sacrificing their bodies on shift after shift in dropping down to block shots and protect the house. They were being hammered in the locker room, too, by a coach who, we now have learned, grew more acerbic and critical of their efforts by the day.

It was one thing for the Rangers to be beaten, another thing to be beaten by the Bruins, and yet a whole other thing entirely to be beaten by their own coach.

Again, we know Vigneault is about getting his talent onto the ice as much as possible for offensive zone draws and getting his best defensive zone guys on for faceoffs at the other end. We know he’s about puck possession rather than dump-and-chase and breakout plays rather than chips off the glass.

There was talk from the coach of giving his “skilled players the latitude to make something out of nothing,” of implementing a system to “maximize the talent you have” while of course adhering to the fundamental principles of winning defensive hockey.

But even as Vigneault was calling Rick Nash “an elite player” and Henrik Lundqvist “one of the best goaltenders in the world,” and even as he was talking about “sleep doctors” influencing decisions regarding travel and declining to offer an opinion on whether Brad Richards should stay or be bought out, his most important words weren’t about X’s and O’s or about PP’s and PK’s.

They were, instead, about the qualities he would seek in his assistant coaches beyond an ability to direct a power play or penalty kill unit and the atmosphere he would seek to establish around his team.

“I want guys that are upbeat and positive,” Vigneault said. “It’s so much easier to come into an environment, and that’s my job as the head coach, to create that positive environment where guys are coming in, and they want to come to the rink and they want to get better.”

Upbeat and positive. An encouraging smile rather than a disapproving scowl. Out with the old. In with the new.

The new face of the Rangers.