Alain Vigneault was able to make jokes, and laugh, and crack up a room stuffed with media types, a room heated by the pressure of cameras and glare of bright lights. The first-year Rangers coach was comfortable behind the podium in the late hours of Thursday night, fixing the cuffs on his shirt, shifting his shoulders, tilting his head and ruffling his brow with each question.
And so in the smallest little driblets, in the biggest moment of his brand new tenure on Broadway, the detached professionalism of his everyday demeanor began to fade. After leading his team to a 1-0 win over the Canadiens in Game 6 of the Eastern Conference finals, giving the franchise its first berth in the Stanley Cup finals since 1994, Vigneault’s personality leaked out, and joy was the overwhelming emotion.
“Refuge — is that an English word?” he turned and asked a French-speaking reporter, his native tongue temporarily blocking his English translation.
“My little French brain,” he said with his patented squinted-eye smile.
What was utterly serious was the culture change Vigneault had ushered in with his hiring this summer. The night of the biggest hockey game in New York in two decades was also the one-year anniversary of former coach John Tortorella’s dismissal. By June 15, 2013, general manager Glen Sather had hired Vigneault, and the idea of patience as a virtue — not a vice — began to sink in.
“It was definitely a test for us, but I just felt the patience from the entire coaching staff,” goaltender Henrik Lundqvist said after the game. “They understood. We talked about this earlier, but they understood the process for us to get to where we needed to be to be a successful team.”
A successful team is just what the Rangers are now, getting Friday off as they prepare to face the winner of the Kings-Blackhawks series in the Cup finals, beginning Wednesday at the Western Conference winner. Vigneault certainly is going to have his hands full when he gets to that next step, to a place he has been before only to suffer heartbreak.
As coach of the Presidents’ Trophy-winning Canucks in 2011, Vigneault made it all the way to a Game 7 in the Cup finals, only to lose to the Bruins, 4-0, on home ice in Vancouver. So he is acutely aware this moment, no matter how important it is to the franchise, it is only dwarfed by what happens in the next two and a half weeks.
“We’re not there yet,” Vigneault said. “We’ve given ourselves the opportunity to compete for the Cup.”
That idea seemed like a delusional fantasy just a couple of months ago, when it appeared the transition from Tortorella to Vigneault was not going as smoothly as planned.
“In October?” Vigneault said when asked to reflect back to that time. “I probably would have said, ‘What are you smoking?’”
The Rangers opened the season with a nine-game road trip on which they went 3-6. They then opened a season-high nine-game homestand in early December by going 0-3-1, and it hit a low point on Dec. 20, when they lost to the Islanders, 5-3 at the Garden, taking them to 16-18-2 and starting to fill out what was looking like a lost season.
“I knew there was going to be some sort of a learning curve,” Vigneault said Friday on ESPN Radio. “It might have been a little bit longer than expected.”
Now Vigneault is the fourth Rangers coach to reach the Cup finals in his first year behind the bench, and that includes the franchise’s two most recent trips there: in 1994, when they won the Cup under Mike Keenan; and in 1979, when they lost to the Canadiens while under the guidance of Fred Shero.
The furthest they got under Tortorella was the 2012 Eastern Conference finals, and now with Vigneault, they are on the cusp of a championship.
“We did change a lot of things going into the season,” said Lundqvist, the longest-tenured Ranger. “I think it was a time where we had to find ourselves a little bit as a group.”