MTPS: Chris Drury, a Blender, and a Coach Who Doesn’t Care About Tomorrow

The seven stages of grief are: shock, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, testing, and acceptance.

The four stages of dealing with Peter Laviolette’s lineup decisions are: this, followed by this, then this, then the strong desire to do this to him. 

I started writing this on Tuesday right after I read the reports that the Rangers intended to put Juuso Parssinen back into the lineup (good) for the disastrous, no good, very bad game against the Flames. And to make room for him, Brennan Othmann was a healthy scratch (of course). Here’s the reasoning Laviolette gave. Yeah, this about sums it up.

Hey, look, I get it. When you bring in a center that you’ve reportedly been scouting for a while it’s only natural that your coach would first play him at wing, then sit him for a few games, then bring him back at wing at the expense of one of your few intriguing, NHL-ready prospects, just to ensure that he can have two over-30, fourth line centers in the lineup at the same time, then justify the move by saying that you want to get a young player into the lineup. So yeah, needless to say I was nonplussed before the game and even less plussed after it when it turned out that Coach Clownshoes decided to give the "young guy" he wanted to get back in the lineup fewer than eight minutes. That makes total sense. (Oh, totally off topic, here’s a thing I wrote.)

There are a few possible explanations for Laviolette’s lineup decisions:

1. He has come to the conclusion that two players (Jonny Brodzinski and Zac Jones) who couldn’t get on the ice at all earlier this season are integral parts of the lineup and are keys to the Rangers overall success.
2. With so few games left and the playoffs within spitting distance, he has neither the time nor the inclination to work new/young guys through their adjustment periods and so while Jones and Brodzinski and Carrick may not offer anything, ya know, positive, they’re at least comfortable. Like a torn up pair of underpants, they don’t support anything, but they feel good.
3. At some point in practice when no one was watching he fell and hit his head.

My guess is probably a combination of two and three. 

I defended Laviolette for much of November and December when it was clear that his stars had decided to take a mental break from hockey to deal with their feelings surrounding Chris Drury’s obvious dissatisfaction with their level of play and the departures of Barclay Goodrow and Jacob Trouba. That was not on Laviolette. That was on a bunch of spoiled, coddled, players who have—over the course of many years and many coaching staffs—gotten too used to getting their way via mutiny rather than improved effort and performance on the ice. Everything that happened over that bleak period lands squarely on the shoulders of those players and they should not be forgiven just because they’ve apparently taken their heads out of their collective asses now, here at the end of all things.

What has happened since…well…Laviolette went from being a guy the fellas described as trying to put out a grease fire with water, to a guy who is no longer trying to put out the fire, he's just pouring gasoline onto it. The mirage of competence that he projected last year is fading as quickly as the efficacy of his combover, with lineup choices and in-game strategies that are reminiscent of the very worst we saw from Gerard Gallant, David Quinn, Alain Vigneault, and Tom Renney.