Solving this home/road mystery falls on Rangers' Gerard Gallant
Rangers head coach Gerard Gallant, center top, directs the team against the Hurricanes during the first period in Game 2 of an NHL Stanley Cup second-round playoff series on May 20 in Raleigh, N.C. Credit: AP/Chris Seward
RALEIGH, N.C.
It’s a mystery, this phenomenon of the home team winning every game, not only in the Rangers-Hurricanes second-round series but in the Hurricanes’ seven-game ouster of the Bruins in the first round.
That is the take from Rangers coach Gerard Gallant and his counterpart, Rod Brind’Amour, heading into Monday night’s Game 7 at PNC Arena.
Well, it falls on Gallant, a finalist for the Jack Adams Award as the NHL’s top coach and a previous winner with Vegas in 2018, to solve the mystery.
He must be the Rangers’ MVP in Game 7. Whether it’s figuring out a better way to keep Brind’Amour from dictating the line matchups with the final change to ensuring that the Rangers play an active rather than passive game from the opening faceoff — as they have at home — Gallant must deliver, through motivation or X’s-and-O’s.
That’s the kind of responsibility any coach wants. And the no-frills Gallant has the resume to engender a belief that he will come through. Heck, he guided an expansion team to the Stanley Cup Final in 2018.
He may not like talking publicly about his process, but he has one. He’s not buddy-buddy with his players, not their BFFs via text, nor is he constantly in their space in the dressing room. He doesn’t do rah-rah speeches.
“At the end of the day, he lets you play hockey,” said forward Frank Vatrano, acquired from the Panthers on March 16. “There’s not much thinking out there. You make a mistake, don’t worry about it, go out there and make the plays you know how to make. It’s been an easy system to adjust to. Not many X’s-and-O’s.”
It would be wholly out of character for Gallant to change anything he does for Game 7. But somewhere in the mix, Gallant must find the answer and present it to his players.
Gallant gets this chance because Brind’Amour couldn’t coax the Hurricanes to a road victory. The Rangers won Saturday night’s Game 6 at Madison Square Garden, 5-2, by carrying play every bit as much as the Hurricanes did in their 3-1 win in Game 5.
“It isn’t, it really isn’t,” Gallant said Sunday when asked if it is worth trying to figure out the home-road discrepancy at this point. “You prepare your team. You get your game plan. You talk to your team a little bit about different stuff, matchups, stuff like that.
“But you know what? You go play the game. It’s a Game 7. Both teams, they know what the consequences are. And both teams have played well. Nobody expected Rod’s team to win all the games at home and lose all the ones on the road. I think we’ve won one game on the road, and both our teams have been good road teams all year long.”
The Rangers enter Game 7 with a 1-5 road mark in these playoffs. But that one win was in the only other elimination game they’ve played away from the Garden, a 5-3 victory in Game 6 in Pittsburgh as the Rangers rallied from a 3-1 series deficit in the first round.
“That was a huge game,” Gallant said. “I just think, from Day 1, we talked about getting up when you’re down.”
So Gallant will approach Game 7 as he’s approached every other game.
But every coaching staff studies hours and hours of video, looking for any kind of advantage to prepare the game plan. Somewhere in that video, somewhere in the experiences of the first three games in Carolina is the key to winning Game 7.
It’s on Gallant to solve that mystery.
Andrew Gross joined Newsday in 2018 to cover the Islanders. He began reporting on the NHL in 2003 and has previously covered the Rangers and Devils. Other assignments have included the Jets, St. John’s and MLB.