Peter Laviolette fired after Rangers miss playoffs
Head coach Peter Laviolette of the New York Rangers behind the bench at UBS Arena on Apr. 10, 2025 in Elmont. Credit: Jim McIsaac
The busy offseason for the Rangers has begun. Two days after the 2024-25 season came to an end, coach Peter Laviolette and associate coach Phil Housley were fired on Saturday, a move that had been expected after the team failed to make the playoffs.
According to a source, assistant coaches Michael Peca and Dan Muse will get the chance to interview for positions on the new coaching staff.
“After finishing with the best regular season record in the NHL a year ago and making a trip to the Eastern Conference Final, we came into this season with high expectations for ourselves,” president and general manager Chris Drury said in the news release announcing the moves. “Quite simply, we failed to meet those expectations. We must all do better — myself included . . . I felt that a change was necessary in order to give us the best chance to achieve our goals as an organization.
“Our search for a new head coach will begin immediately.”
Drury, whose last two coaching hires were well-traveled veterans — Gerard Gallant in 2021 and Laviolette in 2023 — was asked on a Zoom call with local beat reporters Saturday afternoon if he would consider hiring a first-time coach this time around.
“My eyes are wide-open,’’ he said. “I am not going at this with any preset dispositions. If it is a first-time coach and it’s the best fit, great . . . We’re just trying to find the best fit we can, to do what we need to do. And obviously our goal is to try and be back in the playoffs next year.’’
Drury was asked if he’d been given any assurance from Rangers owner James Dolan that his own job is safe. He declined to answer, but the fact that he was allowed to fire his third coach in a little more than four years on the job (beginning with David Quinn in 2021) is a solid indicator that Drury isn’t going anywhere.
So he can get started on a long summer to-do list. Besides hiring a new coach, Drury has lots of work to do to refresh a roster that finished fifth in the Metropolitan Division with a record of 39-36-7 (85 points).
Eight restricted free agents will need to be signed, renounced or traded. There is the draft lottery, the draft (the Rangers still have their first-round pick, No. 11 overall, because the pick they traded to Vancouver in the J.T. Miller deal was top-13 protected) and then free agency to navigate. And there are several high-salaried veterans who underperformed this season and have years left on their contracts with no-move or partial no-trade clauses in those deals.
First, though, will be the search for a coach to replace Laviolette, who stood behind the Rangers’ bench for two seasons.
In his first season, Laviolette led the team to the Presidents’ Trophy and a second conference finals appearance in three years. The team set franchise records with 55 wins and 114 points in 2023-24.
But his second season was marked by turmoil from the very beginning. The offseason exit of popular fourth-line forward and team leader Barclay Goodrow and the messy attempts to trade captain Jacob Trouba over the summer had the locker room on edge from day one of training camp.
After a 12-4-1 start, the Rangers went 4-15 from mid-November to the end of December. That dropped them to last place in the Metropolitan Division, and they never really recovered.
They did play better and started getting better results when the calendar flipped to 2025, and the addition of Miller from Vancouver at the end of January helped. They climbed back into a playoff spot with a huge win over Columbus on March 15 but then went 6-8-1 in their final 15 games. They were eliminated from playoff contention with two games left in the regular season.
After the final game, a 4-0 win over Tampa Bay on Thursday night at Madison Square Garden, Laviolette was asked about his job status.
“Those are things I can’t control,’’ he said. “The year certainly wasn’t where it needed to be.’’
Drury had tried to help by attempting to remake the roster during the season. He traded Trouba to Anaheim in early December, weeks after a memo he sent to the rest of the league’s GMs identifying Trouba and Chris Kreider as players he was looking to trade was leaked. Then he traded young forward Kaapo Kakko, the No. 2 overall pick in 2019, to Seattle just before the NHL’s Christmas week roster freeze, one day after he’d complained bitterly about being scratched from a game.
At the end of January, Drury sent center Filip Chytil — with prospect defenseman Victor Mancini and the protected draft pick — to Vancouver for Miller. In March, he traded unrestricted free agents-to-be Ryan Lindgren and Jimmy Vesey to Colorado and Reilly Smith to Vegas.
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.
