At some point you have to reasonably ask the question.
I’m not talking about the “has he lost the room” nonsense that follows all coaches, of every major sport, around when teams struggle. I’m talking about an honest, logical variation of that question.
Has Alain Vigneault’s message gone stale?
When the New York Rangers parted ways with John Tortorella the writing on the wall had been visible for months. The players were doing the same thing they had been doing the year before, and year before that. Tortorella forced his players play a slow, grinding game that relied on blocked shots and a defense-before-anything system that suffocated offensive output.