Rangers fire coach Alain Vigneault

PHILADELPHIA — In retrospect, this was an act of desperation, one last grasp at something that was slipping through Alain Vigneault’s fingers.

Ultimately, all the pleading wasn’t enough.

The Rangers fired Vigneault as their head coach on Saturday night just hours after the regular-season finale, a 5-0 loss to the Flyers, and hours after Vigneault spent the postgame press briefing laying out every shred of evidence he could find to persuade anyone listening that he deserved to come back for a sixth season.

Even when he was asked if he expected to come back, Vigneault showed a sense of confidence that now seems like a facade for insecurity.

“Yes, yes, without a doubt,” Vigneault had said. “I think my staff is the right staff for this job. I think, and this is just my opinion, but I think one of the strongest assets of this organization is its coaching staff and their experience. We’ve been able to do it with veteran players, we’ve been able to do it with younger players. Our development record — and our record, wins and losses — you know what, it’s pretty good, with young and older players.”

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Now that the Rangers have embarked on this full-on rebuild, they found this to be the right time to move on from Vigneault. He leaves behind a venerable record, one that includes a Stanley Cup finals appearance and an Eastern Conference finals, to go along with a regular-season record of 226-147-37 and a Presidents’ Trophy.

After the game, he said he had yet to speak with management, but wasn’t too concerned with the timing.

“Every year, you do your season, and at the end year, you sit down and talk and you analyze and you work on getting better,” Vigneault said. “And I didn’t think this year was going to be any different.”

The bit of strangeness with Vigneault started at Friday’s practice in Westchester, when he was asked what he learned about himself as a coach after this dreadful season, one when the Rangers (34-39-9) have missed the playoffs for the first time in seven years and when management has finally decided to go all-in on a youth movement in front of 36-year-old goalie Henrik Lundqvist. Vigneault smiled at the question and just said, “Ask me that same question after the game and I’ll have a real good answer.”

Asked after the game just about the emotion of the situation, he dredged up the old question and dove into an autobiographical soliloquy that he spent days preparing — accumulating all history, stats, and anecdotes to defend himself against the rising pitchforks.

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The diatribe began by simply stating his philosophy, noting “you have to coach the team you have in front of you.” He then went through the injury-plagued team he had in Montreal in 2000-01, one that missed the playoffs on the last day of the season that led to his dismissal. He then went through his seven years in Vancouver — mentioning almost every player on the roster during that span, which had a mix of veterans and youth and ended with six division titles and a run to Game 7 of the 2011 Stanley Cup finals, a loss that is seemingly never too far from his mind.

He also didn’t hesitate to mention that the Canucks have gone through three coaching staffs since he left, and have not made it out of the first round of the playoffs, missing this year for the third year in a row.

“That brings me to New York,” he then said. “When we got here, you coach what you have. And what we had was a veteran group.”

Vigneault said because of all those veterans “we put a system in place and a culture in place that maximized them.”

But he did not want to be pigeonholed into the concept that he can only coach a team loaded with older players. Turns out, the Rangers weren’t buying it.

“I’ve gone through every facet, whether it be a young team whether it be an older team. Once we know the team, every year is the same thing,” Vigneault said. “We try to put in a system that maximizes their talent and their potential, and we try to mask and work on the areas we need improvement. That’s not going to change.”

But that final plea fell on deaf ears, and now the Rangers move on.