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PHILADELPHIA — Alain Vigneault said he was going to talk with his assistant coaches during the Rangers’ train ride to Philadelphia on Friday afternoon to contemplate the lineup for the season finale against the Flyers on Saturday afternoon at Wells Fargo Center. It turns out they decided a couple of call-ups were in order. So […]

The captain, the coach and five other members of a junior hockey team were among 15 people killed when a tractor-trailer T-boned a playoffs-bound bus in western Canada, shocking the sports world. The impact sheered the top off the Humboldt Broncos’ bus and ripped apart the semi, scattering its contents across the snowy landscape of […]

PHILADELPHIA — This was some way to go out. The Rangers got blown out in their regular-season finale, losing 5-0 to the Flyers on Saturday afternoon. The Flyers, by way of Claude Giroux’s hat trick and a shutout from goalie Brian Elliott, punched their ticket to the postseason while the Rangers slink off for the […]

PHILADELPHIA — This was a man desperately pleading his case, having spent at least the past few days accumulating all the history, stats, anecdotes and any other shreds of evidence necessary to defend himself against the rising pitchforks. Then Rangers coach Alain Vigneault stood and delivered his autobiographical soliloquy, a postgame press conference Saturday afternoon […]

PHILADELPHIA — In hockey parlance, the coach of the Rangers told everybody that regardless of the final 34-39-9 score run up against the team, he had his man. Alain Vigneault, a proud fellow with a résumé that includes being tied for the 10th-most victories in the NHL and the third most in Rangers history, delivered […]

DETROIT — If this was John Tavares’ final game with the New York Islanders, he certainly made it memorable. Tavares scored 3:16 into overtime as the Islanders rallied for a 4-3 victory over the Detroit Red Wings in the season finale on Saturday night. Tavares, set to be a free agent in the offseason, broke […]

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 […]

Here is a not all-inclusive list of potential candidates for Rangers’ coaching job: Jim Montgomery, U. of Denver: Former NHL center, won NCAA tournament last year. David Quinn, Boston University: Five years at BU, has pro coaching experience as head man in AHL, assistant in NHL. Rick Bennett, Union College: Under contract through 2022-23, though. […]

PHILADELPHIA — Alain Vigneault’s unprecedented, unsolicited and passionate defense of his entire NHL coaching career following the Rangers’ white-flag 5-0 defeat to the playoff-clinching Flyers in the finale of this miserable season, which sapped the organization’s spirit, can now be seen only as a defiant last word before he was out the door. Vigneault must […]

PHILADELPHIA — Who knows if the NHL kind of came up on the fly with this now not-necessary, triple tie-break, play-in game between the Flyers and Panthers, but the league should adopt a Game 83 whenever teams are tied in points and Regulation/Overtime Wins (ROW) for a final conference tournament spot. Forget this small-sample, season-series […]