2021 NHL regular season thread

The entire Rangers coaching staff got put on the Covid protocol list before the game last night, so their minor league HC, one of his assistants and the associate GM were behind the bench.

Then the Rangers proceeded to rout the Flyers 9-0. ... leading to hilarity about David Quinn, on twitter and a fan board I look at. A lot of fans have tired of Quinn. The comments have been brutal.

 

He's not a good coach. At least at this level. It's too bad, because I like him personally, at least from what I get to see. He was the coach at Boston University, did a great job there, and they got him because they were embarking on a rebuild with a lot of very young players that he was going to develop.

It is going to take a more traditional NHL coach now that things are starting to come together. Quinn's leash should start running out at the end of this eason.

The main problem with Quinn is that he keeps shuffling lines. He loves to blow things up and try to put them together again and it has worked to the team's detriment.

He also takes "tough love" too far with some of the young players, benching them for long periods during games and using healthy scratches way too much when someone becomes a whipping boy. All of their players play hard, so that isn't it. But with some players, a couple of mental errors might result in 4 games in a row as a healthy scratch, while similar things get ignored for other players.

It means that on any given night they don't have their best lineup out there, because he is trying to teach someone a lesson. I'm not inside the building to see what is really behind it all, but just from watching games, he doesn't appear to mete out those kinds of punishments equally. Which is normally fine by me -- different players get treated differently depending on their value. But everything he says is predicated on, "Everyone on the roster, top to bottom, has to earn their spot and their playing time."