Six weeks after firing Alain Vigneault, the New York Rangers are still without a head coach — but not for long.
According to Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman, the club is expected to name David Quinn as their new bench boss very soon.
“This is a story that’s been gaining a lot of steam over the last 24 hours,” Friedman said Saturday night. “Jeff Gorton, the GM of the Rangers, is still overseas at the World Championships but when he gets back he’s expected to finalize a deal with David Quinn from Boston University to be the new head coach. The word is that as of yesterday, Quinn was informing people at the school that he would be leaving to take the job.”
Quinn, 51, spent five years behind the bench at BU before making the leap to the big leagues to join a rebuilding team looking to shift its focus to its youth. Before that, he served as head coach of the AHL’s Lake Erie Monsters for three seasons.
“The word is that the Rangers don’t want a big, established name,” said Sportsnet’s Nick Kypreos. “We know a few coaches that are out there: Dave Tippett comes to mind, perhaps Barry Trotz will be still available when this is all said and done.”
Quinn won’t be the only college coach making his NHL head coaching debut next season. The Dallas Stars scooped up Jim Montgomery out of the University of Denver earlier this off-season — his name had popped up in past coaching searches in summers past, too — and Friedman wrote in a recent edition of 31 Thoughts that the Rangers also had interest in acquiring Montgomery’s services before the Stars signed him.
While nothing has been made official in terms of Quinn’s pending contract in The Big Apple, Kypreos believes we can look to Philadelphia for a measuring stick on what to expect.
“The feeling is, Dave Hakstol started something three years ago and set a pretty high price at $10 million for five years,” Kypreos said of Hakstol’s contract, which he signed out of University of North Dakota in 2015. “But if the Rangers land Quinn, many believe that that salary will be higher than Dave Hakstol’s.”
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