CBC-Sports

Tortorella no Mr. Nice Guy like Renney

February 24, 2009 03:01 PM | Posted by   Scott Morrison  

There is no denying the New York Rangers hired a good coach in John Tortorella.

And they got the exact opposite in terms of personality behind the bench from the man they fired on Monday, another good coach, Tom Renney.

Now we'll see if that is what the falling Rangers need to turn their season around - a personality change.

It is hard to fathom that Renney, who did a good job in his four campaigns in New York and got his team off to a good start this season, suddenly became a bad coach over the past couple of months. He didn't, of course.

When you look at the Rangers roster and payroll and performance, you could easily come to the conclusion that Renney was doing a terrific job at the start of the season, and for parts of the past few months, but the reality of the roster flaws eventually led to an inescapable nosedive.

Think about it.

Forget the money the players are making, though that has caused incredible cap issues for the Rangers and has handcuffed them from doing anything else meaningful to improve other than firing the coach.

Look at the supposed best players on their roster. Wade Redden a minus-11. Scott Gomez, minus-nine. Chris Drury, minus-11. Markus Naslund, minus-14. Michal Rozsival, minus-14. That is a collective minus-59 for the fab five.

The team's leading scorer is young Nikolai Zherdev with 45 points. Good for him, but a bad sign for the team. He has four goals in his past 25 games and still leads the team.

So, what exactly happens now with Tortorella in charge? Like we said, he is a good coach, a very good coach. He is also a disciplinarian and the word now is that the Rangers need a firm hand. Apparently, the player-friendly style Renney employed was no longer effective with this group. We shall see.

The challenge for Tortorella is to get something meaningful out of Drury and Gomez, who have been high-priced busts. Naslund has been good, but not great. And Redden has struggled horribly. Can Tortorella somehow resurrect that career?

It will also be up to Tortorella to somehow replace what Jaromir Jagr, Brendan Shanahan and, yes, even Sean Avery brought to the team last year, but was not replaced this year.

Finally, it will be up to Tortorella to restore some of the lustre to general manager Glen Sather's image because there isn't much left. Of course, the only way that happens is if he is able to accomplish all the other miracles.

Good luck with that.

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