The last time the Rangers had a head coach making his NHL debut, they won for Bryan Trottier in Carolina to kick off the 2002-03 season. That was not a harbinger of things to come, the coach gone after a 21-26-6-1, 54-game misadventure.
Which is to suggest that not all that much should be read into the Blueshirts’ 3-2 defeat to the Predators in David Quinn’s introduction to NHL head coaching at the Garden on Thursday. Not all that much about the result, that is.
For in the final analysis, the Blueshirts in fact did a pretty good job of bringing the game and mentality they’d worked on the last three weeks at the Westchester practice facility to the big room on Broadway.