Peter Laviolette is back at Madison Square Garden on Monday night, this time standing behind the bench for the Los Angeles Kings. It’s his first return to MSG since the Rangers let him go on April 19, 2025, ending a two-year run that swung from a dream season to a rough finish.
The Kings came into the night 2-5-2 through their first nine games under Laviolette, who is now in his seventh NHL head-coaching job. His résumé still carries serious weight: he won the Stanley Cup with Carolina in 2006 and has taken Philadelphia in 2010 and Nashville in 2017 to the Final.
With 848 wins, he owns the most victories by a U.S.-born coach and ranks seventh all-time in NHL history. A win against the Rangers would move him into a tie with Ken Hitchcock for sixth.
New York hired Laviolette on June 13, 2023, making him the 37th coach in franchise history and giving him a three-year contract worth $5 million per season. The move came five weeks after the Rangers fired Gerard Gallant and less than two months after Washington cut ties with him following its first non-playoff season in nine years.
“Peter’s impressive resumé, which includes winning a Stanley Cup and advancing to the Final with three different teams, has made him one of the most respected coaches in the league,” owner James Dolan said in a statement. “As we move forward in our goal to consistently contend for the Stanley Cup, I am confident that Peter is the right head coach to lead our team.”
That first year in New York backed up the praise. The Rangers rolled to the Presidents’ Trophy as the NHL’s regular-season champions, setting franchise records with 55 wins and 114 points. Artemi Panarin hit career highs with 49 goals and 120 points, good for NHL First-Team All-Star honors, while Adam Fox landed on the Second-Team after posting 73 points, including a career-high 17 goals.
The postseason followed the script Rangers fans wanted to see, at least for a while. New York swept Washington, beat Carolina in six games, and grabbed a 2-1 series lead over Florida in the Eastern Conference Final when Alex Wennberg scored in overtime for a 5-4 win in Game 3.
That turned out to be the high-water mark. The Panthers responded with a 3-2 overtime win in Game 4, took Game 5 by the same score at MSG, and closed the series with a 2-1 victory in Game 6.
Florida then went on to win the Stanley Cup that spring and repeat in 2025.
“It was kind of a tale of two years. The first year was really good, I mean, most wins and most points and a very storied franchise.
Took it to three rounds to Florida and lost in Game 6 (of the Eastern Conference Final), and that was disappointing. Not to win a couple more games and get that chance to play for the Cup,” Laviolette told reporters Monday at MSG.
“But, overall, looking back at that year, it was a year that was really good. It was something that I’ll remember being here in New York. Obviously, the second year was not as smooth and had problems inside of it.“
The second season unraveled fast. The Rangers started 12-4-1, then cratered and finished 39-36-7, missing the playoffs entirely. They were officially eliminated on April 12 after a 7-3 loss to Carolina and wound up fifth in the Metropolitan Division, six points behind the third-place Devils and six points behind Montreal for the second wild card in the East.
That collapse put New York in a short and unwanted club: teams that won the Presidents’ Trophy one season and missed the playoffs the next. The Rangers joined the 2014-15 Bruins, the 2007-08 Sabres and the 1992-93 Rangers on that list.
Laviolette sat out 2025-26 before landing in Los Angeles on June 9, after the Kings suffered another first-round playoff exit last spring. His arrival also reunited him with Panarin, who was traded to the Kings on Feb. 4 in exchange for Liam Greentree and a third-round pick. Panarin left New York ninth in Rangers history with 607 points, eighth with 401 assists and first in points per game at 1.26.
Los Angeles opened its current five-game road trip at 0-4-2, then beat Washington and the Islanders before falling 3-1 to New Jersey on Saturday.
“I feel like I’m on a little bit of a tour right now on this road trip, if we’d stopped in Nashville instead of Chicago on the way home to play one more game - I think that would have wrapped them all,” Laviolette joked Monday.
Monday night gives him one more stop on that tour, and one more familiar building to walk into with a different team.
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There is a little extra edge to the matchup at Madison Square Garden, too, with former Rangers coach Peter Laviolette back in the building now guiding Los Angeles. Between the lineup tweaks and the change in net, the message is hard to miss: New York is treating this one as more than just another regular-season game. [Read more 🡒]
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Columbus, meanwhile, has another name circulating in trade talk in Dmitri Voronkov, a reminder that the Blue Jackets may be weighing bigger roster decisions than expected. For the Rangers, that sort of movement matters because every shift in the forward market and every available piece in goal can change how aggressively they approach the rest of the summer. [Read more 🡒]