Gerard Gallant

[laughs]

Well, I mean, my, my fa- my favorite thing still that I think we deserve credit for is out of nowhere, Gerard Gallant just changed his name, and nobody was talking about it until I, until I started yelling at Ryan about it.

And then suddenly he was no longer Gerard Gallant, and he was Gerard Gallant.

[laughs]

And I do, I do think we are responsible for that.

And, and, uh, when his career was winding down, he finished as a American League champion in Cleveland in, uh, 2015, '16.

Uh, we hired to, uh, to be an assistant on Gerard's staff, uh, in year one.

So he knows where the halfway tree is too, then?

Yeah, he would know all about, uh, all about.

Every single one of those players came here, got more opportunity than where they came from.

We had no entitlement, we had no hierarchy.

We had complete buy-in to, uh, Gerard Gallant.

We had...

On paper, that team was nothing.

Call it what it is, but it all kind of clicked, and a big part of that was Gerard Gallant's system and his forechecking.

And from what I hear, Craig's teams play more north-south.

And this has been an issue.

I don't see whatever VGK's identity is going to be.

We think it's going to be a physical team that kind of mirrors what we saw from season one from Gerard Gallant.

I don't see any of that in the Hurdle, Bowman, and Olofsson line.

Well, all roads as well, when you're talking about struggling, could lead to Alexander Holtz, the fourth line winger, unofficially.

Yeah.

We got Gerard Gallant.

Gerard Gallant.

Okay.

All right.

You know, my, my kind of secret number for him that I think will be evidence of a successful season is four shorthanded goals.

That's, um, uh, I think his partnership with Chris Kreider, they were two of the more productive penalty kill guys in the league for the stretch of a few years after Gerard Gallant put those two guys together on the penalty kill.

And we talked about who his penalty kill forward partner might be.

Whoever it is, he's a guy who's always been dangerous on the penalty kill.

I think, I think when we talk about Lafreniere and if we're going to compare the two, like we did where pro is probably not going to get power play one minutes, uh, for the majority of the season, like Lafreniere didn't for a lot of his first few years and how that kept his numbers down and maybe how that affected him as a young player that, that seeing those numbers not go up and seeing his minutes not go up kind of took him mentally out of being a consistent regular, you know, regular producer.

Those are conversations that I know, you know, Mike Sullivan and his coaching staff have, you know, probably 50 years of coaching experience between him and David Quinn and Joe Sacco.

These are guys that know that these conversations have to be had, and I'm not casting any aspersions on Gerard Gallant or Peter Laviolette, but when you're under the gun and you're a successful team, Like both of those coaches had their one really successful year.

You know, sometimes those conversations with younger players can fall by the wayside because the focus is we are a good team.

It's not like, you know, it's not like they had Jay Woodcroft and Chris Knoblauch, you know, and stuff like that.

They've had Coach Gallant, Gerard Gallant, who, he was a decorated coach.

He's, he's good.

He's not maybe what Bruce Cassidy was, maybe he's not what Pete DeBoer was, but you know, and then [laughs] you throw Tortorella into that mix and, uh, here comes a rookie head coach, which honestly I think this shows-