You never saw the John MacError reign here.
The only thing Johnny Mac had going for him was that we never allowed like 50 shots in a game (maybe not even 40?) and were damn near the league lead in shots against around the time he was fired. So analytics proponents would chalk this up to poor shooting luck/poor goaltending/goaltending luck.
I chalk this up to small sample sizes not showing up in the analytics and the fact that we were in a hole early almost every game (due to suspect goaltending and Marty's left hand becoming detached from his body that year and Moose looking like a really bad signing up until February) and playing from behind.
The truth is, Johnny Mac was always a poor coach, even as an assistant. Our PP took a dive as soon as he came in. it went from like second in the league to like 30th when he came. Then it rose to it's highest since he had been here in the one year he went to coach for Lowell and was no longer an assistant. Even the Gionta 50 goal/Gomez 33 goal/inflated stats/PP season, our percentage was pretty whatever. Is Gionta like a 55-60 goal scorer that year if we had a better power play? Probably not, but imagine if we had a good power play?
I was already a part of the #NeverJohnnyMac club back in 2005 when people were speculating that he'd be the replacement for Robinson or Lou's replacement in 06-07. That speculation continued every year we made a coaching change until he was hired and I always argued that I didn't want him near the bench in an assistant role, much less a head coaching role.
I can't honestly say that I saw us having the season (or the start that we did) we had when Johnny Mac was announced as the hire. If you would have told me ''We're gonna finish that season with 84 points this year'' or whatever we finished with in the end, I would have said ''Yeah, that's believable with Johnny Mac as the head coach''. Only I didn't think that the way we would have gotten to 84 points was with Johnny Mac coaching us through December to being on pace for the worst record among a non-expansion team ever, while Lemaire took us to being on pace for being the best team in years through the second half to get us up to 84 points. I would have just thought we'd be bumping around at mediocrity all year long. We also had the cap troubles, poor defensemen dressed, Langenbrunner falling off a cliff, Marty and Kovalchuk both having their worst season ever up to that point, Parise practically out the whole year, etc, which made things worse, but he was a very bad head coach. Too many players had career worsts that year for the coach not to be terrible.