Chris Drury finally got Mike Sullivan, now results MUST follow

No more skirting accountability or "would've/could've/should've"

Chris Drury’s tenure as general manager of the New York Rangers is that of a fire department. The former Ranger captain races from roster problem to roster problem, trying to put the fire out in hopes of salvaging enough from the fire to keep the team competitive enough to remain in the mix as a contender. Of course, firemen, ethical ones at least, don’t start their own fires.

Understanding the official narrative of Drury’s tenure does require some suspension of disbelief. Simply put, there are too many conflicting threads that make parts of the story unravel.

Coaching search 1.0

Drury is purported to have been interested in hiring either Mike Sullivan who was then employed by the Pittsburgh Penguins or Rod Brind’Amour who was and still is employed by the Carolina Hurricanes the spring he ultimately settled on hiring Gerard Gallant. By all accounts, Drury ran a barebones coaching search really only considering Gallant and Rich Tocchet who ultimately ended up taking the Vancouver Canucks Job.

If the GM’s plan was to hire another team’s coach through back channeling with no means of actually acquiring them, reporting this as “Drury’s plan,” makes the GM look Naive

The Eichel thing, whatever happened there

Drury is purported to have had the loose outline of an agreement with the Buffalo Sabres to acquire then injured center Jack Eichel. Vince Mercogliano of the Lowhud.com reported that Drury decided to trade then Ranger winger Pavel Buchnevich to the St. Louis Blues to create the cap space to fit Eichel.

Of course, Eichel is a Vegas Golden Knight and Stanley Cup champion. Buchnevich has 263 points in 292 games as a Blue and Drury spent all of that cap space he freed up for Eichel on Barclay Goodrow, Ryan Reaves and Patrick Nemeth. If Drury truly traded Buchnevich without having the Eichel deal finalized, he once again comes off as naive.

Those two decisions framed the last four years of New York Rangers hockey. Drury settled for his third choice head coach, Gallant, and turned a young core over that needed more guidance to someone with no interest in teaching. Gallant allowed the veterans to run the room and when the time came for the veterans to take accountability for losing to the New Jersey Devils in the 2023 playoffs, they were more than glad to throw their players first coach under the bus.

Now, to be clear, Gallant’s inability to adjust and being outwitted by Lindy Ruff was a driving force in the Rangers losing that series. But, it’s also worth pointing out that the team at large failed to meet the moment and needed further recalibration that never came.

In addition to his third choice head coach, Drury failing to acquire the blue chip star in Eichel has left his team a player short for the entirety of his duration as GM. Whether the Rangers acquired Eichel himself or another top six forward, Drury has auditioned no less than 30 different forwards to the right of Mika Zibanejad and Chris Kreider. With great irony, after four years, the Rangers realized that Zibanejad is the first line right wing they were looking for the entire time.

The Rangers defining struggle in the postseason over the playoff appearances of Drury’s reign as GM is star players getting outplayed. In the Stanley Cup playoffs, they’ve come across teams with simply better high-end players. There’s no shame in losing to a team better than you if you’ve exhausted all options.

2022 Tampa Bay Lightning: Nikita Kucherov 27 points, Ondrej Palat 21 points, Steven Stamkos 19 points, Victor Hedman 19 points

2022 Rangers: Mika Zibanejad 24 points, Adam Fox 23 points, Artemi Panarin 16 points, Chris Kreider 16 points

2023 New Jersey Devils: Jack Hughes 11 points, Ondrej Palat 7 points, Nico Hischier 7 points, Dawson Mercer 7 points

2023 New York Rangers: Chris Kreider 9 points, Adam Fox 8 points, Patrick Kane 6 points, Mika Zibanejad 4 points

2024 Florida Panthers: Alex Barkov 22 points, Matthew Tkachuk 22 points, Carter Verhaeghe 21 points, Anton Lundell 17 points

2024 New York Rangers: Vincent Trocheck 20 points, Mika Zibanejad 16 points, Artemi Panarin 15 points, Alexis Lafreniere 14 points

While points are an imperfect measurement of player output, they are a useful snapshot for quick comparisons. Simply put, when the Rangers have been in playoff series, the other team’s star players are better. New York lost two different Conference Final series because the other team had more talented forward groups.

In failing to acquire Eichel, a player within shouting distance of a Kucherov, Hughes or Barkov, the Rangers have looked to alternative roster construction theories. I’ve long been skeptical of Drury’s fascination with bottom six forwards that bring non-measurable traits to the table, in a vacuum his idea does make sense. If the Rangers can’t play with a high skill tempo team, they need to muck the game up, cycle and try to play the team in their opponent’s end for extended periods of time to take heat off of their defense.

The problem for Drury lies in the fact that the players he’s targeted to try and reduce the game to a rock fight aren’t that good at hockey. When two teams are on relatively equal footing talent wise and can really push each other, those non-measurable traits can be a difference maker on the margins. But, when you’re expecting leadership and toughness to score goals, you end up looking like The Rock here:

This brings us to Drury’s third coaching hire in four years as Rangers general manager. The aforementioned Sullivan that Drury not so subtly leaked his interest in for years is now going to be the latest surgeon to attempt to revive a dying core. At this stage of the game, the Rangers’ window of contention as a Stanley Cup contender as previously constructed is over.

You cannot look at me with a straight face and tell me that Zibanejad or Trocheck is going to have the goods to go mano a mano with Barkov or Brayden Point for seven games just to get out of the eastern conference. I mean shit, Nico Hischier had Zibanejad in the Steiner recliner for 7 games in 2023.

We’ve seen that movie on more than one occasion and they couldn’t even get to a seventh game against either Florida team. Now, both Zibanejad and Trocheck are approaching the age range where physical decline on the table with yet another season of NHL miles on their bodies.

Sullivan is an accomplished and revered coach. There’s no arguing the resume, in spite of missing the playoffs three straight years to end his tenure in Pittsburgh, the Massachusetts native still has a .592 career points percentage, is 21 wins away from 500 for his career, is a USA hockey favorite and has two Stanley Cups to his name.

There’s an argument to be made that Sullivan might be the best bench boss the Rangers have had in their modern era on resume alone. Hell, if we’re just talking paper accomplishments, Sullivan might be the best Rangers coach of all time as he enters the job. The peril of hiring Sullivan is that Sidney Crosby isn’t accompanying him.

This brings me to one of the largest takeaways and problems I’ve had with Drury’s time as GM. The former little league world series champion can identify that other team’s players and coaches are good, the problem is that he fails to identify what makes them successful in these other places and simply assumes that success is innately tied to talent.

Think about the laundry list of players that Drury’s auditioned in a variety of roles that had decent track records in other places, then turned into pumpkins upon donning a Rangers sweater. Then, you get to the players that Drury felt were being under utilized with their previous team like a Sammy Blais or a Jack Roslovic and you start to get worried.

It’s hard to judge the mechanics of coaching separate from the talent at their disposal. There’s no disputing that quality of Sullivan’s back to back cup champion Penguins teams. They were deep enough to feature Phil Kessel on their third line and overcome goaltending uncertainty with both Marc-Andre Fleury and Matt Murray playing roles over the course of the two runs.

For the first time since Fleury’s prime close to a decade ago, Sullivan will have an elite goaltender at his disposal. Much of the Penguins futility since crashing out of the 2021 playoffs was tied to subpar goaltending and the variance of Tristan Jarry. Now with Shesterkin to carry the load, it will be incumbent upon Sullivan to reframe his priorities. Now, it will be incumbent upon Sullivan to get the most out of an underperforming group of skaters.

Here’s the important part

There simply are no more excuses for Drury and by extension Sullivan. The latter has accomplished far more behind the bench than the former in an executive suite and probably has another few coaching stops left in him. Sullivan is simply the latest tool for Drury to try and coax more out of a core of forwards that isn’t good enough to win a Stanley Cup.

For the general manager, there simply is no more runway. He inherited a robust prospect pool, $20 million in cap space and a team a move or two away from being a playoff team. In a four year window, he’s burned through that cap space, mostly on extensions, has just Lafrenière, K.Miller and Braden Schneider to show for that prospect pool and flushed more than a dozen draft picks away in pursuit of augmenting a flawed roster.

Now, Drury gets the coach he’s leaked for four years that he wanted the entire time. The problem of hiring Sullivan now, much like acquiring J.Miller in 2025 as opposed to back in 2022 is the team’s key pieces are all four years older now. While the Rangers won’t suffer as bad of luck as they did in 2024-2025 next season, banking on positive regression alone will not make up the gap between their current standing and winning the franchise’s ever elusive fifth Stanley Cup.

At this point, Drury has to make some bold move to re-shape the roster. If he fails to get younger and or cheaper players to fill at least one spot in the Panarin/Zibanejad/Kreider/Trocheck cohort, it feels empty to once again just change the coach. The frustrating part of this reality is that it took three years of the respective primes of Fox and Shesterkin, the team’s two most important players, to reach this conclusion.

As for Sullivan, there’s a tinge of skepticism lingering over his coaching abilities. The former Penguins’ bench boss has two Stanley Cup rings which no one can ever take away from him. But now, after missing the postseason three straight seasons and not winning a playoff series since the 2018, a Crosby tax is being attached to those accomplishments.

While Sullivan is still an upper echelon coach in a league where the vast majority of coaches are pretty interchangeable, I struggle to envision a world where his coaching alone can dramatically alter the Rangers’ fortunes. Thankfully for the greater public and not necessarily for Sullivan, this is it for Drury. There are no more excuses.

No more “it’s not his roster,” no more “he’s locked into his core,” “he has a hard job,” and most importantly “he hasn’t gotten his first choice at head coach.” It is put up or shutup time. Make the roster better or step aside and let JD & the Straight Shot pick a new GM.

Should the general manager fail to improve the roster in any discernible way and expect Sullivan to simply make up the difference, he will have lost what little credibility he has left. While the team’s owner, James Dolan, doesn’t seem to particularly mind allowing Drury to flail and skirt accountability for his poor decisions, a fan base that was promised championships is starting to grow impatient.

It is not Drury’s fault alone that the player’s all collectively underperformed last year sans Will Cuylle. But the team is another year older, the team’s most important players are all 12 months closer to inevitable age related decline. While Drury may still tout the prospects of Gabriel Perrault and Brennan Othman as impact players at the NHL level, they are still both more of an idea than reality at the moment.

There is no silver bullet savior on the horizon. That was supposed to be the Kakko, Chytil, Lafreniere, K.Miller and Schneider wave of the team. A collection of prized assets accumulated during a down period to augment an aging core. Instead, Drury opted to orient the team around the aging core and treat what was supposed to be their reinforcements as an afterthought.

Now, the Rangers years of leveraging their position reaches a climax. Sullivan will be asked to implement a regime of player accountability. It won’t be easy with a GM who fails to take any himself and continually throws others under the bus to avoid self scrutiny, but that’s why Drury made Sullivan the highest paid coach in the NHL.

In all likelihood, the Rangers will have a better 2025-2026 with just slightly more luck. Don’t forget, New York missed the postseason by just six points. If the Rangers had gone 10-10 instead of 5-15 during their death spiral in the first half of the regular season, they would’ve qualified for the playoffs over the Canadiens. It isn’t asking a whole lot in terms of better luck for five of the team’s 82 games in the regular season going the other way.

Positive regression and Drury’s resolve alone will not win the Rangers their second Stanley Cup since America entered World War II. New York needs more talent both in its forward group and on its back end. Drury’s work is cut out for him, but at least now, there is no more equivocation. It’s the general managers birthday party, his parents invited his entire class, no one really wanted to go, but his classmate’s parents felt bad.

So, we’re all sitting here wearing party hats listening to the Black Eyed Peas counting down the minutes till the 1/16 slice of pizza and plastic cups of Coca Cola come out. Until then, we all awkwardly stare in Drury’s direction and wait.