The Fault in the Rangers Stars

All the pieces matter

The New York Rangers season autopsy. A tried and true tradition of trying to understand the illogical. The 2022-2023 iteration of the Rangers desperately tried to convince both itself and the public that the regular season was a mere formality. That once the lights were at their brightest, everything would fall into place.

After all, this is the team that went to the Eastern Conference finals last year. A Vezina winning goalie, a Norris defenseman, multiple forwards at more than a point per game. A complimentary group of ascending young players won in the lottery. Oh and it featured Vladimir Tarasenko, Patrick Kane, Tyler Motte and Niko Mikkola as reinforcements.

Talent wise, the Rangers were setup for success. There were holes in the roster construction, but the talent was good enough to plug them during the regular season. But, in a playoff series against a team equally if not more talented in the New Jersey Devils, those stars wilted.

Other than Igor Shesterkin who was his usual sublime self, the Rangers’ best players were their undoing. Not only were the stars ineffective, they were actively bad.

It might be October when Mika Zibanejad finally gets out of Nico Hischier’s pocket.

But weirdly, I’m not chest pumping mad, wanting to scream at the top of my lungs. I feel as if this was all so obvious.

A team that spent the entire regular season dicking around and failing to find any consistency beyond the goaltender and the power play had the hubris to assume that when the games were at their most challenging, they’d be able to turn good habits on like a light switch.

Prior to the regular season, I had the privilege of interviewing MSG network’s Sam Rosen for "The Liberty Blue Podcast,” and Rosen mentioned how the team was eager to get back to the postseason after their first real taste last year. New York’s entire approach to this season indicated an entitlement to a deep playoff run, not a desire for one.

Hell, lest we forget that the Rangers were one average Jordan Binnington period away in December away from firing Gerard Gallant and hiring Barry Trotz. That’s how close this entire project was to not even getting off the ground. One period away from last summer’s doubling down on a conference final appearance being an admitted failure.

The opening salvo

There’s an entire summer to speculate about the direction of the franchise. We’ll know about Gallant soon enough. Not to go full Bill Simmons body language doctor, but Gallant looked like he was a dead man walking. We’ll see on that front. While he deserves real blame for allowing that sense of entitlement to permeate the entire season, it’s not squarely on his shoulders.

No, that would fall upon the players in the white sweaters on Monday night. Starting at the top and avoiding “I told you so’s,” best I can, this group is what it is. Mika Zibanejad, Chris Kreider, Vincent Trocheck and Artemi Panarin are tenured veterans with ample NHL experience.

There isn’t a coach in the entire world that’s going to get those guys to change their games at this point in their respective careers. That’s always why I didn’t buy the vision the organization was selling about being a Stanley Cup contender. I’d seen Zibanejad get pocketed against better players on more than one occasion.

Hell, if Jacob Trouba, and we’ll get to that clown in a minute, doesn’t concuss Sidney Crosby, the Rangers are eliminated in five last year. There’s no conference final run.

That’s the issue here. At their core, the Rangers are designed around those four forwards. Their cumulative cap hit represents 39.1% of the $82.5 million cap ceiling. Throw in the homeless man’s Scott Stevens wearing a C on his sweater and Barclay Goodrow’s Stanley Cup rings and you get 53% of the salary cap.

For the regular season, against the soggy middle and basement dwellers of the NHL, the Rangers can get by waiting for Panarin, Zibanejad and co. to make a game swinging play. Against the better teams, the survive for the next shift and wait for stars to make a play doesn’t work because they have stars too.

Blowing two 2-0 series leads will define Gallant’s tenure in New York. The coach preaches low risk, high percentage plays to turn games into low event slogs. The fewer events in a game, the more each individual event is worth. The logic being that if a handful of plays decide the game, the Rangers’ stars are good enough to swing them the Rangers way.

Without the Rangers best players able to influence the game, the spotlight fell to its underdeveloped young players. The discourse around Filip Chytil, Kaapo Kakko and Alexis Lafrenière will reach deafening levels this summer. All three failed to make a noticeable impact in this series. Not finding the scoresheet is one thing, being non-factors for swaths of the series at a time is entirely different.

The “leadership”

I’ve absolutely had it with the intangibles discussion in hockey. Harping on non-measurable traits is a cop-out for poor talent evaluators to cling to outdated philosophies on the skillsets that matter. It’s great everyone likes Jacob Trouba, that he’s a swell guy.

He stinks at hockey.

That’s the end of the discussion for me.

Trouba has repeatedly shown an inability to make high level hockey plays. He was repeatedly too slow to catch up to Devil skaters, knocked off of pucks in his own zone, fired terrible shots into legs, at the glass and into the chest of the goalies.

The tangible impact Trouba has on the components of actually playing hockey: Offense, defense and transition are middling. He’s an average NHL defensemen who once had 50 points in a season on a good Winnipeg Jets team.

The Rangers’ as an organization have for whatever reason prioritized non-measurable traits and are getting what they deserve. Not only was Trouba ineffective as a hockey player, he was ineffective as a leader.

Hiring a player’s coach like Gallant means that it’s incumbent upon the veterans on the team to police poor play and lead the way by example.

Instead they get violent hits that feed a primitive hunger for bloodlust. The hockey men love Trouba because he’s a callback to the hockey they grew up watching and playing. He’s tall, he’s American, he’s well spoken. He’s the quintessential good American boy.

But, underneath all of that, Trouba wants to win. Being that he can’t influence the game by trying to play offense or defense, he has to throw predatory hits on susceptible opponents.

Don’t give me clean hit. I don’t care. No, it wasn’t a penalty, it won’t receive supplemental discipline, by rule, it’s clean. I don’t care. The only reason Trouba is throwing that hit on Devils’ winger Timo Meier is because he can’t do anything else to influence the game.

If he could make a positive offensive play or skate into good position to take away Meier’s ice to spring the team going the other way, he would.

Instead, Trouba has to feel like he’s contributing to the team. So he throws those brutal hits on guys who aren’t even looking. The “have your head up rhetoric,” is asinine. It’s the exact same rhetoric the gun lobby uses to justify arming the country to the teeth.

“Don’t be a victim,” they exclaim, “defend yourself.”

Trouba tucks his elbow in and uses his shoulder to inflict a car accident level impact in a 2-0 game. Notice how Trouba throws these hits in situations where he can hide behind the guise of “firing up the team.”

You know what would fire up the team?

A successful zone exit and a possession in the offensive zone that didn’t end in a shot that hit someone in the eighth row of the lower bowl.

I don’t particularly care that this is the way hockey has always been. To quote George Carlin “We made them up, like the Boogeyman, we can change them whenever we want.” Sure, Carlin was discussing the Bill of Rights, but the point remains.

Hockey doesn’t need to be ignorant of traumatic head injuries to provide entertainment. This is entertainment, pretending these types of plays are an unavoidable component of hockey is ignorant and reinforcing a victim blaming philosphy.

Naming Trouba captain was a validation of the 2021-2022 season. That he would be able to shepherd the group out of any trouble. Without a tactically competent coach, it was on Trouba and the rest of the leadership group to establish the right mindset and attitude for the entire season.

Instead, we got a season of “just wait for the playoffs,” you’ll see. Kinda like how I’m still waiting for Trouba the defensive defenseman to show up.

Cake and eat it too

Now this is where I get into the existential crisis the Rangers are facing. Not only are the team’s star players overpaid relative to their impact, the young pieces that were supposed to incubate in their shadow have yet to materialize their potential.

I spent my Tuesday morning arguing with a stubborn middle aged man who insists that it’s Kakko and Lafrenière’s fault for not blossoming in a less than stellar environment.

Let’s re-litigate history

Kakko had two years of David Quinn, in the most two crucial years of his development.

Alexis Lafreniere had 56 games of David Quinn and one season of Gallant.

This is what makes me legitimately angry. Much of my emotions about this postseason appearance are of whatever, they’re a flawed team.

Just pretending that Kakko and Lafrenière’s talent alone would be enough to make them bonafide NHL contributors misses the mark on several levels. The post draft years are the most formative years of development, it often sets the tone for who players will be the rest of their career because that’s where habits are formed.

Instead of being given room for mistakes and taking the lumps, the Rangers took their cap space and threw it at expensive veterans and extensions. Their development was put on the back burner because marquee players wanted to come to New York. It wasn’t about building something long-term and sustainable. It was about a sugar high after missing the playoffs from 2018-2021.

Eating the cheese on last year’s playoff run was shortsighted and greedy, it reflects the same sense of entitlement that plagued the players all season. Instead of an honest account of what did and didn’t work, Vincent Trocheck was the latest mercenary brought in on a bad contract using the logic “if they win the cup, the rest of the contract doesn’t matter.”

Of course, this was based on a team featuring the second best power play in the entire league and a goaltender putting up the single best season of the stat-tracking era to that point. So, maybe believing in an extremely difficult formula for success always was a foolish pursuit.

Now, Kakko and Lafrenière are four and three years removed from their draft year respectively and the Rangers cannot count on either as meaningful contributors. That’s what chasing a sugar high did. Instead of taking the lumps as they came and letting them grow incrementally, the team tried to have everything at once.

Forcing Panarin and Trouba onto the team entering the 2019-2020 season automatically sped up the clock. And that was prior to Lafrenière’s arrival! So how was Lafrenière supposed to find success if the clock was already ticking?

The arrogance of the Rangers’ organization in hockey decision making cannot be overstated. Instead of wanting to do the genuine hard work of developing players in house and then adding to the group once they were far enough along, the Rangers bolted on successful players from other organizations and simply expected everything to fall in line because they’re the New York Rangers.

Look at the composition of the roster and where the key players spent their developmental years.

NCAA: Kreider, Trouba, Fox, Miller, Vesey, Motte, Lindgren

Other Pro Leagues: Shesterkin, Tarasenko, Panarin, Mikkola

Other NHL organization: Zibanejad, Kane, Trocheck, Goodrow

NYR Only: Kakko, Chytil, Lafrenière, Schneider

Prioritizing the sugar high fallacy of “just get in and get hot,” over building the team in a sound way will cost the Rangers for years to come. The team’s messaging was centered around a multi-year rebuild and boy did the fan base buy in entirely.

I was there on draft night when the Garden faithful voraciously cheered the Devils’ selection of Jack Hughes. It didn’t matter, we were getting Kaapo Kakko. The fanbase was totally sold on building around a young core that would have a long-term opportunity at winning a Stanley Cup.

But a funny thing happened. The world shutdown, the Carolina Hurricanes mud stomped the Rangers in the bubble. Then there was a 56 game season which got everyone fired for not making the playoffs because that was apparently the goal for a rebuilding team one season removed from picking second overall.

Then, they had Shesterkin play out of his damn mind for an entire season and somehow ended up in the conference final with a real chance to advance.

But, the stars disappeared, the young guys weren’t ready for the moment and Shesterkin couldn’t score goals too. The last guy figured that out too.

Kinda sounds familiar.

The Unknown

The Rangers announced Wednesday morning would be breakup day. Pretty quickly we’ll have understanding about Gallant’s fate. My gut says he’s absolutely gone and that would be my decision if it were up to me.

The names out there right now don’t exactly give me confidence. Again, instead of trying to forge meaningful progress towards a sustainable winner, the Rangers will give this group one last run with some tinkering along the edges.

If you’re inclined to believe early murmurs, disgraced cover-upper of sexual assault Joel Quenneville is the early leader in the clubhouse. Acquiring Kane was a moral and ethical quagmire. Many I thought to be fine people showed just how little morals mattered if they thought success would follow.

I felt an overwhelming sense of guilt that Kane was representing my favorite team. That something I love and care about so much could remind people of the darkest moments of their life. The Rangers got what they deserved in acquiring the corpse of Kane.

Media professionals I respected showed their whole ass and just how far they would go for interactions on social media. It’s not about being informative, it’s about being a character. Anyone conducting the “Kane Train,” was peddling in falsehoods to either carry the company line or genuinely can’t evaluate hockey.

Quenneville represents an entirely different type of ethical problem. His role in the Brad Aldrich sexual assault coverup should disqualify him from a job in hockey ever again. He was more concerned with not messing up the Blackhawks playoff run than finding out what happened to Kyle Beach.

Then, he had the gall to lie about it ten years later when Beach bravely came forward. It took Quenneville being told to resign from his post as Florida Panthers’ coach in the fall of 2021. The former Blackhawk coach didn’t see the need to step away until he was instructed to.

I have negative interest in running back the same group with a terrible person as opposed to an incompetent one as a coach. Quenneville would be a deal breaker for me. The Kane acquisition really tuned my emotions out, I wasn’t high or low, just jaded.

I have no illusions that a multi-billion dollar corporation will ever behave ethically or morally in the shadows. But to so brashly disregard any sense of right or wrong for a fleeting chance at a trophy is a mind boggling level of toxic arrogance. The same arrogance that torpedoed the 2022-2023 season.

Not only did the Rangers feel entitled to a deep playoff run, they acquired an over the hill star who felt entitled to play for the organization simply because he wanted to. The team bent over backwards to acquire him and put him in a position to succeed.

The same position its drafted talent never got.

The Rangers inability to accept the role of development in success will limit the franchise indefinitely. Somewhere, 79-year-old Glen Sather is chomping on a cigar, encouraging Rangers’ owner James Dolan that scapegoating Gallant and tripling down on this group is the right move.

That’s the real conundrum of it all. Barring major scandal, professional sports teams are beholden to the whims of incredibly fickle and insecure individuals. No matter how much we kick and drag our feet, Dolan cannot be forced to sell the team. The Rangers will always draw, no matter how bad the team or expensive the ticket, there will never be a boycott.

Professional sports teams are always a reflection of ownership. They set the tone from the top down and Dolan’s notorious inability to get out of his own way will sink the Rangers in perpetuity.

It would be an extremely Dolan move to bring in the disgraced Quenneville to run the ship regardless of the backlash. The Rangers simply do not care. They know better, Dolan knows better. Who cares about developing young talent when you could play Kane and his arthritic hip? Who wants to see Chytil develop as a second line center when Trocheck can be a Ryan Strome facsimile with a penchant for yelling after whistles.

The Rangers are looking into the abyss. An expensive older core that wilts against high end talent, young players with no confidence that haven’t blossomed, a general manager who doesn’t understand the salary cap and an enigmatic owner signing the checks.

Other than that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?