The New York Rangers lack organizational accountability
The Rangers have an organization rife with issues from ownership on down and no one thinks it's their fault
The New York Rangers are about to enter the franchise’s 100th year of existence in 2026. In the previous 99 years, the organization has won the Stanley Cup four times, three of which came during the NHL’s original six era of which there were only five other franchises. For all of the organization’s bluster of prestige, it’s largely of the Craig Biggio variety, longevity.
As an organization, the Rangers operate like a multinational corporation that insists upon itself. Just because the franchise has longevity, it’s been able to build a bulletproof reputation. More often than not, its own fans repeat it like a nervous tick “well, they’re the Rangers,” as if that in and of itself was enough to win in a league where 31 other franchises have a vested interest in not allowing that to come to fruition.
Fire two coaches in three years and have a top-heavy roster littered with older, expensive players likely beginning age-related decline and need a new coach? Well, David Carle or Mike Sullivan would be lucky to live in the five boroughs and work under the direction of GM/President/James Dolan Whisperer, Chris Drury. See how ridiculous that sounds?
After years of feeling like Chicken Little warning of an impending sky is falling, the sky actually fell. And instead of uproar and vigor, the fanbase responded with competing pluralities of opinions. It was the roster’s fault for under-performing, the now-fired Peter Laviolette’s fault for not maximizing the players he did have or Drury’s fault for assembling a poor roster.
Unfortunately, in a world that lacks nuance, the concept of mutual exclusivity escapes most. In no world is a single entity culpable for the degree of failure the Rangers reached during the course of the 2024-2025 NHL season. A roster with the high-end talent the Rangers featured this past season failing to even make the postseason is a cataclysmic failure that was several years in the making.
The casual decline
The likelihood of the Rangers capturing a Stanley Cup on the quality of Igor Shesterkin’s brilliance in net, elite special teams and slightly below average five-on-five play was always a bit of a hard sell. It wasn’t impossible, but it was always going to be an uphill battle in a league that skewed more and more towards offense.
Simply put, the Rangers power play falling off a cliff left the team for dead. Without that offense, the team simply could not score enough goals to be competitive. With the team’s margin of error smaller, that put an increased focus on what had been a suspect defense for years.
After the total capitulation of Jacob Trouba and Ryan Lindgren over the course of the 2024 playoffs, it was malpractice to bring both back at the start of the season. Telling the story of this season’s unraveling actually begins with the latter returning to the lineup from injury after the team had gotten off to a 4-1 start and outshot opponents 165-155 in that stead.
For the first month of the season, the Rangers were humming along with the pairing of Adam Fox and K’Andre Miller dominating their minutes. Through November 1st, Miller and Fox teamed up for a 58 percent goal share, 66.8 percent expected goal share and 65.5 high danger chance share. The problem lay with that upon Lindgren’s return to the lineup, he was paired with Trouba and their results were less than optimal. While a 46.7% goal share wasn’t great, it’s certainly not the worst results the Rangers have swallowed from a subpar defensive pair.
With the excuse of a poor Trouba/Lindgren pairing, the Rangers went back to the familiar top four formulation of Lindgren/Fox and Trouba/Miller. With Laviolette choosing to have two mediocre to bad pairs instead of one good and one bad pair, the coach actively limited his team’s capacity for success. While no one wants to punt on a set of shifts every game, actively making a second poor pair out of some deep-rooted loyalty was the beginning of the team’s undoing.
From there, Laviolette turned his attention to trying and finding a way to spark offense. Over the first two months of the season, Mika Zibanejad and Chris Kreider registered a combined 28 points across roughly 20 games with the latter missing a few games within that window. With the Reilly Smith experiment garnering lukewarm results, the coach went to winger Will Cuylle, one of the few players that had shown some improvement since last year.
Unfortunately for the Rangers, to move Cuylle up to Zibanejad’s wing, Laviolette had to break up the team’s best line at five-on-five to that point in the season: Cuylle-Filip Chytil and Kaapo Kakko. Over the first two months of the season, that trio combined for an 86 percent goal share on a 59.9 expected goal share. So while the Rangers were getting some shooting luck bouncing their way, the group was absolutely dominating its minutes.
For the second time in the first three months of the season, Laviolette remodeled his lineup to try and coax performances out of his underperforming veteran players and dragged his entire lineup down in the process. So, instead of having two functioning five on five lines, a passable third line in Smith, Zibanejad and Kreider as well a reasonable upside fourth line, the Rangers created two less effective lines.
This in turn put all the more pressure on the Rangers power play unit to augment a pop gun offense.
But, for as weak as the team’s offense was, its defense morphed from simply below average to a black hole sucking up anything within range. From the start of November through the New Year, the Rangers only generated 615 high danger chances while conceding 724.
While Drury does deserve some acknowledgement for materially trying to change his team’s circumstances in season through a series of trades, an argument could be made that he only made the situation harder. While getting rid of Trouba and Lindgren were net-positives by virtue of subtraction, replacing them with Will Borgen and Urho Vaakanainen didn’t do a whole lot to assuage the defense’s woes.
While defense is a team-wide issue related to effort and attention to detail, the six-man unit Drury Frankenstein’d together on the fly is amongst the weakest in the league. While opinions vary on exactly how bad this group is, especially when it comes to the more unproven components, it is not playoff caliber. Players like Borgen, Soucy, Vaakanainen would struggle to crack the starting lineup for teams like the Tampa Bay Lightning and Florida Panthers.
The fact that the Rangers are in direct competition with other organizations seems to have eluded Drury’s brain trust. While getting rid of the team’s weaker links was the right decision, they also did not help the team get any closer to the team’s they fancied themselves contemporaries with.
The parlor game
Sitting back and sifting through the debris after the fact isn’t a difficult job – it is important to reflect and account. Monday morning quarterbacking is a time-honored tradition in the wake of organizational failure, but when it’s to the degree that the Rangers did, it almost requires something else entirely. It’s not just that the Rangers made a series of bad decisions under Drury’s leadership, it’s also that so many of his errors were unforced.
In running the show, Drury’s had four offseasons to remold the roster to his likeness. Instead, he’s largely tinkered around the margins with third pair defenseman (he has 4 of them on the roster right now), middle six wingers and pet projects to project a certain image. That’s what’s so frustrating about this entire ordeal: the Rangers aren’t even that concerned with winning. It’s about winning in a way they feel good about.
No team other than the Rangers would have dedicated the time and effort to a long-shot flier like Matt Rempe. There’s a reason the league has largely deemed his archetype inefficient for the direction the game is trending. While Rempe is certainly making strides as a hockey player, if he can’t be trusted to play more than 10 minutes per game and is liable to take a penalty fairly called or not, his positive impact is limited. But because Rempe “tries hard” and “works tirelessly” he’s entitled to infinite chances.
The single biggest gripe I have with Drury’s regime is its ideological inconsistency. There is no uniform coherence in adjudication of accountability. Players that the organization prioritizes have a red carpet rolled out and an infinite number of chances to figure it out. The team actively nuked its own season in trying to get Zibanejad and Lindgren going and was too stubborn to accept the players it was prioritizing weren’t good enough.
The organizational rot stems from the top. The revelation that both the organization and Artemi Panarin agreed to pay a settlement based on the player’s actions tells you all you need to know about how accountability works in the Ranger organization.
If the Rangers weren’t willing to discipline Panarin for his transgressions off the ice, how were they ever going to hold him accountable for failing to back check? That isn’t to draw a false equivalence between the two actions, but a larger commentary about how a cultural rot seeps in. Since Panarin isn’t held accountable for anything, that trickles down to other components of the team.
Back in December, prior to being traded to Seattle, Kakko had said “I have not been the worst,” which rings even more pertinent now after the season. The former second-overall pick was consistently given the runaround throughout his tenure in New York. Whether under David Quinn, Gerard Gallant or Laviolette, he was an easy scapegoat to single out.
It was entirely out of the question for any of the aforementioned now-fired coaches to hold Zibanejad, Kreider, Trocheck, Panarin, Trouba or Lindgren accountable for their mistakes, which breeds malcontent. Sure, there’s something to be said for professionalism and doing your job, but compound that double standard with the team’s middling results and it was only natural that the vibes would reach a breaking point.
It’s almost unheard of to have four separate players (Kakko, Jimmy Vesey, Zac Jones and Calvin de Haan) all go on the record during the course of the season feeling that they weren’t being communicated with nor treated fairly. In the NHL, where all sense of individualism is weeded out before a player is old enough to drive, that should’ve set off massive alarm bells. Add those four different comments to Zibanejad’s breakup day message that the team felt like it wasn’t in the loop and the front office wasn’t adequately communicating and it’s no surprise the whole season felt like walking on eggshells.
Now, for as anti-Drury as most of this newsletter is, I do think it’s important to acknowledge the players have a professional responsibility to perform up to a certain standard. As Don Draper once so eloquently said, “that’s what the money's for.” While I do fault Drury for failing to adequately address the roster’s shortcomings in the offseason, he had to have been ignorant or naive to think there wouldn’t be repercussions.
While I think the narrative surrounding the exiling of Barclay Goodrow and Trouba is massively overblown, the two were amongst the worst players in the entire NHL this past season on their new clubs. I’ve often referred to the Rangers as a team of conduits with no conductors. As a collective, they’ve gone with whatever direction the wind’s blown for years now. This always was a fragile group.
The Zibanejad and Kreider duo that Drury’s auditioned no less than 30 different right wingers within four years has burned through four different coaches. I can still vividly picture sitting in the first row of section 208 after Game 6 of the second round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs as people around me left. I lingered in my seat for at least ten minutes and had a sinking suspicion that the group was tapped out as far as the ceiling.
It took half of the following season for the organization’s decision-makers to reach the same conclusion. It unwound its position, selling off assets and embarking on a noble pursuit – a full-throated multi-year rebuild. Over the span of the following three seasons, the Rangers made 27 draft choices and acquired a litany of reclamation projects like Tony DeAngelo and Brendan Lemieux.
Of those 27 draft picks, just four are still in the organization and have enough of an established NHL pedigree to be considered regulars. While tweeners like Rempe, Jones, Robertson and Brett Berard may still prove themselves building blocks going forward for the Rangers, it’s a bit stunning to see a multi-year rebuild yield two middle six forwards (Lafreniere and Cuylle), a top four defenseman (K.Miller) and a third pair defenseman (Schneider) as the total haul.
This gets to the root of another long-term organizational issue. In pursuit of “everything will work out because we’re the Rangers”, the team never gave its prospect pool the room to grow into their prospective roles. Instead of gradually bringing pieces along and giving them room to learn as the team did, the team sought to be competitive while those younger players took their lumps.
In April of 2021, I wrote “If the coach is running a short bench every game when the Rangers have a less than ten percent chance of making the postseason in a ‘rebuilding year’, when exactly are those young players supposed to get the game reps in a one-goal game scenario?”
The entire point of embarking on a multi-year rebuild was to have a self-sustaining young core of cost-controlled building blocks. After all, the Rangers did the hard part – they actively iced a bad team and picked second then first overall in successive drafts. But then when it came time to put those players in a position to succeed, Quinn argued, “we’re in a position where it’s all about winning.” Of course, the irony of this was that the Rangers were 3 points back of a playoff spot with games in hand on the Bruins.
But, the Rangers couldn’t take the logical path. After several seasons in hockey purgatory and getting their doors blown off in the play-in round vs the Carolina Hurricanes in the 2020 bubble playoffs, they couldn’t leave well enough alone and prioritize the long-term. Never let the organization live down the fact that Colin Blackwell, who was a 27-year-old with 33 career NHL games, averaged more time on ice during the 2021 season than Lafreniere, the first overall pick.
The franchise’s management of its younger players has long been a cause for consternation. It took Kreider and J.T. Miller (the first time around) several seasons to break into the lineup as consistent NHL regulars for no real reason other than risk aversion. Instead of playing younger players who might be bad, the team opted for lower-ceiling, more proven pieces.
Unfortunately for the Rangers, because the organization never empowered its younger players to seize the reins of the team, it created a vacuum of frankenstein monster parts. The supporting cast of a Stanley Cup contender is in place if you squint hard enough. It wouldn’t be hard to envision sliding every forward on the team down a slot in the lineup and a real play driving the first line being enough.
But the Rangers are over-using miscast players. For all the bluster about Zibanejad and Trocheck’s respective defensive games over the last several seasons, that was never rooted in any type of statistical proof. It was purely anecdotal and tied to their respective usage on the penalty kill which brings up one of my favorite rhetorical questions: is he good at defense or does he just kill penalties?
For Zibanejad’s career, he is 2% below average defensively. Not terrible but a far cry from the supposed 200 foot brilliance he’s characterized as presenting.
It is not inherently disqualifying for a player to have negative shares of high danger chances or expected goals, but it is a more difficult game environment to operate within. That means fewer chances to create offense and increased pressure on the defense. In an ideal world, a team’s top two centers would both be capable of driving possession irrespective of their wingers. In reality, Zibanejad’s play-driving metrics were always a red flag for his long-term trajectory and Trocheck was largely a byproduct of riding shotgun with an MVP-caliber player in Panarin.
The irony of this entire situation is that the Rangers didn’t need to embark on an overleveraged roster path. After the surprising run to the Conference Final in 2022, there was room to gradually build on the incline, give younger players runway to play their way into bigger roles and orient the team’s window of contention into the near future as opposed to the present. Instead, Drury opted to bring in Trocheck as a Ryan Strome replacement and bank on the team’s flimsy five-on-five play not mattering a whole lot because of its individual talent.
Looking at the Rangers roster now, it looks like several years into the future of an EA Sports NHL franchise simulation. The team has a handful of supremely expensive players – Panarin, Shesterkin, Fox, J.Miller, Zibanejad, Lafreniere, Kreider and Trocheck’s combined cap hit checks in at $69 million. For as much flack as the Maple Leafs have gotten during the core “four era”, at least there’s no question as to whether or not Mitch Marner, Auston Matthews and William Nylander are amongst the best in the world at their respective positions.
With so much money tied up in an older core, it’s hard to envision sufficient room for this group, regardless of whoever the next head coach is, to fundamentally restructure the team on the ice and in terms of its character. While I do think the Rangers’ obsession with strong culture spiraling them off the deep end is a beautiful example of irony, we do have to live with those consequences.
In Drury’s first offseason at the helm four years ago, he imported Barclay Goodrow, Ryan Reaves, Patrik Nemeth and Sammy Blais because he felt the group lacked toughness and character in the wake of the Tom Wilson/Panarin incident. Of course, over the following few seasons, Drury realized it didn’t matter a whole lot how good a guy a player was or how hard they tried if they were a net negative on the ice.
So, in pursuing the intangible, Drury felt the tangible slip through his fingers. He was so caught up in trying to formulate the perfect recipe of people to overcome their talent deficiencies, he didn’t put enough into actual hockey results. I won’t exactly be weeping for Drury’s misfortune going forward because he made his own bed. Pursuing actively bad players in hopes of elevating a good group to great instead of acquiring good players to reach a higher baseline is ultimately why the Rangers are in this boat.
With each passing day, it’s all the more baffling that Drury isn’t facing more heat for the roster he assembled. After four offseasons at the helm, he’s done shockingly little to improve or re-shape the roster. A laundry list of deadline acquisitions, a below average defensive corp, J.Miller and Trocheck to play the game “the right way.” But, by and large, the DNA of this Rangers team predates Drury’s tenure.
Sather: Kreider, Shesterkin
Gorton: Panarin, Zibanejad, Fox, K.Miller, Lafreneire, Cuylle, Berard, Rempe, Schneider, Jones, Edstrom, Brodzinski, Robertson
Drury: Trocheck, Carrick, J.Miller, Vaakainen, Borgen, Soucy, Perrault, Othmann, Kaliyev, Parissnen, de Haan, Quick,
Deadline Additions: Chad Ruhwedel, Jack Roslovic, Alex Wennberg, Patrick Kane, Vladimir Tarasenko, Niko Mikkola, Frank Vatrano, Andrew Copp, Justin Braun, Tyler Motte (x2)
Of the players that Drury acquired during his tenure, they’ve largely been rooted in trying to solve mistakes he made in the first place. Vatrano, Copp, Kane, Tarasenko, Roslovic and Smith were all brought in to try and fill top six winger roles available because Buchenvich was traded and the team refused to give Kakko or Lafreniere extended run in those lineup slots.
Trying to fill out the back end has long been a challenge for the organization dating back to the Sather administration. While the Rangers are fortunate to have been spoiled with world-class goaltending from both Henrik Lundqvist and Shesterkin, it’s also made the team’s decision makers look at their defense with rose colored glasses. Instead of looking at defense as an opportunity to enhance their goaltender, the position group has largely been viewed through the lens of the goaltender maximizing what’s in front of them.
The Credibility issue
The foundational problem with the Rangers organization I keep coming back to is one of logic. Neither outcome in the binary is particularly reassuring from the outside looking in, but regardless, it is time for Drury’s record to be held to account. When Drury assumed the role back in the spring of 2021, he was handed a top five prospect pool in the NHL and nearly $20 million in cap space.
Upon taking the helm of the franchise, Drury burned through a significant portion of both his assets and his liquidity. Extensions to Zibanejad and Fox were almost all of his cap space up front. He burned a series of draft picks on replacements for Buchnevich, subsequently gave up on a former second overall pick and cut bait on a talented but injury-prone player in Chytil to acquire a player he’d long coveted (J.Miller).
The problem with this supposition and giving Drury the benefit of the doubt with this series of decisions that burned through all of his flexibility is that now, in the present, we’re all supposed to believe that Drury has always disliked the core of the team. If Drury truly didn’t believe in the Zibanejad/Kreider tandem all this time, why would he commit to orienting the three most valuable seasons in his window of contention on the supposition that Shesterkin could drag it across the finish line?
The alternative is that Drury made the roster decisions he did without fully believing in them to placate a demanding owner that was tired of missing out in the playoffs. In that case, this entire exercise is pointless because that means the GM is catering to the whims of someone who materially does not understand the sport and his job is hopeless.
Of the two possibilities, especially after the last two weeks, I’m more inclined to believe the latter as a working theory. It would explain why the GM operates with the paranoia of a Soviet Commissar and makes a point of forceful shows of authority in public.
Drury had been on the radar for a few other GM jobs around the league, but ultimately after interviewing with both Florida and Buffalo, he opted to bide his time in New York. In his stead as assistant GM back in 2020, the now-boss stopped a practice that he wasn’t in charge of to berate a player (Kravtsov, who was a black ace) in front of the rest of the team for not trying hard enough during a drill.
While I’m all for the occasional bout of tough love, especially in sports, I think this reported blow-up shows a lot of who Drury is as a leader. The fact that three years later, as GM, he and then head coach Gerard Gallant had a shouting match back and forth after game four of the Devils series is reflective of a larger pattern of ineffective leadership and a lack of accountability.
The fact Drury is going to get to pick a third different head coach in a four-year window teeters on insanity. At a certain point, Drury’s unwillingness to accept the roster he assembled or signed-off on is good enough to be enough to get his eventual comeuppance. That’s why it’s hard for me to accept the arguments from a plurality of the public that insist it’s not his roster and he hasn’t had enough time to remake it in his vision.
I do understand that the players are a culpable party in the organization’s issues as well. Yes, it’s entirely unprofessional for a team of players to allow outside noise and environmental factors to throw an entire season away. The players had an opportunity to seize the narrative and prove their GM’s perception of them wrong. Instead, they simply followed his lead in failing to take any accountability for the spiral.
The GM has had four offseasons to remold the roster. Instead of trying to re-orient the team around gritty, hard-nosed players that he so clearly prioritizes, the organization has augmented the core with supplementary pieces like Rempe, Berard and mercenaries like Goodrow and Reaves. So, instead of getting a more well-rounded lineup, all Drury got was a mediocre or bad bottom six and a top six that plays a style of hockey incongruent with sustainable playoff success.
I don’t have a lot of personal empathy for the situation Drury’s put himself in. If you continually portray yourself as being the one with answers and operate with contempt for logic and basic facts, you aren’t being reasonable. Even worse, Drury’s own insecurities linger over the organization like a stale fart.
So Drury stands alone now. One of the smallest front offices in the league. No advisers. An established shelf life on coaches that’s slightly longer than your average carton of milk.
Arthur Staple of the Athletic wrote the above excerpt last week upon the news of Laviolette’s firing and matches up with Vince Mercogliano’s reporting from earlier in the season. The longer Drury’s been at the helm, the more he’s reshaped the organization with his people.
I’d compare Drury to a medieval mad king living in perpetual fear of being overthrown and in all honesty it’s a fair comparison. It has to linger with him that he assumed the role in the first place through backstabbing people who’d mentored him along and given him the opportunity to build his resume. It was reported back in December that Drury culled components of the organization he perceived as being loyal to his predecessors and not him as a means of truly embedding himself at every level of the operation.
Downsizing staff, operating out of paranoia, refusing to take accountability for mistakes and always casting the blame outward are not a recipe for success in professional sports.
That said, most of this conversation is moot because Drury has the owner’s ear. Until Dolan is convinced that Drury is embarrassing him, the entire organization will keep repeating the same mistakes. Being that Drury shows his face for questions from the media less than a handful of times per year, it’s borderline impossible to get him on the record and it only fuels the air of paranoia around the team. Of course, this is at large a byproduct of the team’s owner’s own problems with the media.
Dolan has consistently felt that the coverage his teams get is unfair. This reached a zenith between the Winter of 2018 and Summer of 2019. In December of 2018, MSG banned New York Daily News reporter Stefan Bondy from then team president Steve Mills’ press conference. Then the following summer, MSG did it again for the team’s draft picks introductory press conference. At least the second time the NBA fined the organization for violating NBA policy.
It’s less of a problem that Knicks President Leon Rose doesn’t show his face or address reporters on the record as often as his contemporaries because that team is actively good. It would go a long way in endearing some much needed accountability towards the Rangers if the GM took some blame for this disaster of a season.
Instead, Drury will pick a third head coach, and the attention will turn to moving Kreider and/or Zibanejad ahead of the NHL draft. In all likelihood, Drury will get returns that create new holes in the lineup and we will get to relive the adventure of 2024-2025 all over again. Sure a coach might coax slightly better defensive effort out of the group at large, but make no mistake, Drury’s made an entire organization walk on eggshells for a full season. There’s no putting that toothpaste back in the tube when it comes to trust between players and the front office as well as the fan base and the organization.