The Rangers missed their window

The party's over for Chris Drury, it's just a matter of when he realizes

Art by Nick Zararis

Prevailing wisdom amongst savvy New York sports fans always rendered a true rebuild impossible. This was New York City, 9 professional sports teams, Broadway, a vibrant social scene, the magical “anything could happen tonight,” feeling that still pulls transplants from suburban Ohio who book dining reservations off of TikTok, people always have options. Turning 41 home games at the world’s most famous (expensive) arena into a development camp for teenagers and 20 somethings from Mississauga wasn’t going to fly.

Then, a funny thing happened.

The general manager, Jeff Gorton, and president, Glen Sather, convinced not only the team’s mercurial owner James Dolan that a rebuild would be beneficial, they sold an entire fan base on it too. For much of the New York Rangers tortured history, they’ve tried to live up to some idealized self image.

A hard working, blue collar team amongst a city that was increasingly becoming representative of a gilded America. No quit in New York, from this team?

Celebrity chef licensed Sushi Bars, facsimile “New York Pizza,” for 10.50 a slice and of course, $18 tall boys of Bud light all line the concourses of Madison Square Garden now and are largely a reflection of the team on the ice: nice ideas, but in practice a bit absurd.

Then general manager Jeff Gorton spent four seasons tearing down the core of a team that peaked at losing in five games in the Stanley Cup Final to the LA Kings in 2014. Trading off pieces like Rick Nash, Ryan McDonagh, Mats Zuccarello, Kevin Hayes, J.T. Miller, Cam Talbot, Carl Hagelin and buying out franchise icon and hockey hall of famer Henrik Lundqvist. The promise wasn’t set in stone: the team would liquidate its assets, and bring them to the draft casino in hopes of turning a corner.

The goal was to establish something sustainable, long lasting and meaningful. The promise of an eventual payoff for patience lingered, fans bought in and adopted the optimism associated with rebuilding. These teenagers were the hopeful future backbone of a long-term contender. There wouldn’t be a need to trade draft picks at the trade deadline for a Keith Yandle or trying to level up Ryan Callahan into Martin St. Louis if the team had its own home grown high-end talent.

Instead, the Rangers were going to buck their own recent history and model their organization after the league’s best: Tampa Bay, Chicago, Washington and Pittsburgh. Take your medicine in the short term, draft high-end, moldable talent and build the team out around them. But, impatience as well as the prospect of being competitive while the drafted players figured it out was too tantalizing.

The cruelest irony of it all was that the Rangers’ stakeholders bought an incredible amount of goodwill with the fanbase by being transparent about the direction of the team. The fanbase was willing to keep checking their wallet to be sure the Power Ball tickets were still in their pocket for the hopes that there’d be a winner.

The first real inflection point, and why the Rangers are stuck in the soggy middle five years later was the offseason of 2019. It acquired the rights to future Norris Trophy winning defenseman Adam Fox in April for second and third round picks. It acquired Jacob Trouba from the Winnipeg Jets for a first round pick and Neal Pionk in June.

Thus giving the Rangers a right side of Fox, Trouba and the previously acquired Tony DeAngelo all of which were under team control for the foreseeable future.

Then, the Rangers made their highest ever draft pick in the common draft era, second overall. New York selected Kaapo Kakko who’s amateur pedigree was supposed to translate right away. Kakko presented a high-end toolbox centered around his physical stature at only 18-years-old. He’d played against men in Finland since he was 16, the supposition being the Rangers could develop his instincts and puck skills on the fly.

But the team’s masterstroke? Signing point per game forward and bonafide superstar winger Artemi Panarin on the first day of free agency. Panarin to this day is the highest paid player in the history of the Rangers during the salary cap era. He’s been a Hart Trophy finalist two separate times and been a driving force of the team’s regular season success.

Unfortunately for both Panarin and the Rangers at large, the reinforcements never really arrived. As much as it’d be easy to point the blame squarely on Panarin’s lack of offensive production in the Rangers’ pair of conference final runs, the team simply never gave him the type of high end running mate that rebuilds are supposed to manifest.

Sure, Mika Zibanejad and Vincent Trocheck have occasionally moonlighted as point per game players, or close to it in the case of Chris Kreider. But the entire point of enduring a multi-year rebuild was to get underpriced, relative to market value, that was high-impact.

Duos and trios of superstars defined the last 15 years of the NHL: Alex Ovechkin/Nick Backstrom, Sidney Crosby/Evgeni Malkin, Jonathan Toews/Patrick Kane, Nikita Kucherov/Steven Stamkos, Nathan MacKinnon/Mikko Rantanen, Matthew Tkachuk/Alex Barkov and Jack Eichel/Mark Stone.

Hell, even the teams that didn’t end up taking home Stanley Cups featured Connor McDavid/Leon Draisaitl, Patrice Bergeron/David Pastrnak and Auston Matthews/Mitch Marner.

The process

That’s what makes the Rangers foray into contender status and regression back to the middle all the more frustrating. New York’s unconventional path tried to aggregate an elite goaltender in conjunction with an elite defenseman to Panarin to will an unconventional roster construction into the winner’s circle. In spite of all circumstantial evidence around them requiring at least one other elite forward, to join their prized free agent, the Rangers trudged along.

New York consciously subtracting from a roster in hopes of icing a less competitive team to produce better draft odds was supposed to supply said reinforcement. The organization bought itself leeway with the fanbase, it was eager to embrace the highly drafted amateur talent and give it time to grow.

If anything, there was palpable excitement to watch picks like Lias Andersson and Filip Chytil begin to forge their respective NHL paths against the backdrop of a hungry, promising team that was exciting even if it didn’t win a lot.

Between the summers of 2017 and 2020, the Rangers made 34 draft picks. Of those 34 picks, 8 were in the first and four were in the second meaning more than a third of the picks to jumpstart the rebuild fell in the first 62 picks. When stakeholders hunker down and piece together a strategy for an organizational overhaul, this is the type of ammo they could only dream of.

The Rangers took all of that raw amateur talent and did close to nothing to foster a positive environment for its success. Instead, the team became a vehicle to speedrun to the middle as quickly as possible. Sure, the organization acquired pieces like Ryan Lindgren and the aforementioned Fox in trades. They found some solid pieces to provide depth.

But ultimately, strong NHL organizations can find depth pieces in the draft every single year. Finding cost effective, young bottom six forwards is often one of the differentiation points between good and great teams.

Not exactly murderers row

Of draft picks between 2017 and 2020, 13 have played at least one NHL game, 6 were traded, and two are in their first full seasons as semi-regular NHLers. Of this cohort, just Lafreniere, Miller and Schneider have solidified themselves as regular Rangers and have all plateaued at similar points in their respective developments.

The Rangers were banking on at least one of these forwards being the high-end piece to compliment Panarin up front. While Lafreniere did an admirable job in 2023-2024 riding shotgun with Panarin and Vincnent Trocheck, that seems to be an outlier in his production. The book on Lafrenière as a professional hockey player isn’t closed, but he’s assuredly not good enough to be a first line wing for a Stanley Cup champion.

Now, with Panarin’s star fading though not entirely extinguished, the Rangers are struggling to maintain what they already had. This is where the unmaking of the team’s long-term future starts.

What’s the direction?

In trying to maintain contender status, there were of course difficult decisions to make. Instead of making them at the most prudent of times, Drury has often hung on too long and had his hand forced.

Whether it being firing Gerard Gallant, moving on from Ryan Reaves, Sammy Blais, Barclay Goodrow or Jacob Trouba, Drury has always rode something to the bitter end, as if pride were a determining factor. Sure, the people who cover the team are giving Drury credit for exiling Trouba to Anaheim and Goodrow to San Jose now, but that would’ve been far more helpful last year when the Rangers were in the midst of the best regular season in the 99 year history of the franchise.

Of course, this obsession with always being right led Drury back to where he was two seasons ago, in pursuit of J.T. Miller. In Drury’s mind, the problem with the Rangers isn’t that the team lacks talent, just that they don’t try hard enough and play with enough snarl.

Drury reportedly could’ve had Miller back in the 2021-2022 season but refused to part with Schneider, who seems to be a third pair defenseman at best. There’s no better encapsulation of the Rangers’ talent evaluation issues than Schneider. A player whose tools are promising, but never seemingly makes any progress. The Saskatoon native is 4 seasons into his NHL career and still has yet to even sniff consistent top four minutes in spite of his prodigious standing within the organization.

After all, the Rangers traded up in the 2020 draft to acquire Schneider, traded Nils Lundkvist away to open up the lineup spot for him with no competition and given him ample opportunity to prove his worth. Yet, like Lafrenière and K’Andre Miller, it doesn’t seem like a higher level is attainable. Teams don’t draft third pair defenseman 19th overall by design.

Instead, the Rangers hung on and hung on. Burning draft picks and prospects in trades for a laundry list of wingers over the last several years in pursuit of finding the perfect compliment for the ever mercurial Chris Kreider and Mika Zibanejad tandem.

This presents a binary which more thoroughly can be plotted along a spectrum. Either Drury felt the guys were good enough, which was wrong or he never really believed in the core all that much to begin with and burned assets on a project that he himself was never a proponent of. Either way, Drury’s management has led the Rangers to the brink of a retooling period.

Sure, Panarin, Fox and Shesterkin are amongst the best in the world at their respective positions, but there does reach a tipping point where the returns begin to diminish. Hell, look at the prevailing narratives around Fox and Shesterkin amongst the team’s more casual fans, you’d think Shesterkin was putting up Stuart Skinner numbers and that Fox was moving like Tyler Myers.

The respective greatness of Fox and Shesterkin over the past four seasons covered up a lot of the team’s problems. It wasn’t easy, but it was enough to win enough regular season games, qualify for the playoffs and beat the teams they were supposed to.

Chasing the magic of the “perfect group,” where it wasn’t about the most talented group, but the best people led the Rangers here. Sure, in the regular season, that can be a rallying point late in games and coax better play in short spurts. In playoff series, it can be enough against equal or lesser opponents. But anytime the Rangers have lined up from a more talented team than them in the playoffs, they have failed to swing the upset.

Florida 2024. New Jersey 2023. Tampa Bay 2022. Tampa Bay 2015. Los Angeles 2014.

The Rangers pushed, valiantly, often riding borderline superhuman performances to keep those series in the balance and forcing them a game longer than they should have. But, eventually, talent outplays good vibes.

If you have two evenly matched teams, sure, good vibes and intangibles can be a deciding factor. But when there’s a talent gap between teams, the non-hockey reasons for roster construction stick out like sore thumbs.

Between the 2022 and 2024 playoffs, Trouba was outscored 28-25 at even strength with .938 save percentage goaltending. In that same window, Goodrow was outscored 8-12 with .942 save percentage goaltending. No matter how much they might have helped on an intangible factor, prioritizing the intangible over reality in a results business is hubris teetering on delusion.

Now, the Rangers sit on the precipice of missing the postseason all together less than 10 months after being two games away from representing the eastern conference in the Stanley Cup final. The GM has flailed in the trade market for stop gaps to plug in his leaky ship like Will Borgen and Carson Soucy with little to no reward.

Sure, Borgen is better than Trouba, but that’s not the bar a cup contender operates on. It’s not just in relation to the internal, if you are not in consistent cycles of self comparison to contemporary opponents, you will fall behind. Borgen might crack the third pair for either Florida team or the Hurricanes. He would not get into the Devils lineup if their first six choices were healthy.

In the Rangers collective mind, the team’s stakeholders see undervalued or misused assets in Borgen, Vaakanainen and Soucy as solutions to New York’s problems. However, if any of those players were capable of changing their material conditions for the better irrespective of environment wouldn’t the Ducks, Kraken and Canucks, who all need defensemen and badly opt to hang onto them?

It’s acquiring players simply for the sake of shaking things up which misses the forest for the trees. Yes, unequivocally, the Rangers needed upgrades on the back end, but that was not going to coax better performances out of the team’s failing core forwards.

Hell, the Rangers dropped J.T. Miller into their team the first week of February who’s recorded 20 points in 21 games with a 12.5 on ice shooting percentage and the team is just 10-9-2 with him in the lineup. The situation is so dire that dropping a near point per game forward on a heater into the team has New York mediocre instead of bad.

There will be impassioned defenders of the general manager and his direction. That the team’s stars are soft, that they don’t play playoff style hockey, they fold at the first sign of real adversity, and Peter Laviolette will be singled out for allowing the bad habits that spiraled the season out of control to ferment in the first place.

Unfortunately, in the world of professional sports, the concept of mutual exclusivity is elusive. A team’s unraveling doesn’t happen overnight or in a vacuum. The Rangers had a nice run the last three years, they came awfully close to making the Stanley Cup final, they won a whole lot of regular season games, they picked up some individual awards and a president’s trophy. There are a whole lot of franchises across the NHL that would sign up for the last three years.

But that’s not what the letter promised. That was not supposed to be the reward of patience. To add insult to injury, the Rangers don’t have a next wave either. The entire point of enduring multiple seasons of the draft lottery was building out the foundation of a long-term winner. It often takes a while even after selecting those highly touted prospects to bear fruit

Washington Capitals: 14 seasons after drafting Alex Ovechkin

Tampa Bay Lightning: 12 seasons after drafting Steven Stamkos

Florida Panthers: 11 seasons after drafting Alex Barkov

Not only did the Rangers fail to win in speeding up and ultimately unraveling their rebuild, they failed to develop long-term building blocks. Don’t look now, but Shesterkin is 29 and Fox is 27. Both still have several prime seasons to give and likely will be driving forces for future team success in the short term.

However, beyond Fox and Shesterkin, the next wave fails to reach that impact player threshold. Neither Lafreniere or K’Andre Miller seem to be team driving caliber players. The collection of young pieces moonlighting in the bottom six right now: like Brett Berard, Brennan Othmann and Matt Rempe are varying degrees of intriguing but none profile as quality top six players. Will Cuylle might be a top six forward but lacks the dynamic ability typically requisite with such a lineup role, but there is still time for that debate.

Sure, Gabriel Perrault is on the horizon, but the organization that whiffed on two first round picks so badly last decade that neither is even in North America less than a decade later is going to drop a college hockey product into the team’s top six over its more proven and expensive veterans and he’s actively going to be great as soon as he dons the blue sweater?

The Rangers are hinging the rest of the decade for the organization on a 20 year old that’s listed at 165 pounds hitting the ground running and being the team’s first, first round pick to be a point per game player for the franchise since Brian Leetch. Of course, that’s also assuming that Zibanejad, Trocheck, Panarin and Kreider’s simultaneous struggles happened to be a symptom of a season from hell as opposed to the beginning of a stark age related decline.

Without that third superstar skater in support of Panarin and Fox, the Rangers have a defined ceiling. As good as J.T. Miller has been in his return to the Rangers, he is not the answer to the team’s wholesale issues. The older Miller, much like Vaakainen, Borgen and Soucy, is a stop gap. They’re all here to serve as distractions from the wholesale issues plaguing the organization both on the ice and from its decision makers.

There is no easy way out of this mess. More likely than not, Drury’s triage is only going to make the next general manager’s job more challenging. But, it’s not a GM’s prerogative to worry about the aftermath, he’s simply going to keep leveraging his assets until the position materially changes or he gets fired and the old boys club gives him career rehab.

The Rangers had multiple opportunities to pursue a middle ground through a rebuild and being competitive. Adding a Hall of Fame candidate who’s only gotten better since signing like Panarin was an absolute no-brainer. Even if the Rangers didn’t end up winning a championship, adding a player capable of recording 536 points in 419 games is something a team does every time. It’s a stinging indictment of the Rangers’ front office that the player with the second most points since Panarin’s debut is Zibanejad with 492 in 510 games.

These are the epitome of first world problems. The Rangers will likely reorganize this upcoming offseason and chart off into a new era. The last pieces of the Henrik Lundqvist time period, Kreider, J.T. Miller and Shesterkin are all that remains of the group that went to the cup final 11 years ago.

While the Rangers have come awfully close, the NHL is not the national horseshoes league. The path back to bonafide contender status is nonlinear and likely not one offseason away. Barring a superstar acquisition in the next 10 months, next year's Rangers will likely resemble this underperforming group that’s garnering “least likable Rangers team of all time,” tags.

Drury and his self insulating cohort of decisionmakers that carry an air of paranoia over the entire organization are insisting to the DJ to keep playing one more song so he can try to close. The DJ just gave him “New York, New York,” by Frank Sinatra to shut down the dance floor, but this party, it’s over. It’s simply whether or not Drury keeps inconveniencing the staff that has to clean up the banquet hall.