The New York Rangers have seen enough with this current group of players. Now that they are more than halfway through the season and residing at the bottom of the Eastern Conference standings, management has decided that it needs to start selling off players and retooling.
Rangers misevaluated how good their team was going to be
The thing that stands out the most about the Rangers’ failures on the ice this season is that the front office really believed this team was capable of contending.
That is why they went out and hired Mike Sullivan to be their head coach.
That is why they traded a first-round pick and two young players to the Vancouver Canucks at last year’s trade deadline for J.T. Miller, and then named him captain.
That is why they signed veteran defenseman Vladislav Gavrikov as an unrestricted free agent this summer.
All of it was done in the name of trying to win a Stanley Cup. Not next year or in a couple of years. This year. But the Rangers missed the fact that their core group of players just was not good enough to win. Despite having one of the league’s best goalies in Igor Shesterkin and a top defenseman in Adam Fox, the Rangers missed the playoffs in 2024-25 and had way more flaws than could have been plugged with a new coach and a couple of veterans.
Even when the Rangers were making the playoffs in recent years with this core, nothing about it looked like a team that was capable of winning a championship. They were overly dependent on Shesterkin and their power play to win games, and that is simply not a recipe for championship success in the NHL. The Rangers never adequately fixed any of those flaws.
On Friday, Rangers general manager Chris Drury sent out a letter to fans saying the team was going to be making decisions with players on the roster, and that the team would be saying goodbye to some players. He made sure to point out it would not be a “rebuild” but more of a “re-tool.”
