We asked. You answered. Over a thousand of you weighed in on the New York Rangers, their current state and what may come next for the NHL’s most bizarre franchise.
Had we dropped this survey a month ago, when the Rangers looked as hopeless as any team in recent memory, these responses would have been far darker: Trade everyone! Fire everyone! Start over!
But now, with the Rangers on the upswing, there’s optimism in this survey. A serious majority of you feel playoffs are coming this spring and that the teardown general manager Chris Drury started by shipping out Barclay Goodrow in June and Jacob Trouba and Kaapo Kakko last month shouldn’t turn into a full rebuild.
And a decent majority of you still feel Peter Laviolette can guide the team to respectability behind the bench. About Drury, though: “I have no faith that he can build a championship team,” one commenter said. “He needs to go before he causes even more damage.”
Let’s break down the answers:
This would have been a laughable question before the calendar flipped to 2025. The 4-15-0 slide that took the Rangers through December left them with playoff chances hovering around single-digit percentages. The current 7-1-3 run that’s put them on the edge of the East playoff picture — plus a healthy tiebreaker edge in regulation wins over the teams around and just above them — makes this viewpoint a good one, grounded in data and not just rose-colored fan glasses.
Here’s betting that the 60.24 percent of you who voted yes are going to look smart in April.
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A bold prediction for 2025: The Rangers are making the playoffs
The majority of you who answered here see what the main issue was during the 19-game slide as well as in some of the games before and after: The Rangers are too reliant on their goalies to make up for a bevy of scoring chances. Defending teams against the rush has been an issue for a few years now; when the Rangers collapsed in December, they couldn’t defend anywhere on the ice.
Their recent surge has been fueled by a recommitment to defending in all three zones, though there are still games like Sunday’s, in which the Rangers yielded 17 high-danger chances to the Montreal Canadiens.
Drury gets plenty of attention from voters here, too. It’s a farfetched scenario that owner James Dolan would suddenly turn on his handpicked GM; more likely would be that Drury continues to tinker with the roster and tries to move out a core player.
One commenter gave another option for change: “Fire Dolan.”
This one was closer than we expected. Zibanejad has started to turn his game around, but he’s not the player he was last year. He’s also not going anywhere unless he approves a trade with his no-move clause, but a fair number of you see the decline and are hoping for change.
“The big question is can you win a Cup with Zibanejad as a top (two) C,” one commenter said. “Most of us would likely say no.”
Miller garnering over a quarter of the votes is a bit of a surprise, given his skill set and age. He’s had a rough season like a lot of other Rangers. He would likely bring back the biggest haul if Drury were to move him, so many of you could be on to something.
Lindgren is the most likely to be moved off the top of this vote list, since he’s a pending unrestricted free agent. So the 17.88 percent of you who went with Lindgren will likely be proven right soon enough.
It’s not a full endorsement of Laviolette here, but a solid majority of you feel coaching is not the issue with this Rangers season. Laviolette has experienced drops in his teams’ results from Year 1 to Year 2 just about everywhere he’s been, but nothing like this season. If the Rangers continue their current turnaround, make the playoffs and actually do some damage there, then the franchise’s stance that Laviolette is not primarily at fault will look smart.
“Laviolette is NOT the problem in any way, shape or form,” one commenter said. “Without him, last year’s team, which is basically this year’s team, would never have gotten as far as it did.”
Counterpoint from another: “I used to think the problem was the roster (which is still problematic), but I’m just tired of Lavy as the coach.”
This is as close to a split decision as we had on any of the yes/no questions, but still a decent majority of you feel that Drury, who helped create some of the issues with his strong-armed moves to shuffle the roster (as necessary as some of those moves were), isn’t going to be able to see this through.
We’ll leave it to the commenters to explain this result:
• “I thought Drury was up to the task, but now I have my doubts. You look around the league at who other teams have drafted and that is not something we have done as well as we need to — on top of the fact that it’s essential to have more guys with jam and edge to their game. I don’t love giving Igor that money.”
• “The Igor contract, in my opinion, was a massive mistake, and Drury’s strategy, if you can call it one, seems to be reconstructing the 2011 Rangers (that) tried real hard and scored two goals per game.”
• “It’s hard to blame Drury when they — on paper — have an extremely talented team and are fresh off winning the Presidents’ Trophy.”
Overwhelmingly you agreed with the coaches, execs and agents we polled last week. Shesterkin is locked up, and so are Adam Fox, Alexis Lafrenière and Vincent Trocheck. Braden Schneider is a keeper. So is Will Cuylle. Gabe Perreault will be a Ranger soon. And this is the Rangers, who have gone through a full rebuild recently enough that the fruits of those labors are at the core of this group.
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NHL execs, coaches and agents on fixing the Rangers: Fire Drury? Or Laviolette? Rebuild? Stay the course?
(Photo: Danny Wild / USA Today)
