Better luck next year: Chris Drury needs to own this failed Rangers season

The organization needs a fresh start in more areas than just the roster.

Welcome back to Better Luck Next Year, a series that will focus on each team as they get eliminated from Stanley Cup Playoff contention and the Stanley Cup Playoffs. What went wrong, why it went wrong, what (if anything) went right, and what is next. We continue today with the next team to be eliminated from Stanley Cup Playoff contention: The New York Rangers.

Even when the New York Rangers find some level of success it always seems to be done in spite of themselves. The three-year run between 2021-22 and 2023-24 is a perfect example of this.

Those teams won a lot of games in both the regular season and playoffs. They got reasonably close to a Stanley Cup Final. Hell, they won a freaking Presidents’ Trophy as the best regular season team in the league. In terms of wins and losses, they were a contending team and looked as if the rebuild that started back in 2017 was going to produce some real fruit.

Or at least had a chance to produce something.

But when you lifted up the hood and looked underneath at the inner-workings of it, it was not hard to see that the entire thing was being held together with a mixture of duct tape and some old string. The process behind the results was always flawed, and never up to the level that true Stanley Cup contenders reach. Their 5-on-5 metrics, and especially in terms of shot and scoring chance suppression, were always among the worst in the league. The entire process was built around the idea that their power play could swing a game and provide the bulk of the offense, and that their goalie (in this case, Igor Shesterkin) was better than every other goalie and would mask all of their many flaws.

That CAN work, but only to a point.

Teams that rely on those elements typically have a ceiling, and it is not the ceiling you want.

In a lot of ways the Rangers are the latest example that elite goaltending can be both a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that it gives you a chance to win and gives you a chance to compete. The curse is that it can blind you to the problems you have and stop you from fixing them. Carey Price. Henrik Lundqvist. Connor Hellebuyck. Shesterkin. All of these guys elevated otherwise mediocre teams, but never received the help they needed due in some part to the fact they themselves were so good.

After all, the team is winning games, why do we need to fix anything? Who cares WHY we are winning. We are winning.

This was pretty much the Rangers. It has always been the Rangers. It has been the Rangers for two different franchise goalies over the past 20 years. Only this time I would argue they did an even worse job of identifying it and fixing it.

The 2024-25 season went south due to three main factors (in no particular order):

• Shesterkin was simply really good instead of an MVP-level player.

• The power play went in the tank.

• Chris Drury’s reactive management and team-building style not only pissed off what turned out to be a very fragile team with bad leadership, but also resulted in some really questionable (and downright bad) roster moves.

Instead of fixing the flaws, the moves they made only magnified them for the 2025-26 season.

Trading for a 31-year-old J.T. Miller and making him the captain after his previous two teams quickly tired of his act, while also taking on the remainder of his contract and adding another big-money player on the wrong side of 30 to a team that already has too many of them, was a crazy, reactionary move. Borderline madness.

Trading Kaapo Kakko for Will Borgen and then re-signing Borgen to a long-term deal after watching him play for 18 games was bat-shit insane.

Trading a top-six forward in Chris Kreider and not bringing in another top-six forward to replace him was …. curious, especially for a team that already had a need for more scoring help and better 5-on-5 play in the top-six.

Trading way K’Andre Miller after signing Vladislav Gavrikov (a legitimately solid move) because your salary cap situation was decimated by the additions of the other Miller and all of the other bad defensemen you previously acquired was just laughable asset and salary cap mismanagement. Gavrikov was a good addition. The defense would have been better with both him and Miller on it. The Rangers never had a chance to see that for themselves.

None of this is hindsight. These were all things that seemed obvious at the time the moves were made, and all you have to do is dig through the archives here.

It is a bad team.

It is a poorly constructed team.

It is a poorly run team.

New head coach Mike Sullivan might not have been the answer, but he is just the latest coach that has been cycled through and not produced the results they wanted.

The problem runs far deeper than any current or past coach.

This team needs some sort of a re-tool, or rebuild, or reset (or whatever you want to call it) on the ice. But before it can start that process, it needs to start with the front office and the people orchestrating that reset.

What went right this season

As big of a failure as this season has turned out to be, there are some legitimately positive developments that include Adam Fox, a healthy Igor Shesterkin, Alexis Lafreniere, Mika Zibanejad and one good move of foresight Drury might have had.

Let’s talk about those developments, as well as what went wrong, and what should be next for the Rangers.