NHL Trade Deadline Primer: Why should the Rangers trust Chris Drury to oversee this re-tool?

His tenure with the Rangers has been defined by reactive moves with no real vision or plan. That is not great for a team that now needs a long-term plan and vision.

The NHL Trade Deadline (March 6) is approaching, and until it arrives we are going to take a look at some of the significant players and teams that could be making moves. We continue today with the New York Rangers and Chris Drury being tasked with fixing the mess he helped create.

The New York Rangers have already all but admitted their previous rebuild has failed, and have now taken the steps to begin their next re-tooling phase. They even sent out another fancy letter to explain it, and already started dealing pending unrestricted free agents Carson Soucy (defenseman) and Artemi Panarin (forward). There will almost certainly be more trades before the March 6 trade deadline. The only question is how significant will they be, who will they involve, and which players on the current roster the Rangers actually see as “core” players they can re-tool around.

Starting goalie Igor Shesterkin seems like an obvious bet.

As does defenseman Adam Fox, even if he remains one of the most weirdly criticized top-tier players in the league.

Beyond that?

Who the hell knows.

There are certainly no shortage of potential trade options on the roster this season, and even going into the offseason. Do they keep waiting on Alexis Lafreniere to take a step toward stardom? What big-money veterans will they try to trade? Can they get a good return for Vincent Trocheck? Just how extensive of a re-tool is this going to be?

All valid questions. All relevant questions.

Also a valid and relevant question: Why should they have confidence in general manager Chris Drury to make all of these decisions, oversee this process, and ultimately get it right?

It is not even necessarily a question of the individual moves Drury has made in the past that lead to the skepticism of his ability to pull this off. It’s also about the process behind everything he has done, the way he has done it, and, yes, also the quality of the moves themselves.

The biggest issue with Drury’s tenure has been the reactive (and overreactive) nature to a lot of what he’s done and the way he has tried to build the roster. It started from the very beginning of his tenure in the summer of 2021. That was when he traded talented forward Pavel Buchnevich for Sammy Blais, traded for Ryan Reaves and then gave Barclay Goodrow too much money over too many years.

It was all an overreaction to Tom Wilson causing havoc against them in one game, which totally broke the brains of everybody within the Rangers organization (they even wrote an angry letter about it — this team loves its letters) and forced them into thinking they needed to become bigger, tougher and grittier.

So Drury’s first order of business was to trade the one talented forward to come through the Rangers organization and produce at a top-line rate in the NHL (Buchnevich) for roster filler, trade for one of the league’s last-remaining face-punchers (Reaves), and pay a fourth-liner (Goodrow) $22 million over six years!

Madness! It was all madness! It was all madness at the time! It is still madness in hindsight!

To be fair, the Rangers DID manage to have some team success in the aftermath of those moves, reaching two Eastern Conference Finals and winning a Presidents’ Trophy over a three-year stretch between 2021-22 and 2023-24.

But that team success was not the result of Drury’s overreaction to Wilson. It was the result of Shesterkin being the best goalie on the planet for three years, Fox becoming a Norris Trophy-level defenseman, and Artemi Panarin becoming one of the best offensive players the Rangers organization has ever had. Those three guys helped mask a LOT of flaws.

Overall, the results were fine. The process was flawed. And if there were ever a statement that perfectly defined this era of Rangers hockey it is almost certainly, “good results, bad process.”

That first summer was also not the only overreactive decision-making from Drury and his front office.

And unfortunately for the Rangers that sort of managerial strategy is not going to get them out of this mess.

Let’s talk about it.