The New York Rangers rebuild failed: How did they get here?

By being the New York Rangers and doing what the New York Rangers always do.

In February of 2018 the New York Rangers sent a letter to their fans announcing major changes and the beginning of a rebuild. Veteran forward Derek Stepan had already been traded the previous offseason, and over the next year veterans like Ryan McDonagh, J.T. Miller, Mats Zuccarello and others would also be traded for younger assets and draft picks.

It was not a complete teardown — several veterans like Chris Kreider, Mika Zibanejad and Henrik Lundqvist all remained — but it was still a pretty extensive rebuild.

What followed for the Rangers was some strong luck in the team-building process.

• They had multiple top-10 picks, while also having some incredible draft lottery luck that produced a pair of top-two picks when they never actually bottomed out in the standings.

• They made a huge free agent signing in Artemi Panarin that worked out better than most big-money free agent signings do, rapidly speeding up their timeline for contention. At his peak, he was an MVP-level player for a few years for them.

• They were able to acquire a young, top prospect in Adam Fox that would match all expectations and become a legitimate No. 1 defenseman in the NHL. They got him because Fox pretty much forced his way to the Rangers and it made clear he would only sign with them.

• They also had another franchise goalie come through their system (Igor Shesterkin) and just step right into the crease to replace future Hall of Famer Henrik Lundqvist.

A LOT of things went right.

A lot of things that could have, and perhaps should have, produced a long-term contender, and perhaps even a championship.

But the entire process never really produced the desired results on the ice.

Now we sit eight years later and the Rangers’ rebuild has produced just three playoff appearances. Four if you want to count the 2019-20 season where they lost in the qualifying round of the expanded playoff. They still never actually made the 16-team field and had the 12th best record in the Eastern Conference when that season ended. In a normal season they miss the playoffs.

Those three real playoff seasons produced two Eastern Conference Finals runs and a Presidents’ Trophy for the league’s best record during the 2023-24 season.

The two deep playoff runs and the Presidents’ Trophy might seem like some measure of success (and to a point, they are), but I can promise you it is not really what the Rangers wanted when they began the rebuilding process.

Especially since they never really had sustained success and never reached the top of the mountain. Their success was extremely short-lived, as that three-year run was followed by last year’s disappointment (missed playoffs) and this year’s nightmare that has seen them own the Eastern Conference’s worst record into the second half of the season.

All of that resulted in the reset button getting hit again this past week.

That was when they sent out Letter No. 2 to their fans, indicating that more changes are going to be coming between now and this year’s trade deadline.

The Rangers were quick to point out in this letter that it was not going to be a full rebuild, but an on-the-fly re-tool that will have them try to add young players with tenacity, draft picks and salary cap space that will give them flexibility in the future.

That almost certainly means pending unrestricted free agents Panarin and Carson Soucy will be moved. Maybe a Vincent Trocheck if a team wants to pay a premium for a center.

Beyond that, it is anybody’s guess.

But why did this rebuild go so wrong, how did it go so wrong, and how did they regress so quickly and so significantly from that Presidents’ Trophy winning team during the 2023-24 season?

There will be a lot of theories and ideas on this.

Some will point to the way general manager Chris Drury and the front office dealt with jettisoning the contracts of Barclay Goodrow and Jacob Trouba, and the impact that had on the locker room.

Or perhaps the infamous memo that was sent out by Drury early in the 2024-25 season where he made it known pretty much every veteran on the team could be available for trades.

Nobody ever seemed happy with head coaches Gerard Gallant or Peter Laviolette and the way they ran the team, setting the stage for Mike Sullivan to take over. That has also not proven to be a cure-all.

Those are all fine narratives, and maybe they did play some sort of a role. After all, these are still humans with human emotions in that locker room.

They are just probably not the biggest reasons it all fell apart and failed.

The biggest reasons are the simple fact they have received almost nothing from all of their top-10 picks from the rebuild, and because management was blinded by the curse of elite goaltending and had no idea how to self-scout themselves, no idea what their problems were, and no idea how to fix them.

Let’s talk about all of that a little more.