Rangers lack of leadership sabotaged season, threatens team’s future
Within the past week, the New York Rangers said goodbye to fired coach Peter Laviolette and bade farewell to Sam Rosen after 40 years behind the mic. They also turned the page on a miserable season. And numerous players from a failed roster may have played their final game in the Blueshirts, as well.
What isn’t going out the door with some of the soon-to-be-departing veterans is leadership. That element left the premises long ago.
The reasons for the Rangers’ shocking regression this season were many. Hence Laviolette being canned just one year after leading the Rangers to the Presidents’ Trophy.
But none were bigger than the leadership void among the players that became painfully apparent throughout this season of discontent – which will have to be addressed as the Rangers undergo significant change over the summer.
The Rangers weren’t physical enough. They lacked speed and a sense of identity. They struggled or refused to play in straight lines and attack the net. They continually failed to commit to playing robust defense in front of star goaltender Igor Shesterkin. They tuned out their coach.
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Jacob Trouba, Barclay Goodrow departures left unfilled hole in Rangers dressing room
So much of that can be directly traced to a dressing room that lacked strong voices to set the tone and direction, and create a culture of accountability, for a talented team that drifted all season and missed the Stanley Cup Playoffs for the first time in four years.
The messy and exhausting Jacob Trouba and Barclay Goodrow affairs last June created lasting effects beyond just the acrimony it initially caused, since players took exception to general manager Chris Drury’s ruthless disposal of the two veterans. It turns out that the moves did more than just create a sense of frustration with the front office that set the club on a bad path from the get-go. It’s clear now that the loss of Trouba, the captain, and Goodrow, the two-time Stanley Cup champion with the Lightning, left a vacuum of guidance and direction that was never filled.
Trouba wasn’t around anymore to fire his helmet at the bench and fire up his teammates, appealing to their sense of responsibility to each other. The Rangers couldn’t look to Goodrow, a pivotal figure in Tampa Bay’s back-to-back championship runs, to see how to react and perform when the going got tough.
It showed up over and over again. The Rangers were a terrible defensive team, their roster-wide failure to commit to shutting down plays in the neutral zone and prevent breakdowns in their own end blatantly were obvious in nearly every game. It was just as obvious that no one was calling out those failures, nor confronting guilty parties.
Grit and desire were absent. The Rangers were utterly lacking in resilience, consistently unable to bounce back from giving up a goal, which often snowballed into multi-goals against sequences. In perhaps the most glaring evidence of absence of veteran stewardship, four players – three of them depth pieces – publicly torched the team over their playing time and usage. Apparently no one was counseled to keep grievances in house.
When Calvin de Haan – a 33-year-old defenseman on his fifth team in four years who was a throw-in to the Ryan Lindgren trade in March – ripped the Rangers last week over being a healthy scratch for what turned out to be the final 20 games of the season, it was anything but new.
De Haan joined Kaapo Kakko, Jimmy Vesey and Zac Jones as Rangers who aired lengthy grievances to the media over their ice time – or in Kakko’s case, what he perceived as being scapegoated by being a healthy scratch – this season. Teams with strong leadership keep things like this behind closed doors.
Hearing these colorful phrases like “I’m rotting away” (Jones), “I’m kind of dying by being here” (Vesey), “It’s just easy to pick a young guy and boot him out” (Kakko) and finally, “It’s f —-d” (de Haan) shined poorly on Laviolette, Drury and, yes, the in-house leaders.
It seems inconceivable that had the 2024-25 Rangers been led by strong, accomplished star players who cultivated a clear sense of mission and responsibility to each other and the team, such incidents would have occurred.
Related: Return of J.T. Miller highlighted slew of Rangers trades during 2024-25 season
Rangers’ youth at risk from troubled team culture
Add in the parting comments of Trouba and Goodrow, and the acrimonious, unhealthy environment around the Rangers was hard to miss all season. As significant a role that played in helping to torpedo this season, the potential for it to be a much bigger problem looms.
That’s because a key facet of the Rangers expected retooling going into 2025-26 involves integrating and giving bigger roles to promising younger players. Perhaps unfortunately, some of those players started their apprenticeships this season, exposing them to the negative environment for which the 2024-25 Rangers will be remembered.
That’s not at all a healthy situation for kids who represent the Rangers future, as they try to learn how to become pros. Watching highly-paid, accomplished veterans fail to bring maximum effort and responsibility to the ice night after night can’t be anything but corrosive for impressionable early 20-somethings and teenagers. The organization has to get this corrected, lest the negativity of last season stay with Brett Berard, Matt Rempe, Gabe Perreault, Brennan Othmann, Adam Edstrom and others.
It would be unfair to place all of the blame on Chris Kreider, Mika Zibanejad and Artemi Panarin, but the fact remains that the trio of core forwards were exposed as anything but leaders this season. Each an alternate captain, they were derelict in stepping up to demand more of themselves and their teammates when the season went sideways.
Kreider isn’t expected to be back and Zibanejad could also depart if Drury can work through his no-move clause. Panarin’s credibility took a big hit following news that he and MSG Sports settled a sexual assault accusation levied against him.
Drury is banking on a big part of the solution to the culture problem being already in-house. The GM didn’t acquire star center J.T. Miller in late January just for his skill set; the front office envisions Miller’s hard-nosed intensity and demanding ways rubbing off on the Rangers. That didn’t happen enough in Miller’s 32 games after the trade, but the expectation is that he will grow into one of the unquestioned leaders of the team in 2025-26.
The hope is also that Miller’s childhood friend and current teammate Vincent Trocheck continues to emerge as one of the tone-setters in what will be his fourth season on Broadway. Trocheck was the Rangers heartbeat in 2023-24, but like so many of his teammates this season, his impact and voice seemed muted. As with Miller, the Blueshirts want more of Trocheck’s fiery personality, not less.
While Trouba’s five-plus seasons with the Rangers were generally disappointing, he was undoubtedly their leader. It’s possible that Drury overlooked that aspect of Trouba’s presence when he shed his contract, and perhaps did the same when it came to Goodrow. The key now is “fixing the room,” so to speak, with new leaders theoretically coming forward while key subtractions are made with an eye on moving out from under the dark cloud that followed the team all season.
Miller’s relentless focus and perfectionism rubbed some of his Vancouver Canucks teammates the wrong way by the end, leading to his trade back to the team with which he started his NHL career. The Rangers, though, require all of that and more as they attempt to transform what has become an unsuccessful approach to being a contending team. Ditto for Trocheck, whose intangibles and style personify what the Rangers must become.
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