Nightmare Alley

New Yorkers are feeling blue and here’s a recap of went wrong in the Rangers 2024-25 season which was the Nightmare on 34th Street

The New York Rangers are broken. They went from the cusp of the Stanley Cup Final to scraping the shit bucket of the Eastern Conference. With sky high expectations this season when everything that could go wrong did there are many overlying layers as to why the Rangers went from President’s Trophy winners two wins away from the Finals to a catastrophic disappointment like an experiment that went wrong in a lab. The Rangers were cooked like an Oven Gold turkey after the loss in the semifinals last year. That’s a large reason as to why they failed to make the postseason in a season where there was supposed to be no glass ceiling amongst this group. I’ll delve into that shortly but first what went wrong this year? The answer to that is everything.

The team is loaded with talent and they just expect to be good. They’re downright lazy and expect instant greatness. The coach and General Manger lost the locker room. They gave up on Peter Laviolette and Chris Drury. I believe Drury was never the right guy for the job. He’d be better off selling peanuts for the Hartford Wolf Pack. He’s too incompetent to be a General Manager in the National Hockey League. He named Jacob Trouba the Captain, another man who under qualifies for the gig. Trouba was not the heart and soul. The team never fed off him and he is not a great hockey player. Not bringing back Barclay Goodrow was a mistake and in October giving Alexis Lafreniere $52 mill for seven years was far too much for a wing that is “pretty good” not “great.” He’s succeeded in a Ranger uniform but the number one draft pick was expected to be a goal scoring machine yet he’s never led the league in one category in his career. He’s only had one 20-goal season in his career. He hasn’t lived up to the hype. Giving Igor Shesterkin the long-term deal was a no-brainer so no credit goes to Drury on that.

As far as Laviolette I don’t think he’s done a terrible job as the coach this year but he certainly hasn’t done good. The team turned their back on him, so I cut him some slack but what’s disappointing is when you have a coach who has taken three different teams to the Stanley Cup Final, winning it with Carolina, you expect that same greatness with a team that is yearning to get there automatically. I haven’t been in favor of the coaching carousel. Now, after this tumultuous disaster the coach has to go ASAP but they should have just stuck with Gerard Gallant. In his first season as Rangers coach when the team was still in a rebuild with little to none expectations, he took them to the Conference Finals unexpectedly. Yes, they lost two playoff series when they were up two games to none and should have shut the doors both times but Gerard Gallant wasn’t on the ice playing. Firing him was foolish and I really liked his fiery demeanor. He would scream at the players like the drill sergeant from Full Metal Jacket. I like that, good coaches are not supposed to be nice guys.

So, this year during the first month of the season the Rangers were dominating and living up to their expectations. Then in November they struggled. They’re struggles persisted into December where they couldn’t win a game. I caught the bad vibes early on from November. As much as I didn’t want to admit it, I saw the November struggles as more than a slump. Unfortunately, my cynical fears became a reality as the team never at any point this season rekindled their success in the season’s opening month. Trouba was traded to Anaheim which is a good riddance but it shows how duncical Drury is. He gave him the C to wear on his jersey and shortly after realized he chose the wrong guy to esteem that merit. They broke up the kid line trading Filip Chytil and Kaapo Kakko which I’m still unsure on my thoughts on those. They both weren’t materializing into greatness but were amongst the fountain of youth that maybe with more patience may have catapulted into the success we were hoping. Maybe, maybe not, but time will tell in regards to how their careers pan out elsewhere. Also, Ryan Lindgren and Jimmy Vesey were traded at the trade deadline.

This year the Rangers averaged 3.10 goals per game which is twelfth place, a drop off from 3.39 which was fourth in the league a year ago while they ranked fourth in goals against last year and this year were 20^th in the NHL. A season ago they were third in the league on the power play with a 26.4 power play percentage and this year plummeted to 27^th at 17.7%. They failed in gut-wrenching fashion all year but the demise really began last June after the loss in the Eastern Conference Final to the Florida Panthers. Making long playoff runs but coming up empty handed and empty cupped the past few seasons tanked the team. They are just gassed from it. And I’m going to delve into the reality about the 2023-24 New York Rangers.

Were they really that good? Well, they were good enough to be a playoff contender. They were the number one seed in the NHL winning 55 games notching 114 points but as high and mighty as that team soared last year the team was incomplete. They were not a fully dimensional team. They were a two-dimensional team with a porous defense and they relied way too much on the power play. They had a GREAT goaltender and a magnificent offense that chose when they wanted to be magnificent. They also would frequently score early and then go to sleep for half the game then wake up in the third period to captivate a win but good teams you are facing in the Stanley Cup Playoffs are going to take advantage of that. The Panthers sure did. A team such as Florida is well disciplined therefore, they failed to commit many penalties and the Rangers were trying to find a winning recipe playing 5-on-5 hockey against a spellbinding defensive unit. Plus, when it’s the playoffs and your third and fourth lines are scoring all your goals that’s a problem. Mika Zabanejad, Vincent Trochek, and Artemi Panarin who headline the core of this offensive juggernaut failed miserably. It’s blatant that with the recent playoff failures this team is not built to win in the playoffs.

In the series vs. the Capitals the Rangers swept the Caps but all four games were very close. When you’re a #1 seed facing a #8 seed you gotta wipe them out. They won the first seven playoff games while up three games to none vs. the Hurricanes and then they snoozed. In all six games the Rangers were outshot by Carolina and that was a sign that the team was running out of steam like a ticking time bomb. After losing two in a row New York was in danger of going to back to The Garden for a seventh game. Which they would have if it weren’t for Chris Kreider rescuing the team and Shesterkin playing like a brick wall in the third period. They escaped the Hurricanes and met their match in the Conference Final.

The Panthers manhandled the Rangers out playing them physically and on special teams. The Panther’s defense was punishing and the Rangers were mystified by their lack of generating scoring chances and the default of success on special teams which was a false sense of security that carried them this far. And I’m not being a sore loser but the truth is that Shesterkin played far better than Sergei Bobrovsky. Bobrovsky didn’t have to work that hard in the Conference Final. Igor played as good as he possibly could. He was lights out the entire postseason. He was standing on his head twisting and turning smothering the puck like Ken Dryden and full out dominated but when your offense is lackluster and your defense is leaving the puck right in front of you like a pancake, you’re going to give up a goal or two.

The Panthers outshot New York in all six games. After the Rangers pulled out a game three win by the grace of God in which they were overwhelmed by Florida getting outshot 37-23 yet managed to win, the Rangers were out of steam. There wasn’t any gas left in the tank and they faltered losing games four, five and six. The Rangers broke when the horn sounded in game six and the Panthers celebrated on their home ice in Sunrise while a plethora of rubber black rodent trinkets infested the ice. The Rangers were burnt like French toast and as shocking as it is that the Rangers missed the postseason when the expectations were through the roof in 2024-25 the failure is credible due to the team’s deficiency which was exposed the entire season. The Rangers like the Brooklyn Dodgers will have to wait till next year.