On Tuesday morning, following the New York Rangers’ morning skate, J.T. Miller spoke expansively about the emotional weight of returning to Vancouver.
He spoke of trying to harness that emotion for his team’s benefit. That was vital, given that the Rangers came into the game on Tuesday night desperately needing a win and feeling the pressure of dropping six of their previous seven contests.
As the game unfolded and the Rangers controlled the proceedings handily, Miller found himself logging a defensive-zone shift as the clock wound down to close out a 2-0 victory over his former team. As the Rangers stopped a late Canucks cycle, Miller received the puck and had a clear 150-foot look at the empty Vancouver net with less than 10 seconds remaining.
A goal would’ve put an exclamation mark on Miller’s triumphant return to the city that had celebrated him as a cult hero, and that he and his family had chosen as their home, before things went sideways, necessitating a change of scenery midway through last season.
Rather than go for the storybook moment at the minimal risk of an icing, Miller resisted the temptation and managed his emotions. Unselfishly, he made the simple play, punting the puck into the neutral zone to kill off the game.
Vancouver regrouped in the neutral zone, now with just over five seconds remaining on the clock. Filip Hronek hit Elias Pettersson with the quick up pass at the blue line, and with Miller gapping up quickly, Pettersson dumped the puck in deep for his teammates to hopelessly chase.
In that moment, Miller had a clear lane to land a hit on his former teammate, whom, over time, he’d failed to partner with effectively, a situation that directly led to his departure from Vancouver. The hit would’ve been fair game, but once again, Miller kept it business-like. With the end of the contest rapidly approaching, Miller pulled up and decided not to throw the hit.
Perhaps Miller’s final shift was representative of a more settled player. A testament to the benefits of making a fresh start when it’s needed, which it sometimes is in both life and hockey.
Purely from a hockey perspective, however, the absolutely juiceless contest that unfolded between the Rangers and Canucks on Tuesday laid bare an uncomfortable on-ice reality for both organizations: that these appear to be average teams at best, teams that seem more likely than not to spend this season spinning their wheels.
It’s been nine months now since Vancouver sent Miller to the Rangers in a trade. The full deal was Miller, collegiate blue-line prospect Jackson Dorrington and depth defender Erik Brannstrom for a conditional first-round pick (which was shipped off later that day to Pittsburgh), center Filip Chytil and defender Victor Mancini.
Since that day, the Canucks and the Rangers have struggled in eerily similar fashion.
Last season, New York sagged out of the playoff race following the Miller acquisition, just as Vancouver fell out of contention in the Western Conference after shipping Miller off. Both teams changed coaches this summer, a choice that New York made willingly and that Vancouver backed into when Rick Tocchet rejected a lucrative extension.
The Canucks and Rangers have played an identical number of games since executing the Miller trade, amassing a truly mediocre record across 43 games (20-19-4 for 44 points for Vancouver, 19-19-5 for 43 points for New York).
This season, both teams have started off dealing with rotten injury luck, which in no way serves to explain their miserable form. We’re not deep enough into the season for the math to be daunting for either organization just yet, and so the standard “It’s still early” qualifiers apply, but given the quality and youthful ceiling of the teams putting space between themselves and the Canucks and Rangers in the standings already, it’s fair to describe both sides are looking rather listless less than one month into the 2025-26 campaign.
From New York’s perspective, Miller has been named captain and has performed well — he’s accumulated an impressive 41 points in 43 games. But while he’s been a very good addition, Miller hasn’t proven sufficient to solve what ails an aging Rangers side.
In acquiring Miller, the Rangers were desperate for a star player capable of holding up the creaky edifice that Chris Drury has unwisely built upon the promising foundation that he inherited from Jeff Gorton. Miller, however, at this stage of his career, doesn’t appear to be that player.
A gifted playmaking power forward, Miller would’ve been a perfect fit as a finishing piece on a dynamic defensive team full of play drivers, but in need of a veteran forward capable of punching up the power play while bringing some heavy skill and game-breaking ability to the lineup. In New York, the Rangers need Miller to be the engine every game.
Miller is capable of performing at that level, but he has dealt with preseason injuries over the past two years, which may offer a partial explanation for why he has started the season slowly in consecutive years.
That’s what aging sometimes looks like for elite NHL players: they’re hurt more often, which means they’re not as dominant as consistently as they once were. Perhaps they can perform like one of the 15 best forwards in the sport on occasion, but it’s harder to hit that level regularly, the way Miller did in Vancouver when he was a 100-point player in his age-28 and age-30 campaigns.
As for the Canucks, it’s inescapable that this team has endured a brutal run out from an injury luck perspective this season. Even before Conor Garland left Tuesday night’s game after a Sam Carrick hit, Vancouver’s infirmary list was as long as an 18-inning World Series game.
It felt grimly appropriate for how this Canucks season has unfolded so far that both of the players Vancouver acquired in the Miller trade, Chytil and Mancini, were on Injured Reserve for Tuesday night’s game.
Even outside of the injuries that Vancouver has had to work through in the first several weeks of the season, it’s readily apparent that the Canucks could use a big, faceoff-winning, game-breaking center in their top six. In fact, the biggest need in their lineup is a player an awful lot like Miller.
On Tuesday night, for a second consecutive game, Vancouver utilized recently acquired Chicago Blackhawks cast-off Lukas Reichel as its second-line center. Reichel looks dynamic on individual forays as a puck carrier through the neutral zone, and he generated a couple of good scoring chances with his speed against the Rangers.
He also struggled off puck and was on the ice for another five-on-five goal against, his fifth in his first three Canucks games. There’s also a certain Andreas Athanasiou-like inefficiency to the way that Reichel manufactures chances, in that he might be generating looks as a downhill attacker, but he’s not really participating in the build-up in a way that enhances the overall amount of offense that his team creates. At least not yet.
On Tuesday night, by means of illustration, Reichel was on the ice for only one Vancouver shot on goal that wasn’t taken by him at even strength.
In the big picture, this is a critical season for the Canucks as captain Quinn Hughes — who missed Tuesday’s game due to an injury — becomes extension eligible this summer. Hughes wants to win above all else, and the organization is preoccupied with icing a winning team this season to enhance the pitch to keep him in Vancouver for the duration of his career. The absence of Miller, or at the very least a Miller-like presence in the lineup, has clearly been a major hit to that key short-term organizational goal.
While we still don’t know the full story of exactly what happened to the Canucks last season, for off-ice reasons, Miller was no longer a player who fit in Vancouver (and in fairness, it seems that the team itself was no longer a fit for Miller either).
From an on-ice perspective, however, it’s indisputable that Vancouver would be far better positioned to succeed if the one-two punch of Miller and Pettersson down the middle of the forward group had proven to be durable and tenable. It’s what the Canucks were counting on when they signed both centers to long-term extensions in the late summer of 2022 and the winter of 2024, respectively. Plans change, such is life.
But on Tuesday night, as the Rangers and the Canucks played a game at Rogers Arena that can only be described as a mid-off, the sense that the fateful trade that sent Miller to New York was something of a lose-lose proposition for both sides from a hockey perspective felt unmistakable.