The roster is old and has plateaued as a mediocre team. There is little talent coming up the pipeline. Management’s hopes that a Jack Eichel or Connor McDavid would force his way to Broadway will not bear out. At the same time, there will be no rebuild in which the team tears it down to the studs and aims for top-three overall picks. Even if ownership accepted such a vision (unlikely), the team’s goaltending and top defensive pairing alone prevent the team from bottoming out. <\/p>\n
The NHL has changed rapidly in the last decade, and so has what it means to rebuild. Take the Pittsburgh Penguins, who, by all accounts, are almost exclusively prioritizing days ahead, yet sit in a playoff position. Waiting around for a few lottery picks to hit \u2014 and sucking in the meantime \u2014 is not required to turn around a franchise.<\/p>\n
The team’s core is Adam Fox (27), Igor Shesterkin (30), and Vladislav Gavrikov (30). For better or worse, captain J.T. Miller (32) is also going nowhere. The current team is not competitive, and the ages of its core players won’t allow for a long-term rebuild, either. The situation requires a different approach, one that imagines the Rangers as a competitive team again in 2028. Everything GM Chris Drury does in the next calendar year should be imagined through that lens.<\/p>\n
That does not mean building upwards.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The roster is old and has plateaued as a mediocre team. There is little talent coming up the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":394033,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[385,99],"class_list":{"0":"post-394032","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nhl","8":"tag-nhl","9":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394032","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=394032"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394032\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/394033"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=394032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=394032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=394032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}