It\u2019s the dog days of the 2026-27 season, and the NHL is steadily approaching the brief holiday break toward the end of December. The Rangers, who came in with genuine hopes of returning to the playoffs, are in no better position than they were just a short year ago.<\/p>\n
A third consecutive season of noncompetitive play and failing to make the postseason would be the Blueshirts\u2019 worst-case scenario.<\/p>\n
It wouldn\u2019t just mark the organization\u2019s first stretch of three consecutive playoff-less seasons in 23 years, dating back to before the 2004-05 lockout, but it would also confirm the team\u2019s state of purgatory.<\/p>\n
All the draft capital recently sacrificed for the team\u2019s retooling initiative would look wasted.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s the dog days of the 2026-27 season, and the NHL is steadily approaching the brief holiday break…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":833050,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[11555,178216,11556,51063,11558,4823,385,4892,99,358],"class_list":["post-833049","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-alexis-lafreniere","tag-chris-drury","tag-inside-the-rangers","tag-j-t-miller","tag-mika-zibanejad","tag-new-york-rangers","tag-nhl","tag-post-sports-newsletters","tag-sports","tag-sports-plus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/833049","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=833049"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/833049\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/833050"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=833049"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=833049"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=833049"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}