NHL
The Rangers have waved a white flag on the season and announced their intent to retool. Bruce Bennett / Getty Images
The best-case scenario saw the 2025-26 New York Rangers returning to the contender’s circle and proving last year was just a fluke. But there was a range of outcomes for New York heading into the season — and through the first half of the season, the worst-case scenario has come true.
Last year’s struggles can’t be fixed with a coaching change alone. Younger players, like Alexis Lafrenière and Will Cuylle, haven’t progressed enough to become difference-makers. The defense has been abysmal. Artemi Panarin is on his way out. As a result, the team is projected to miss the playoffs for the second straight season.
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The Rangers aren’t going to fade quietly into the background. The team is making waves with (another) dramatic statement of its intentions. Unlike The Letter 1.0™ in 2018, the plan isn’t to start another rebuild, but to retool back into the playoff picture.
As ideal as it is for a team to have a strategy, it sparks two key questions for the Rangers: what a retool entails in today’s NHL, and whether this front office can be trusted to lead this team in the right direction.
A team has to be honest about its trajectory and determine which path will best turn things around: a rebuild, a hybrid rebuild, or a retool.
Rebuilding is a long, grinding process. The risk is a never-ending cycle, or a faulty one that never materializes in deep playoff runs. Teams like the Buffalo Sabres and the Edmonton Oilers, back in the 2010s, show how instability can derail and delay the process, while past iterations of the Pittsburgh Penguins, Chicago Blackhawks and Tampa Bay Lightning show how rebuilds can lead to championships.
In today’s NHL, the San Jose Sharks are becoming the shining example of how to turn a bleak outlook into a positive one. It doesn’t just take strong planning, but luck, to pull everything off. Not every team has the wherewithal for the long haul, or the creativity to navigate potential setbacks. Any impatience can doom the entire process, too. That’s why some general managers prefer a hybrid rebuild, or an accelerated one. The risk is a shakier foundation on Day 1, and a faster fall from contention instead of a long, sustainable window. That’s why there was so much concern when the Vancouver Canucks floated the idea this season.
The Rangers’ 2018 rebuild essentially became an accelerated process due to lottery luck (with the No. 2 pick in 2019, and No. 1 in 2020) and the Panarin signing. Just eight years later, the organization is back to the drawing board.
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A retool is the path of least resistance because it generally doesn’t require as drastic a teardown or as substantial a timeline. A handful of teams that have pulled it off recently have set the standard of how this process can successfully work — from the Penguins ahead of their back-to-back Stanley Cups, to the 2018 St. Louis Blues and 2023 Washington Capitals, among others. There are even notes to take from teams like the Boston Bruins and New York Islanders, who are in the midst of their own retools right now.
Not every team can get away with the retool; there has to be a core of players worth reloading around. Timing is also of the essence. If teams aren’t proactive enough with 1) the decision to start the process or 2) the timetable of it all, it can set a team back even further (and potentially push it to fully rebuild).
Getting that timing right can require a team to pull itself out of the playoff picture — that’s what the 2018 Blues did and the 2023 Capitals, despite only sitting a few points outside wild-card seeds. But that’s what it takes to avoid another finish in the mushy middle sometimes.
Then comes the sell-off. Teams have to walk a fine line between tearing a roster down too far, because a team can only build itself up so much in a short span of time. It’s even tougher now that free agency has become less and less of a resource for team-building; it’s more of a way to supplement a roster (and the Red Wings and Canadiens’ rebuilds are a reminder of that).
Instead, retooling teams can load up on draft picks, prospects and up-and-coming NHL talent via trade to reset a lineup.
The best way to add difference-making talent is through the draft and development process. In this year’s Player Tiers project, 91 of the top 150 were added by their current clubs through the draft. While there can be hidden gems later in rounds — like Kirill Kaprizov in Round 5, Brayden Point in Round 3, and Igor Shesterkin and Jaccob Slavin in Round 4 — there is rightfully an extra emphasis on first-rounders.
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First-round picks are a true commodity because players drafted earlier are generally expected to have higher ceilings and are expected to reach them sooner. Of the 91 drafted players in Player Tiers, 29 were top-five picks; 32 others were selected later in Round 1.
Those first-rounders can also make for coveted trade assets for other needle-movers. Shortly after adding the Bruins’ 2023 first in the Dmitry Orlov-Garnet Hathaway trade, the Caps flipped the pick to Toronto for a young defenseman in Rasmus Sandin. That brought in a player who could grow with the Capitals. The Blues, on the other hand, took a different route by adding Ryan O’Reilly in the offseason after replenishing their asset pool with the Paul Stastny trade.
A key part of all of this is a willingness to get creative and take an outside-the-box approach by spotting potential reclamation projects. For Boston, that was Casey Mittelstadt last year, and for the Islanders, it was Emil Heineman, who had yet to pop off in Montreal. That line of thinking also extends to veterans like Viktor Arvidsson and Jakob Chychrun, who joined the Bruins and Capitals during their respective processes. Maybe the biggest swing in recent history was Washington’s on Pierre-Luc Dubois (and his massive contract). The Caps leveraged their cap space and took a risk to address one of their most pressing areas of weakness down the middle.
Then comes the challenge of knowing when to shift gears into a buying, right-now approach. The Capitals had a quiet 2023 offseason and let some of their up-and-coming players cook in more meaningful roles in 2023-24 under Spencer Carbery. After a Round 1 exit in 2024, management got to work and added the third-most value in the league to their roster. That innovative approach led to the Caps becoming one of the top contenders to watch less than two seasons after kicking off this process.
With a handful of teams providing lessons and pitfalls of retooling, the Rangers have a blueprint to guide them.
Retools don’t require the same depth of root changes as rebuilds, which gives management an existing foundation to build off. Right now, it appears to be Shesterkin, Adam Fox, Vladislav Gavrikov, J.T. Miller and Mika Zibanejad. But this isn’t a new front office coming in to fix the previous regime’s mess: it’s the same management group that put them in this position. So can the team truly reinvent itself on the fly, without a change at the top?
There’s reason to be skeptical, considering all the missteps made by Chris Drury and the Rangers’ front office over the last five years.
One of those missteps: underestimating the ripple effect of key subtractions.
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It goes back to Drury’s first summer in the position with the Pavel Buchnevich trade. But in the last season and a half alone, there have been dicey exits that contributed to last season going off the rails, from Barclay Goodrow and Jacob Trouba to Chris Kreider. While management deserves credit for shedding contracts in their entirety, these players weren’t adequately replaced on the ice or in the locker room (which may be even more damning for a front office that emphasizes character).
The J.T. Miller situation is another strike in the Drury era. Sure, he fit the meat-and-potatoes energy that the Rangers were seeking, but even with the buy-low cost of acquisition, it was a risky move considering his up-and-down play over the years, age and contract. Adding Miller in exchange for a first-rounder and then selling months later at the deadline shows how conflicting last year’s philosophies were, which directly contributes to the current situation.
Last year’s deadline should have been the official start of the retool, but it’s tough to facilitate that process without a first-rounder in 2025. After the 43rd overall pick, the rest of the draft was somewhat uninspired — and that highlights one of the biggest issues along the way of Drury’s tenure.
It’s not that the Rangers’ pipeline ranks poorly now. The Capitals ranked 25th in 2023, before the team started the process, and have since jumped up to ninth. The Islanders were in a similar position this time last year and in less than one season of a retool, now have five players in the top 122 in Prospect Tiers (and only one was with the organization before the 2025 trade deadline). Lottery luck plays into it with Matthew Schaefer, but Cal Ritchie was brought in with the Brock Nelson trade, while Victor Eklund and Kashawn Aitcheson were drafted with picks from the Noah Dobson deal.
Instead, it’s that this Rangers front office hasn’t drafted well over the years or promoted the development of those players, and that could be back-breaking here. Only one of 31 players drafted by this front office has become a mainstay in the NHL: Noah Laba. Gabriel Perreault may be on that path, as one of just two in Prospect Tiers (in 4A). But the lack of high-end talent is glaring, and it’s been a theme for years now.
2019 No. 2 pick Kaapo Kakko never hit his ceiling in New York before being traded to Seattle. Lafrenière hasn’t consistently been a difference-maker. Braden Schneider, who will be an RFA this summer, has also plateaued. And if the Rangers give up on either player now, they would be selling low.
Cuylle has also stumbled. With the right direction, he could still follow the path of comps like Roope Hintz or Kreider, but he could also become the next Luke Kunin, Denis Gurianov or Nathan Bastian. And that could be another separator between the Rangers’ retool from the Capitals, since Washington already had rising talent like Aliaksei Protas and Connor McMichael to reload around.
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So even if this team can flip players like Panarin and Vincent Trocheck, among others, to the highest bidder, it comes down to whether the team can actually maximize the returns.
After wasting another season with their core players, the Rangers are rightfully changing their strategies. But even with teams around the league setting models for successful retools, this front office may not have the chops to turn things around. Whether an overemphasis on character over skill is to blame, a rotating bench of coaches, or the absence of a developmental system, the Rangers’ woes stem from the top. So while retools generally reset a team’s timeline, the pressure is only mounting in New York.
Shayna Goldman is a staff writer for The Athletic who focuses on blending data-driven analysis and video to dive deeper into hockey. She covers fantasy hockey and national stories that affect the entire NHL. She is the co-creator of BehindtheBenches.com and 1/3 of the Too Many Men podcast. Her work has also appeared at Sportsnet, HockeyGraphs and McKeen’s Hockey. She has a Master of Science in sports business from New York University. Follow Shayna on Twitter @hayyyshayyy
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