You’ve heard the hype. You’ve heard the predictions. You’ve heard the counter predictions. The Rangers had a phenomenal offseason, loading up on high end talent. They are a better team than last year. But they aren’t a playoff team, and might not even finish with more points than last year. After all, the team they improved upon was not the 78 point team, but the 60 point pace team that didn’t have Kevin Hayes or Mats Zuccarello. Yet all the hype, all the models, all the predictions, they try to account for the one thing that is virtually impossible to account for. Wild cards.
The Rangers are full of them this season. Kaapo Kakko is a wild card. Filip Chytil is a wild card. Lias Andersson. Adam Fox. Tony DeAngelo. Brett Howden. Brendan Lemieux. Vitali Kravtsov. All wild cards. Even Alex Georgiev. There just simply isn’t enough history or data there to accurately predict how these players will look next season.
If all of them hit. Every single one of them turns out to hit their ceilings or makes significant progress towards those ceilings, then the Rangers might be one of the most offensively dynamic and dangerous teams in the league. If Georgiev is able to truly shoulder a 50/50 split with Henrik Lundqvist, and Lundqvist defies the aging gods with a revamped –and most importantly, improved– blue line in front of him, then perhaps then the Rangers are a playoff team.
But what are the odds they all hit at once? What are the odds that most do? Half? Some? None? All possibilities. The Rangers are built on so many wild cards that their success has the widest margin of error in all these predictions.
As it stands today, we will see Kakko, Chytil, Andersson, and possibly even Kravtsov in top-nine roles. They will be given the opportunity to score and succeed and take that next step –or first step– in their development. Fox and DeAngelo will be getting some kind of 2RD/2PP split. Georgiev, as mentioned above, likely will get 50% of the starts this season. The crazy thing: DeAngelo is the oldest of that group at 24 years old (in October).
Perhaps that is why there is so much excitement from the fan base this preseason. For the first time since Lundqvist, Jaromir Jagr, Michael Nylander, and Martin Straka carried the Rangers to a shocking playoff season in 2005-2006, we have no idea what to expect from this team. Are they a playoff team? Are they a bottom feeder? Are they a bubble team? The only thing we know for sure is that they could be any of those teams.
And yea, the influx of talent that can’t even legally drink yet is a huge part of the hype and excitement.
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