I came into this season with an open mind. Mike Sullivan has the ability to take a very mediocre team and make it better. I expected the Rangers to rebound and make the playoffs due to a weak conference, even if this was viewed as a transition season. But there’s a bleak Rangers future, and it’s something very few of us anticipated. The Rangers weren’t supposed to be this bad, even in a transition year. We would have been happy with making the playoffs, and even happier with winning even one round. Now though? What is there to look forward to?

I do still believe that Sullivan is a top-tier head coach. However, the league-wide developments since the summer have made a couple of things very clear: There is no free agent saviour on the way next summer to complete the transition, and the Rangers lack the assets required to land a big fish in the trade market. It’s a sad, bleak Rangers future right now, and it’s hard to visualize a path forward, despite Suit’s optimism.

That’s a pretty significant development for Chris Drury and the Rangers. Because if there has been one key takeaway from the first 3.5 months of the season, it’s that this team outright lacks talent and direction. If there is no clear pathway to acquiring the talent needed to contend before this core truly ages out (if they haven’t already), then the bleak Rangers future becomes a bleak Rangers present very quickly.

Those questions have been raised in the media, and the consensus appears to be that Dolan and Drury are not on board for “another” rebuild, although Dolan did recently publicly state that he is being patient with Drury’s vision. Good luck with that, because the help Drury was relying on is almost certainly not coming.

Unless the Rangers truly bottom out this year, I am skeptical they will have the chance to draft a true difference maker, as this does not look like the deep draft class many Rangers fans confusingly believed it would be while debating the merits of sending the 2025 or 2026 pick to Vancouver/Pittsburgh.

Perhaps Adam Fox and Igor Shesterkin’s injuries will force Drury to make the right decision on this group instead of doubling down and trading for the Kiefer Sherwoods of the world. But none of the chatter suggests that Drury is clear-sighted enough to reach the correct conclusion, which is that he has failed to extend this core’s competitive window. It’s over. Perhaps that’s what makes this bleak Rangers future all but guaranteed: No one trusts the man running the show.

There is a way to avoid this bleak Rangers future, and it involves capitalizing on the clear path to meaningfully restocking the draft pick cupboard. Panarin’s control over his destination in a trade leaves me skeptical of an impressive return, but he should still net a first-round pick and a prospect (after retention, obviously). Trocheck is an obvious sell-high candidate as a “glue-guy” Olympian and top 6 center. He should easily secure a first-round pick plus a good prospect, and probably more. It’s also time to pull the plug on Braden Schneider, whose trade value has outweighed his on-ice impact since he stepped into the league.

Ultimately, Drury’s management of this team has driven this core’s contention window into the ground, driving much of this discourse around the bleak Rangers future. Positive steps, such as offloading $11.6 million in cap space between Barclay Goodrow and Jacob Trouba for no retention have been coupled with multiple steps backward. His roster-building solutions have been unimaginative and lacked a risk-taking profile. His actual man-management has been abysmal and directly contributed to the malaise of last season.

As an aside, we saw Drury’s horrible people management skills at work in Hartford as early as 2021.

This is a bleak Rangers future, almost entirely because there is no confidence that Chris Drury is the right person to lead the Rangers forward. In fact, I believe his delusions about the quality of the team he’s assembled will set this hockey club back years.

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