Remember when there was slight optimism going into this season? That was a fun day or two. Fast forward to now, and the Rangers are completely irrelevant. They are the East’s Nashville Predators, they just don’t matter. The Rangers were losing before the Adam Fox and Igor Shesterkin injuries, and now without both they can’t seem to do anything right. Overmatched and out-skilled against Seattle, they blew a 2-0 lead, losing 4-2 as they remained winless without both Fox and Shesterkin. Three regulation wins since December. Three.
You know what isn’t helping? The so-called captain putting the Olympics before his teammates and continually playing hurt all season. After taking a friendly fire hit from Braden Schneider in an already injury riddled year, Miller immediately left for the locker room. While he came back out, there was not much he could do. JT is clearly compromised much like Chris Kreider last season and the negligence of the organization to not force him to sit and get healthy is borderline malpractice.
We know athletes will never take the responsible approach and remove themselves from games, which is why you have a medical staff to yank them off the ice and save themselves and their careers. So why is JT Miller continuing to play when he can barely move? Sometimes the more respectable thing to do is admit you’re not healthy and ineffective. But of course, the Olympics. So he has to play.
If one thing about the Rangers blue line has become clear, it’s that Braden Schneider has peaked. He’s barely scraping by as Fox’s replacement, something that even Erik Gustafsson managed to do well. The Rangers miss Fox and asking Schneider to be Fox isn’t fair, but asking him to step up and at least showcase that heavy game that got him drafted isn’t unfair. There just isn’t much to his game, and he’s just as vanilla as the rest of the team. Schneider isn’t a bust, but he’s certainly not hitting that draft ceiling.
Another mess? The top-six. Only Mika Zibanejad seems to show up on a nightly basis. Now on a 6-game point streak, Mika has shown more leadership quality than any other pathetic scrub who calls themself a captain on this team. While other aspects of the leadership group do a lot of talking and don’t back it up with their play, Mika has had a resurgence this season that hopefully revives his Rangers career. He deserved a lot of criticism for last season, but he’s put it behind him, unlike everyone else on the roster. He’s been the lone bright spot this season, and has re-earned the benefit of the doubt.
Fans are calling for Chris Drury’s job, and rightfully so. There is no immediate help coming. There are no free agents to sign, there are no top prospects coming, and the roster is locked into declining players on big contracts. The captain has no answers and delivers the same sound bytes on a nightly basis. It’s hard to ever say that a single transaction “ruins” a team’s outlook, but the JT Miller trade was poorly timed and was not the move to make at that time. You only get so many bullets in your trade gun, and Drury wasted several in the Miller trade.
For the 40+ year olds, welcome back to the Dark Ages. For those who didn’t live through it the first time, ask those who were. This isn’t going to be pretty.
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