Can the New York Rangers Salvage Their Season?

It's big trouble in the Big Apple right now.

Mika Zibanejad has been one of New York’s most disappointing players this year. (Wendell Cruz/Imagn Images)

Hard as it is to remember at this exact moment of crisis, the New York Rangers looked like Stanley Cup contenders — nay, Stanley Cup frontrunners — not too long ago.

One of those points came last spring: As they were taking a 2-1 lead over Florida in the Eastern Conference finals, a feeling built that the 2023-24 Rangers were going to commemorate the 30-year anniversary of the iconic 1993-94 Blueshirts, staging their own Stanley Cup parade in Manhattan. While that didn’t end up happening in the end, New York had still made the conference finals twice in three seasons and looked poised to maintain that form in 2024-25, with a roster that wasn’t too old and didn’t lose too much over the offseason.

And that looked true enough early this season. The Rangers started the year strong, ranking No. in 1 the Elo ratings as recently as late October with a league-high 16 percent championship probability at their peak. Again, that wasn’t necessarily surprising; New York was supposed to skate stride-for-stride with the rest of the NHL’s top contenders. This was an experienced team with key skaters still in their primes at both ends of the ice, and one of the league’s best goaltenders behind them in the form of Igor Shesterkin.

Everything seemed to be on cruise control until mid-to-late November. Then… it all changed. Starting on Nov. 21, when the Rangers fell to Calgary 3-2 on the road, New York would lose five straight contests; then, after winning two of three to stop the skid, they embarked on a stretch with losses in five of six games, and then followed an uncharacteristically good win at Dallas with another stretch of five losses in six games before beating the terrible Blackhawks on Sunday.

If you’re keeping track, that was 16 losses for the Rangers in the span of 21 games heading into Sunday’s contest, dropping them from No. 3 in Elo to No. 15 — and causing not just their Cup odds to become next to nonexistent, but their playoff chances to completely implode. New York went from having a 96 percent playoff probability on Nov. 21 to a season-low 27 percent on New Year’s Eve, rebounding to a still-shaky 40 percent on Tuesday morning.

The losses coincided with what feels like entire years worth of drama for coach Peter Laviolette and his squad.

On Dec. 6, New York traded captain Jacob Trouba to the Ducks for a fourth-round pick and a depth defender — a relatively rare case of a team trading its captain at a still-relatively-young age. (Though the Rangers had been through this before, shipping Ryan McDonagh to the Lightning in 2018.) The move was supposed to not only jettison salary owed to a slumping player, but also to wake the team up in the midst of its first troubling skid.

It didn’t work.

The Rangers were No. 4 in scoring offense and No. 1 in scoring defense days before the trade. They had the league’s sixth-best power play and top-ranked penalty kill. Now their respective ranks in those categories are 21st, 21st, 26th and fourth. (Yes, the PK is still functional.)

Meanwhile, Shesterkin was since placed on injured reserve, which tanked the team’s goaltending in conjunction with Jonathan Quick regressing from his elite start to the year. Matt Rempe became the game’s biggest villain for a dirty hit on Miro Heiskanen. And the tension in the locker room ratcheted higher than ever, with once-beloved late-blooming scorer Chris Kreider bracing for a trade any day (before heading to IR himself) and trade rumors swirling around other big names like Mika Zibanejad and Artemi Panarin.

How rare is a sudden in-season collapse like this? In reasonably full-schedule¹ seasons since 1949-50, there have been just 38 cases of a team losing at least 50 points of Elo rating in any 32-game span during the first 50 games of a season, as the Rangers have:

But many of those cases involved bad teams getting worse, perhaps waiving the white flag on a season that already lacked promise. (The infamous 1992-93 Ottawa Senators, whose owner got drunk and admitted to what would later be termed tanking, are present and accounted for.) What’s incredibly rare is to see teams who started their skid looking as strong as the Rangers did suffer this fate. In our sample, only two teams — the 1982-83 Islanders and 1979-80 Canadiens — fell off from a higher spot on the NHL mountain than the 2024-25 Rangers.

The good news for New York? Both clubs recovered to make the playoffs. Montreal in 1980 went on to go undefeated in their final 21 (!) games of the regular season, losing in Round 2 of the playoffs, while the Islanders eventually won the Stanley Cup. Each team serves as a reminder that a sudden downturns can strike even the best of teams — but that talented teams can also overcome even the deepest of slumps.

But overall, the teams on our list above struggled to make back the rating points they lost. 20 of the 37 pre-2025 teams gained some Elo back by the end of the year, but roughly half of those gains were in the single digits. Meanwhile, 17 of 37 lost even more Elo over the remainder of the season than they’d already bled during the losing skid that landed them on the list. On average, the entire 37-team sample fell another 2.4 points of Elo by season’s end.

So, barring a dramatic turnaround in the style of those old Islanders or Canadiens, the Rangers are probably what they look like right now: A middle-of-the-pack team (14th in Elo, 20th in SRS) packed with underperforming, disgruntled talents. A 40 percent shot at the playoffs means they still can make a push if they play to their potential again, starting against the Dallas Stars at MSG tonight. But it also means New York’s front office has a whole host of tough decisions to make about whether to try to stop the skid and keep trying to win now, or to punt on 2024-25 and reload for the future.

Needless to say, that’s not a position anyone thought this team would be in just a few months ago.

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Filed under: NHL, Hockey, Hockey Bytes

1. Minimum 70 games per team.