With Patrick Kane, These Aren't Last Year's Defensive-Minded Rangers

New York already had a different formula this year — adding Kane just doubles down on it.

After what felt like weeks of waiting, the New York Rangers finally, officially added Patrick Kane from the Chicago Blackhawks on Tuesday, in a trade that involved multiple draft picks and a lot of salary-cap finagling. Now that the Broadway Blueshirts have their brightest deadline acquisition, there’s already chatter that the new Stanley Cup favorites reside at Madison Square Garden.

Maybe so. (I’m still somewhat skeptical — or at least, I wouldn’t rank the NYR above, say, the Colorado Avalanche or Carolina Hurricanes, much less the historically dominant Boston Bruins.) But what the Kane move really accomplishes is to make this New York club bear less and less resemblance to the defense-first version that came within two wins of the Cup Final last season.

Perhaps counterintuitively — given the fact that they possessed such stars as Chris Kreider, Artemi Panarin, Mika Zibanejad, Adam Fox, etc. —the 2021-22 Rangers had a below-average offense, scoring 0.05 fewer goals per game than the league average. That they still managed to finish 10th in goals-per-game differential was purely a testament to their defense and the spectacular, Vezina-worthy goaltending of Igor Shesterkin, which added up to save 0.62 goals per game relative to league average.

We might have expected this year’s Rangers to have even more trouble in the offensive department, since Kreider has (predictably) regressed from his team-leading 52-goal form of last season, tracking for just 34 this year. (Fun fact: Kreider accounted for 20.8% of New York’s goals all by himself last season.) And yet, instead of watching a subpar offense get even worse, the Rangers have improved their scoring by about a quarter of a goal per game relative to the league average. And that’s with only 9 games of Vladimir Tarasenko — and zero yet with Kane. If Kane is truly more like his old self again, this offense could keep rising up the league’s ranks.

But the other strange paradox of the 2022-23 Rangers is that they are far worse at the other end of the ice this year, to the tune of losing a quarter-goal per game relative to average — effectively wiping out any positives from New York’s offensive improvement. It’s not necessarily the defense’s fault (they’re actually allowing fewer expected goals per 60 this year than last), but rather in large part because Shesterkin has regressed from being the league’s top goaltender by far to just another netminder this year.

Goalies being notoriously fickle, nobody would be surprised if Shesterkin started to play like the 2022 version of himself again, which would combine with a solid blueline corps and an improved forward group to make the Rangers formidable indeed. But Kane is probably not going to help Shesterkin reclaim his best form. In terms of forechecking and defensive-zone coverage, Kane gives what the brilliant hockey coach (and fellow Substacker) Jack Han calls an “unacceptably bad” token defensive effort.

While Kane wasn’t a massive liability for some good Chicago defenses that won the Cup (most notably in 2013), he’s in New York to provide his vintage offensive spark. The offensively-challenged 2021-22 Rangers could really have used that, and there’s no doubt the 2022-23 version will be better for it as well. But Kane’s arrival does nothing to help these Rangers get closer to the defense-first form they used so well last season and have struggled to rediscover all of this year. If anything, he drifts them further away from that identity.