Training camp is here, and the Rangers are rolling into it with a roster that looks very different from the one that finished last season. New faces have been added, familiar ones are gone, and the opening-night picture still has a few moving parts. For New York, that makes camp worth watching from the jump.
The biggest question starts up front, where the top six is going to have a new feel. Artemi Panarin and Vincent Trocheck are no longer in the mix, but general manager Chris Drury has tried to rebuild that group with some aggressive moves.
He signed Oliver Bjorkstrand and Eeli Tolvanen to one-year deals and swung a major trade with the Vegas Golden Knights for Pavel Dorofeyev. Put those additions next to J.T.
Miller and Mika Zibanejad, and the Rangers look better on paper than they did at the end of last season.
Miller and Zibanejad are the top two centers, which leaves four winger spots to sort out on those first two lines. Dorofeyev, Alexis Lafreniere and Gabe Perreault appear to have three of them locked down.
That leaves one opening for a handful of players to battle over. Bjorkstrand, Tolvanen and Will Cuylle are the main names in that race, and camp should decide which one grabs the final top-six spot.
Defense is another area that has been overhauled. Outside of Adam Fox and Vladislav Gavrikov, the blue line was described as underwhelming last season, so Drury made it a point to change that.
In three separate trades, he moved on from Will Borgen and brought in Sean Durzi and Marcus Pettersson to form a new second pair behind Fox and Gavrikov. Add Braden Schneider, and that gives the Rangers five of their six expected defensemen for opening night.
That still leaves one opening, and it’s the left side of the third pair next to Schneider. Matthew Robertson looks like the first player who will get a shot there, but Drew Fortescue and Alberts Šmits are also worth watching.
Fortescue got time with the team at the end of last season and handled limited minutes well. Šmits, drafted fifth overall in June, also enters camp with the kind of profile that suggests he could be ready sooner rather than later.
Then there’s the young-player watch, which is always one of the best parts of camp. Noah Laba was the surprise name last season and ended up spending most of the year as the Rangers’ third-line center. This year, there are several younger players trying to force their way into the conversation again.
Adam Sykora and Jaroslav Chmelar both finished last season with the team and gave New York the kind of speed and energy that made their games easy to notice. Liam Greentree and Cole Beaudoin are the organization’s two top forward prospects, added in the Panarin and Trocheck trades, respectively. They’re likely headed to the American Hockey League to start, but they’ll be pushing hard to make a case during camp and preseason.
There will be other young players to track at forward and on defense, but those are the names that stand out most heading into camp. The Rangers want to move past the last two seasons and build something younger, and hopefully better, while trying to get back to the playoffs. For now, though, the lineup still has questions that training camp will have to answer.
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