The Rangers are heading into training camp with a familiar kind of tension hanging over the room. One year ago, the uncertainty was about whether the team could get back to being a playoff-caliber group. This time, after a 2024-25 season that went off the rails, the question is even more basic: have they actually improved enough to matter again?
Chris Drury spent the offseason trying to answer that with action. After New York missed the playoffs and endured a season full of internal issues, he stuck with the core and brought in Mike Sullivan as head coach, while also adding veteran defenseman Vladislav Gavrikov in free agency. Then came another round of roster turnover, with Artemi Panarin, Vincent Trocheck, Sam Carrick, Will Borgen, and Carson Soucy all moved out after Drury’s January letter to fans said the team planned to “retool” the roster.
Even with that shift in direction, Drury still pushed to make the club more competitive right away. Over the offseason, the Rangers brought in Pavel Dorofeyev, Sean Durzi, Oliver Bjorkstrand, and Marcus Pettersson.
“We’re excited with the moves we made,” Drury said on Wednesday. “We looked at a lot of different things, my staff, Sully’s staff, and feel like we're in a pretty good spot to get off to a good start.
A lot of changes, a lot of excitement in the building. I’m excited about what we’ve done and where we are at.”
Sullivan, speaking alongside Drury at the team’s joint opening press conference on Wednesday, struck the same upbeat note. His message was straightforward: the Rangers expect to compete.
“My expectation is that we are going to compete,” Sullivan said. “I think we have, as Chris alluded to, we have more depth than we had a year ago. I think we've addressed some of the priorities that we felt were important to help us become more competitive…
“My expectation as the head coach is that we're going to compete. Is that we're going to be a competitive group with an expectation that we're going to compete every night and give ourselves a chance to make the playoffs and see where it goes.”
The optimism is real, but so is the uncertainty. New York finished 34-39-9 with 77 points last season, dead last in the Eastern Conference, and the organization has now spent two years missing the playoffs while overhauling the roster around Igor Shesterkin, Adam Fox, and Mika Zibanejad.
The defense looks like the clearest area of improvement. Pettersson and Durzi should form the team’s second pairing, giving the Rangers a stronger look on the back end.
The forward group is less settled. Dorofeyev and Bjorkstrand add pieces, and Gabe Perreault’s continued emergence could help, but replacing Panarin and Trocheck is no small ask.
Drury pointed to depth as a major issue in last year’s collapse, and he believes that’s one area the Rangers have addressed.
“There’s a lot of things we were trying to check. I feel like we checked most of them, if not all of them.
Certainly one of them would be depth,” Drury said. “ I think when we were healthy last year, our record was pretty good and when we weren’t healthy, it was not good.
We just didn’t have the depth to support missing those big pieces in the lineup.
“When you lose those big pieces, Fox and Shesterkin for big chunks, it’s gonna hurt you. I think we've addressed a lot of things all over the organization, Hartford and in New York and (I’m) excited to get going.”
Sullivan was careful not to project too far ahead, even while backing the idea that this group can be competitive.
“It's a daily endeavor, and so we're not going to get ahead of ourselves by any stretch,” Sullivan said. “We're going to just take the day right in front of us, and we're going to try to maximize that opportunity to become the best version of ourselves. We'll see where it takes.”
That’s the backdrop for camp: confidence in the room, but plenty still unresolved. The Rangers have spent months reshaping the roster and talking about competitiveness, but this season will ultimately decide whether the changes actually move them forward.
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