The Rangers’ power play is good enough to keep them afloat, but it’s also leaving too much on the table. At 7 for 34 on the season, New York is converting at 20.6%, which puts the unit at 18th in the NHL. For a group loaded with Mika Zibanejad, Pavel Dorofeyev, Adam Fox, JT Miller, and Alexis Lafreniere, that’s a modest return - and the common thread is easy to spot: not enough shots coming from Fox and Miller.
Through those 34 chances, the Rangers have generated 46 shots on goal from 98 shot attempts. Another 26 attempts were blocked, and 26 missed the net.
The volume is not the problem in the broad sense; the Rangers sit in the top half of the league in both shot attempts and shots. The issue is where the looks are coming from, and how predictable the unit has become.
On PP1, Dorofeyev leads the way with 11 shots on goal. Zibanejad has 7, Lafreniere 6, Fox 5, and Miller 4.
Those numbers don’t scream crisis. But they do underline the larger point: opposing penalty killers are reading the Rangers’ structure well enough to cheat toward the circles, where New York has wanted to feed shots for the past few seasons.
That tendency showed up in the examples cited from the power play. At the 5 minute mark, CBJ3 Charlie Coyle was slow to move up to Fox at the point when Fox got the puck.
Fox still got the puck through on net, but Miller couldn’t get enough on the deflection. A few minutes later, around 5:20, the same basic sequence played out again.
Coyle was late getting to Fox, which forced Dorofeyev to adjust and slide lower. Fox waited, Dorofeyev eventually got a look, but the angle was too sharp, and Jet Greaves had enough time to lean toward Dorofeyev while still tracking the play.
That’s the root of the problem: the Rangers are too easy to map. The puck keeps finding the same spots, and the penalty kill knows it.
This isn’t about Fox or Miller failing to execute. It’s about the unit as a whole leaning so hard on a few familiar looks that defenders can sag off and cheat into passing lanes.
Fox, in particular, needs to be a more willing shooting threat from the point. When the puck goes there with traffic in front, it forces the first penalty killer - in this case Coyle - to respect the shot.
That opens the ice elsewhere. It also forces a goalie like Greaves to stay honest instead of leaning toward one side as the play develops.
The Rangers can still score with their talent alone, but the ceiling is capped if every power play feels like a rerun.
The same issue applies to Miller in the bumper role. He has only 4 shots on goal with the man advantage, and that spot is supposed to do more than serve as a decoy.
The Rangers aren’t using the bumper the way teams like Carolina do, with set plays designed to make that area a real shooting threat. Too often, it’s simply a distraction.
The Ducks game offered a couple of snapshots of both the problem and the fix. On the first power play at the 1:13 mark of the video, Anaheim didn’t even seem bothered by the passing lane.
Fox moved the puck low, and instead of Lafreniere finding Dorofeyev in space, the play tried to work cross ice to Zibanejad. Whether that was the intended read or a miss the Rangers didn’t sort out quickly enough, the larger pattern was the same one New York has shown for years.
Later in that same game, at the 4:17 mark, Anaheim backed off Fox almost immediately. Fox stayed patient and waited for Miller to get into position for a deflection, and this time it worked. The Ducks should have had a body on Miller, but the point still stands: when the opponent doesn’t respect the point shot, the Rangers can make them pay.
One game won’t force a league-wide adjustment. A broader shift in how the Rangers attack on the power play might.
More shots from the point, more traffic in front, and more movement that changes the picture for the kill would make the whole unit harder to read. The Ducks game was a clear example of what happens when Fox and Miller are treated as real threats.
There’s also a larger lesson in that. Sometimes a team has to show something different before the preferred look opens up later.
If Fox is shooting from the top and Miller is a legitimate option in the bumper, then the lanes to Zibanejad and Lafreniere get cleaner. Dorofeyev can become more dangerous at the net front for rebounds and deflections, too.
The Rangers’ power play isn’t broken. It’s just become a little stale, leaning on talent more than variation.
At 20.6%, it’s still workable. But with this much skill on the ice, it should be better.
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