Pierre McGuire did not hide how he feels about the New York Rangers’ recent slide.
The longtime NHL insider said this week that the league is simply better when the Rangers are winning, and he made it clear the franchise’s last two seasons have been a major letdown. New York has missed the Stanley Cup Playoffs the past two years and finished last in the Eastern Conference a year ago, a stretch that has been rough on a team with one of the sport’s biggest followings.
“I’m heartbroken with what’s gone on with the New York Rangers. And it’s not because I’m a Rangers fan,” McGuire stated earlier this week on Toronto Sports Rush.
“The New York Rangers are an important franchise for the National Hockey League, and it’s because of TV more than anything else, and the size of the audience they have in New York. It’s just mammoth.
People don’t realize until they go there just how big it is.”
The Rangers matter to the NHL from a television standpoint, but the league’s broader financial picture has hardly been stuck in neutral. Revenues have climbed sharply every year since the pandemic-shortened 2020-21 season, reaching approximately a record $7 billion in 2025-26. That growth has also helped drive the salary cap higher year after year.
The 2026 Stanley Cup Final backed up the league’s ability to draw without a New York team in the spotlight. More than 31.6 million viewers in the United States watched the series on ABC, which featured the Carolina Hurricanes and Vegas Golden Knights. Carolina won in six games, and the audience marked a 106 percent jump from the previous year’s final, when the Florida Panthers beat the Edmonton Oilers in six games on TNT/tru TV.
It was also the most watched final since the St. Louis Blues’ championship run in 2019, when they defeated the Boston Bruins in seven games on NBC/NBCSN and drew 37.33 million viewers in the U.S.
Still, McGuire’s bigger point was that a strong Rangers team lifts everyone. When the club is a real contender on Broadway, interest rises, the viewership follows, and the NHL benefits.
For Rangers fans, though, that’s background noise. The frustration is about the team itself, and the fact that New York still has not won the Stanley Cup since 1994.
McGuire said the biggest problem is not just the results, but the lack of progress from within.
“They’ve been so disappointing because they have no internal growth. Their young players have not gotten better,” McGuire offered.
“Alexis Lafreniere hasn’t gotten better, You can look at Braden Schneider hasn’t gotten better. Go look at the guys there were force-feeding through their system.
They didn’t get better at the NHL level. And that’s the problem for them.”
That issue has followed the Rangers for years. Poor drafting and uneven development have left the organization with too many prospects who never turned into difference-makers.
In the past 15 years or so, Chris Kreider stands out as the most successful homegrown skater, with Igor Shesterkin the top homegrown goalie. After that, the list thins out quickly.
There is still hope that some of the current crop can change that picture. Lafreniere is coming off a strong final quarter of the 2025-26 season and is expected to try to build on it. Gabe Perreault, in his second season, is also a name to watch, along with 2025 fifth-overall pick Alberts Smits.
But the concerns remain. Schneider and Lafreniere have not yet matched the expectations placed on them, and the Rangers’ recent history is filled with prospects who stalled out, including Kaapo Kakko, Lias Andersson, Vitali Kravtsov, Brennan Othmann, and even K’Andre Miller, who helped the Hurricanes win the Stanley Cup this past spring.
The organization is trying to address that track record under Tanner Glass, its new head of player development, and with a fresh coaching staff now in place in Hartford for the AHL affiliate Wolf Pack.
Even so, the task is daunting. The Rangers’ prospect pool is described as light on star power and heavy on middle-six forwards and second- and third-pair defensemen, which makes it hard to know whether the changes will pay off quickly enough for a franchise that badly needs them.
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