Colin Stephenson: Rangers must earn back trust after two-year playoff drought
Rangers coach Mike Sullivan speaks to the media on breakdown day at the MSG Training Center on Apr 17, 2026, in Tarrytown. Credit: Brad Penner
GREENBURGH — There’s a recent television commercial for a job search board in which a job candidate asks his interviewer what the salary is for the position to which he is applying. The interviewer assures him the salary will be “competitive,’’ and repeats that word several times, while never offering the actual number.
When coach Mike Sullivan and general manager Chris Drury met with reporters Wednesday, the day the Rangers reported for training camp, they were asked what their expectations are for the team, whose roster has been significantly remodeled over the summer. And Sullivan kept emphasizing his belief that the team would be competitive, while being careful to not make any promises.
“My expectation is that we’re going to compete,’’ Sullivan said. “I think we have, as Chris alluded to, more depth than we had a year ago. I’m hopeful that our team can stay a little bit healthier this year, which should help us.
“We’re going to be a competitive group,’’ he said, “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.”
No bold declarations of challenging for a Stanley Cup, nor any assurance that this group will return to the playoffs next spring after missing the postseason two years in a row.
And, honestly, after the disappointment of the last two seasons, that’s definitely the right approach.
Two years ago, the Rangers were coming off a season in which they set a franchise record for points, won the Presidents’ Trophy for the best record in the league, and reached the Eastern Conference final, in which they lost in six games to the eventual champion Florida Panthers. The expectation at that time was for them to build on that: maybe go to the Finals, maybe win it all.
Instead, they fell apart. Drury tried to save the season when he began a radical, in-season remake of the roster, but his efforts couldn’t stop them from missing the playoffs. A year ago, with Sullivan starting his first year behind the bench, the Blueshirts were expected to rebound from that disaster, and get back into the postseason. But they never came close.
So now, after strengthening their roster following Drury’s declaration in January that the Rangers needed a “retool,’’ it would be presumptuous — arrogant, really — for the Blueshirts to just assume they will not only return to the postseason, but go far in the playoffs.
Yes, trading for sniper Pavel Dorofeyev from Vegas, acquiring defensemen Sean Durzi and Marcus Pettersson to improve their back end, and signing a couple of free-agent forwards in Oliver Bjorkstrand and Eeli Tolvanen make them way better than the group that finished last season.
But other teams got better, too. Florida missed the playoffs last year, but Aleksander Barkov, who missed all of last season, and Matthew Tkachuk, who missed most of it, are healthy, and the Panthers have added Tkachuk’s brother, Brady. Washington, which also missed the playoffs last spring, added forwards Alex Tuch, Jordan Kyrou and Boone Jenner, who signed as a free agent. Plus, Alex Ovechkin decided to return. So pencil them in for a return to the playoffs.
If those two get back in, that would mean two teams that made the playoffs last year will be out this spring. Can the Rangers bump a third 2026 playoff team out in 2027?
Drury, after saying he “addressed a lot of things in the offseason,’’ was asked Wednesday what he thought was the most significant improvement he made to the roster since last season.
“There’s a lot of things we were trying to check,’’ he said. “I feel like we checked most of them, if not all of them. Certainly, one of them would be depth. I think when we were healthy last year, our record was pretty good. 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,’’ he said.
On paper, the Rangers look like a much better team than they were at the end of last season. But they fooled us once when they missed the playoffs in 2025, and they fooled some of us a second time when they missed again in 2026.
We can’t let them fool us again. They’ll have to earn our trust this time. Let’s see them score some goals at Madison Square Garden first (remember, they were shut out in their first three home games last season), and win some games early. Then we can talk.
Colin Stephenson covers the Rangers for Newsday. He has spent more than two decades covering the NHL and just about every sports team in the New York metropolitan area.
