The New Rangers have done things this season that make you scratch your head. They’ve played games that make you wonder if anyone around here knows what they are doing. The fact they are still in the thick of the chase — think one of those baby races during the seventh-inning stretch of a minor-league baseball game, not any sort of race where things move fast — has so much more to do with the ineptitude of the teams around them than anything good the Rangers have done.
And yet, despite so many lows this season, somehow the bar was lowered Friday at the Anaheim Ducks. They had a 4-2 lead in the third period with under six minutes to go, and a late power play turned it into a tie game. Then, a quick and painful overtime session left the Rangers with 1 point instead of 2. The 5-4 loss left them still outside the top eight in the East when they were minutes away from actually holding that last wild-card spot, if only for a night.
It leaves you wondering even more whether this team, which has seen plenty of change this season already, is in dire need of more surgery. Maybe the Rangers are tired. Maybe they’re fed up. Maybe they’re angry with all that’s gone on. Maybe they, like many of you out there watching and commenting, just want this to end as quickly as possible.
So the Rangers head to San Jose on Saturday for yet another chance to either get a leg up on the other teams trying to drag themselves across the playoff finish line or puke down their own shirt fronts in front of a late-night audience. Who knows what will happen?
Some takeaways from another ignominious moment in a season littered with them:
The power play is a mess
And that declaration comes on a night when the Rangers scored a power-play goal, just their second in their last 35 chances. Mika Zibanejad whipped a patented one-timer off an Adam Fox feed to make it 4-2 at 4:35 of the third. Amazingly, the Rangers were 1-for-3 after that goal; they finished 1-for-7, including a 96-second five-on-three that produced zero shots on goal.
FoxyFeed + Mika buries it. pic.twitter.com/JBMZ1r0hAs
— New York Rangers (@NYRangers) March 29, 2025
Oh, and the Ducks scored a short-handed goal in the first period, so that Zibanejad power-play goal just evened things out for the Rangers’ power play on the night.
Peter Laviolette and Michael Peca have toggled different players onto the power-play units and ended up back where they started the season: with the original power-play five on the top group. No one has been able to fix this mess, which has the Rangers at 17.9 percent for the season. They were a 26.4 percent power play last season with the same crew.
Being unable to score is one thing; gifted a seventh power play with 3:54 to go while holding a one-goal lead thanks to Radko Gudas’ deciding to see if he could ping Brennan Othmann’s head off the crossbar, the Rangers failed not only to score a clincher but also to realize the situation with the second unit out there.
Laviolette had Will Borgen on with K’Andre Miller instead of a fourth forward, but the three forwards on the ice — J.T. Miller, Alexis Lafrenière and Will Cuylle — as the Ducks’ penalty ended either had no idea it was five-on-five again or just couldn’t bring themselves to hustle back after J.T. Miller turned it over and sent the Ducks down four-on-two.
Olen Zellweger had loads of time as the trailer to snap one by Igor Shesterkin, and the score was tied with 1:45 remaining.
Three-on-three is a mess
The 2023-24 Rangers were 8-1 in overtime. They’re 2-7 this season, and Friday’s loss was an immaculate OT grid of sorts: Mason McTavish beat Vincent Trocheck on the overtime faceoff, three Ducks under the age of 23 moved the puck around for 59 seconds, and McTavish tapped in the winner. Trocheck, Fox and Artemi Panarin, three big-time Rangers, never touched the puck.
Defensive structure — forechecking, neutral-zone systems, penalty killing — is all work ethic. You have to want to do it and want to do it well. Whether it’s sacrificing your body to block a shot or get a body on someone, to track back and find the right opposing player to cover, to swing low in the defensive zone to make sure the puck gets out or chip a puck off the wall to get a change, all that stuff is discipline. It’s tedious. It’s work.
So we can all understand why players, even the pros, don’t give their every attention to detail when the team is as disjointed as the Rangers have been. You don’t accept it, by any means, but you understand. Work is work; it’d be called something else if it was easy.
But the power play, three-on-three overtime — those are times to shine, to let the skill and creativity out. The high-end Rangers who get to play on those units should want to succeed there for any number of reasons, from something as shallow as padding stats to something as meaningful as winning games that still matter.
Yet this team does not succeed there anymore. The fog of losses in December was so thick that you couldn’t notice individual aspects of the team’s game because it was all ghastly. Now, when there are working parts and points that matter, the power play and overtime failures are glaring.
Everything is a mess
The image the Rangers project out to the world — to their fans, the only people who really matter in sports — is ugly. Jacob Trouba, who left Friday’s game after crashing hard into the boards in the third period, expressed relief at being gone from the Rangers to The Athletic’s Eric Stephens earlier this week. Fans have every right to criticize Trouba’s on-ice game slipping, but his stubbornness to not go along with Chris Drury’s summer plan to remake the Rangers by force doesn’t make the former captain the bad guy.
All the subsequent moves might be justified in the name of changing the team’s play, but there sure is something big still missing, as evidenced by Friday’s loss. I’ve heard from fans wondering why Trocheck was so short with the MSG Network studio crew at intermission of the Rangers’ game at the Winnipeg Jets two weeks ago. I’ve heard from fans wondering why Sam Rosen’s pregame ceremony before last Saturday’s game was so short.
I got no answers on either of those things, but they are definitely noticed by more than just you all. There are plenty of mediocre teams that don’t give off bad vibes like this one does.
And somehow, they reached a new low Friday.
(Photo of Mason McTavish scoring past Igor Shesterkin in overtime: Nicole Vasquez / NHLI via Getty Images)