It has been a nightmare season for the New York Rangers, who were eliminated Saturday to become just the fourth team in NHL history to miss the playoffs one year after putting up the league's best record. In appropriate fashion, this season is ending with disgruntlement and dysfunction. Trade-deadline acquisition Calvin de Haan said the way he's been treated by the team has been "fucked," and told a reporter he wanted to talk about it. Team PR stepped in and suddenly de Haan was no longer talking.
Nearly everything that could go wrong has in New York. The team's veteran core all seemed to age five years overnight. Offseason dramas with Jacob Trouba and Barclay Goodrow spiraled and appeared to infect the rest of the locker room. Talented youths failed to take the next step. Trouba, the captain, along with Kaapo Kakko, Filip Chytil, Ryan Lindgren, Reilly Smith, and Jimmy Vesey were all important parts of the lineup last year who were shipped out during this campaign. The team alienated its longest-tenured player, Chris Kreider, by leaking its willingness to move him. Instead he finished up what is expected to be the end of his stay on Broadway just as the rest of the team did: with an ineffective whimper. Elite goaltending and special teams carried the Rangers to the conference final last year, but when they regressed, what was left was a team that just wasn't very good. "So many things went together to bring us here," Artemi Panarin said after elimination.
But all is not lost. Mark Messier, legendary Ranger and big-time leadership guy, has a five-point plan to fix the team. And when the annual presenter of the Mark Messier NHL Leadership Award speaks, wise teams listen.
1. Identify captain/leader. The Rangers had one in Trouba, the 2024 winner of the Mark Messier NHL Leadership Award for the player who best exemplifies the qualities of Mark Messier, and now they don't. They need a captain, and a leader ... someone to inspire his fellow men ... someone like Mark Messier.
2. Create an identity. Hard-nosed, team-first hockey, like the kind Mark Messier used to play. Can a team really be said to be a team if the team doesn't include a Mark Messier? Mark Messier knows the answer to that is no.
3. Define a nucleus to drive culture. OK, these three points are all kind of saying the same thing so far. But no matter! Who am I to question Mark Messier? You need that nucleus, that one player who embodies the essence of Mark Messier, to build around. Once you have your Mark Messier, everything else falls into place. Just ask Mark Messier.
4. Push youth into more important roles. A team actually has two options here. The first is to have a young Mark Messier. Do you think Mark Messier's age was a problem when he scored 50 goals at 21 years old? Do you think Mark Messier was cowed by playing top-line minutes for five Stanley Cup–winning teams before he turned 30? The Rangers simply need to find a young Mark Messier, or barring that a young Wayne Gretzky.
If this cannot be achieved, the Rangers also have the option of putting their young players under the wing of an inspirational veteran leader who will bring out the best in them and drive them to new heights—a Mark Messier, if you will.
5. Body language. I don't know what this has to do with Mark Messier but I'm certain it does.
I think it's clear now that the Rangers don't need a full teardown. Their myriad flaws, happily, can all be addressed by the presence of one player, as long as that player possesses all the traits valued and enumerated by Mark Messier. Can such a player even exist? Could one man ever be such a talented leader that he captains not one, but two franchises to championships—hypothetically speaking? Messier, unfortunately, did not name names. Maybe he was talking about P.K. Subban.
