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Every NHL season, there’s a team whose success in the standings doesn’t sync up with some of its underlying numbers, leading fans to ask if they’re “actually this good.”
So, are the New York Rangers actually this good?
They’re second in the Metro Division with a 29-13-4 record (.674 points percentage). They have roughly a 92% chance of making the 16-team Stanley Cup playoffs for the first time since 2017, after a brief but effective rebuild.
They’re also last in the NHL in 5-on-5 possession metrics, with a middling offense. The perception of some is that they’ve been carried by goaltender Igor Shesterkin, who leads the NHL with a .937 save percentage and has 21 of the team’s 29 wins this season.
Is perception reality, or are the Rangers more than just the product of their MVP-caliber goaltender?
Here’s what New York’s players are saying, how the analytics community sees the team and what others around the league think about the Rangers this season.
What the players say
NHL players love to feign ignorance about outside opinions surrounding their team.
Ryan Reaves is one who doesn’t.
The Rangers enforcer has heard the doubters. He’s aware of the narrative cropping up about New York as a club not truly as good as its record.
So Reaves issued a rebuttal. And there was no better time to do so than after he scored two goals in a come-from-behind win over the Toronto Maple Leafs last month in which New York erased a pair of two-goal deficits to come out on top.
“I think we know [we’re a contender],” Reaves said Jan. 19. “I think maybe some of the league doesn’t believe it, but let them keep [not] believing it. We’re going to keep doing our thing. And, I mean, the standings don’t lie.”
That victory over the Leafs pushed the Rangers into first place in the Metropolitan Division, where they’ve been hanging around most of the season, helped by having played more games than many teams (46).
Reaves said taking down Toronto in the manner they did showed the Rangers “can hang with the big boys [and] that we are one of the big boys. We’ve got to keep beating the playoff teams. That’s something we’ve talked about, but I think we’re proving to the league that we’re a contender.”
Indeed, the Rangers have lagged when playing against the league’s best. Their record against clubs in playoff position this season is 9-11-1, with a goal differential of minus-14. They’ll have a chance to improve that mark when they face the first-place Florida Panthers on Tuesday (7 p.m., ESPN+/Hulu).
Victories against upper-tier teams come easier when New York’s depth can shine the way it did against the Leafs. The Rangers’ veteran fourth line stepped up and sparked the comeback, showing that, with the right contributions, the Rangers can go toe to toe with anyone.
“We just have that mentality,” All-Star defenseman Adam Fox said. “We have a lot of guys who are maturing, we brought in a lot of guys with experience who could calm the room down a little bit when things are a little flustered. When your goaltender is making big saves, too, you never feel out of a game, and we have a lot of skill guys who can score. So we just have that mentality that we’re never out of a game, and I think we’ve shown it well this year.”
And yet, critics continue to question how real — and sustainable — the Rangers’ success is.
Skepticism was especially high late in December, when New York had gone 2-4-1 ahead of consecutive meetings against the two-time reigning Cup champion Tampa Bay Lightning on Dec. 31 and Jan. 2.
The Rangers came away with a sweep, earning a road shootout win and then blanking the Lightning at home. More impressively, New York topped Tampa the second time with some key players, including Artemi Panarin and Ryan Lindgren, unavailable due to COVID-19 protocols.
“I think it speaks to a little bit of growth,” Fox said after New York’s 4-0 win. “Not only did we beat a good team, we did a good job holding a lead we got early. We’re going to have to do a lot more of that if we want to be respected around the league.”
That was about the time the Rangers seemed to recognize that, despite their excellent start, there was a fair amount of suspicion about their standing.
“We talked about how if we want to be in the conversation with the top teams in the league or upper echelon, we need to start beating those teams,” Barclay Goodrow said after New York’s shootout victory in Tampa. “We’ve fared pretty well against teams that are out of a playoff spot or below us in the standings, but haven’t fared so well against top teams. Tonight we held on and got through it.”
That made those bouts against Tampa classic measuring-stick games, and the Rangers were pleased to not only get needed points but to have handled adversity well.
“We’ve said it — you’ve got to beat teams [like Tampa] to be a good team, and we’re learning to do that,” Fox said. “It’s a learning curve, but games like this help with that. We go into games confident that we can win, and we keep playing well. We’re finding different ways to win, and that shows the resilience of this group.”
On the other hand, New York has to avoid getting too wrapped up in proving itself. After the team’s emotional comeback win over Toronto, the Rangers laid an egg against the division rival Carolina Hurricanes. The Hurricanes, who have been one of the NHL’s best clubs all season, jumped out to an early 3-0 lead en route to a 6-3 drubbing.
It was a night that brought the Rangers’ goaltending into focus. Shesterkin has had an incredible first half in a Vezina Trophy-caliber campaign. But backup Alexandar Georgiev, who is 7-7-2, was in net for the loss to Carolina. Rangers coach Gerard Gallant told reporters before the game “don’t ask why” Georgiev got the nod over Shesterkin, but perhaps he too wanted to see how his team would fare without their regular starter.
Turns out New York looked lost without Shesterkin’s game-changing presence, admittedly against a great Carolina team. Was that a one-off situation? Or is the Rangers’ place near the top of the Metro standings skewed by their terrific goaltending?
“I didn’t feel like we got up to the level we needed to,” forward Mika Zibanejad said after the loss to the Hurricanes. “We’ve had games where [we talked about] a full 60 [minutes] and we haven’t done that. That was maybe the best team we’ve played against, and they really took advantage of the stuff we did wrong and our mistakes.”
Less than 24 hours later, the Rangers were back on the ice — with Shesterkin in net — dropping Arizona 7-3. A nice response maybe, but notably coming against one of the league’s worst clubs.
“We try not to look at it as [proving ourselves]. We try to approach every game the same,” forward Ryan Strome said. “If we get too worried about who we’re playing or [what’s a] measuring stick, sometimes that just messes with your mind a little bit.”
“Two points against Carolina or two points against the teams that are at the bottom, it doesn’t matter,” Gallant said. “Every team can beat you in this league. If you’re not prepared to play, you’re going to lose.”
That’s all well and good. But until the Rangers convert their preparation into more wins over playoff-caliber teams, skepticism about their status as a legitimate title contender will linger.
Will they be able to shake the naysayers? Only time will tell.
“You can’t [inspire confidence] just beating the teams that are out of the playoffs,” Reaves said. “You’ve got to play playoff teams hard, you’ve got to play them physical. And sometimes you’ve got to push them out of the building, just to prove that you’ve got that little bit of swagger in you.
“Coming down this stretch, this is the time to start preparing for the playoffs. … We’ve got to put our best game out there. We’ve got to prove to ourselves that, not only are we a playoff team based on the standings, but we’re ready to make a run at it.”
What the stats say
After Sunday’s win over the Seattle Kraken, the Rangers were fourth in the NHL in team goals-against average (2.59) and 16th in goals per game (2.98). They were ninth in goals against (119) and 15th in goals scored (84) when playing 5-on-5, but that looks at only what’s on the surface.
Dig into the analytics, and it’s a different story. The Rangers are last in the NHL in percentage of shot attempts (44.1%) at 5-on-5. They rank 31st when ahead (40.6%) and when the game is close (44.8%). In terms of puck possession, they’re 20th in the league (18:59 per game).
This is the root of the “Are the Rangers actually this good?” debate: They are second in the division and fourth in the conference in points percentage (.674), yet they’re in the basement, or a few steps up from it, in some important underlying analytics.
“Nearly every fiber of me is telling me that the case you’d make for them as a true contender based on point percentage and standings is paper thin, and that they’re a classic regression candidate instead,” said Dimitri Filipovic of EP Rinkside, a respected analytics analyst.
Filipovic sees defensive structure at even strength as the Rangers’ most glaring liability, with New York conceding the fifth-highest rate of high-danger chances and expected goals.
“The reason it hasn’t mattered is because Igor Shesterkin has been nothing short of brilliant,” he said, “but that’s a dangerous game to play. Goalie performance can be highly volatile, and there’s a good reason why we’re so uncomfortable about projecting them with any real confidence. For as great as Shesterkin is, he’s not immune to that.”
Josh Younggren of the analytics site Evolving Hockey adds that the Rangers’ power play has been a huge factor in their success. That unit sits in the top five of several standard metrics as well as Evolving Hockey’s Regularized Adjusted Plus-Minus (RAPM) model.
“I’d argue a team built on goaltending and power-play production is not one that usually sustains a good record for a long time,” Younggren said. “But in the playoffs? It could work. That’s the playoffs. The Canadiens made it to the Cup final last season.”
Panarin has contributed 20 points to that power play and has 1.20 points per game this season. That’s a dip from his average over the previous two seasons (1.38), and that has Younggren somewhat concerned.
“He’s declined drastically over the last one or two seasons and continues to struggle, especially defensively,” Younggren said. “Getting Panarin back on track is maybe their biggest non-systems-based issue.”
All that said, the Rangers doing what they do best might be good enough for them to contend.
“The combination of an awesome goalie and elite power play is something the Lightning notably leaned on at the start of last year’s playoffs, until the rest of their game came around. So there’s precedent to that kind of formula winning games, and I think the Rangers could plausibly take down anyone in a short series because of it,” Filipovic said. “But history tells us that kind of thing eventually catches up to you and isn’t exactly a recipe for success when it comes to being a legitimate Stanley Cup contender.”
What they’re saying around the league
How much difference can a few games make? A lot, apparently — at least when it comes to forming opinions about the Rangers.
After New York beat Toronto in mid-January, one rival executive agreed with Reaves’ assessment that the Rangers deserved to be in the contender conversation. But after they followed up that comeback victory with losses to Carolina, Columbus and Minnesota, the tenor of that same exec changed a bit.
“I still think the Rangers are a good team, don’t get me wrong,” he said. “Can they be considered a top-tier team without beating more of them, though? Or at least playing better against [some of] the other top-tier teams? That’s more where the doubts come from around the league.”
The other common denominator in any debate about the Rangers is Shesterkin. Without him, where is New York? On the other hand, as one prominent analyst noted, where is any team without its best player? It’s the chicken or the egg argument. Do the Rangers play better when Shesterkin is in net because they have confidence in their goalie? Or is it Shesterkin actually making New York appear better as a team than it really is?
The general consensus is that the truth about the Rangers probably falls somewhere in the middle.
“Put it this way,” one scout said. “I believe the Rangers can go as far as Shesterkin can take them.”
Others were a little more direct in their feelings on the Rangers. We asked one NHL executive whether the Rangers are “just” Igor Shesterkin.
“Yes,” they said.
Is there anything else to New York’s success?
“No,” they said. “They’re not very good.”
Some of the internal numbers opponents use to grade the Rangers rate them worse defensively than traditional stats would indicate. However, the sense behind the scenes around the league is that the Rangers are right where they should be offensively, based on how they play rather than the expectations for their personnel.
The Rangers are in the middle of the pack, averaging about three goals per game, but they’re near the bottom of the league in shots per game (averaging fewer than 30). If the quantity of their opportunities is lower, the quality does seem relatively high. New York does well keeping the puck out of its own end with top-end offensive zone time.
Building on that in the second half of the season would move the needle on New York for a few people we polled, those still waiting to see if the Rangers are, in fact, actually this good.