Right as we thought no major moves would be made by the Rangers until after the playoffs ended, we got a doozy of an announcement. The Rangers announced the Chris Drury contract extension, and it was met largely negatively across the fanbase. It’s rare that a move made by the Rangers has a universally agreed upon reaction, and the Drury contract extension was one of those rare cases. As per usual, I have some thoughts.
1. We don’t know the terms of the Drury contract extension, so it’s hard to gauge what the full impact will be down the road. But we do know the optics of the Drury contract extension are pretty bad. The announcement came less than a week after Drury fired his third coach, if you include firing David Quinn, and barely a week after the Artemi Panarin allegations came to light. This is bad timing at best, and a questionable decision at worst, given Drury’s impact in his first four years as GM.
2. To be direct, anyone involved in the Panarin situation should have been dismissed. Whether that be Peter Laviolette (fired), Drury (extended), or Panarin (still under contract for another year), they should not have been with the Rangers next season. Aside from it being the right thing to do, it’s also going to be a distraction. We’ve already seen him decline to talk to the media about it, and those questions won’t go away. It’s likely these allegations made their way to the locker room, and it’s again a tough sell to say it didn’t impact the locker room in some way. Instead, we got the Drury contract extension.
3. All that said, James Dolan rarely gives up on General Managers after just four seasons, so the Drury contract extension should have been somewhat expected. Dolan has seen just four GMs since he bought the team: Neil Smith (whom he inherited), Glen Sather, Jeff Gorton, and Drury. Smith lasted a total of 11 years before being replaced by Sather in 2000. Sather was GM for 15 years before Gorton took over, who lasted six years before the 2021 drama that left Drury in charge.
Something about the Drury contract extension stinks
4. If you look at his body of work from taking over in 2021 through now, the big picture has been a mixed bag of good and bad, but the bad has far outweighed the good. That first summer was a disaster, and the Rangers simply haven’t been able to recover from losing a top line winger for essentially nothing. They spent four offseasons and trade deadlines trying to find another top line winger, and whatever their plans were kept blowing up in their face. This is a major stain on Drury’s legacy and really calls into question why the Drury contract extension happened.
Add to that the terrible contracts handed out to bottom of the lineup players like Ryan Reaves, Barclay Goodrow, and Patrik Nemeth, plus the bad-upon-signing Mika Zibanejad contract, and you have a guy who dug himself a huge hole and potentially torpedoed the full rebuild plan within the first five months of taking over.
5. While that first offseason has mostly been undone by this point, it opened up even more questions about the Drury contract extension. From the start, the Rangers had a Drury problem with how he managed players. Even if we want to dismiss Vitali Kravtsov as a bust, which is fair, this player relationship management problem extends far beyond Kravtsov, drafted by a different regime.
Kaapo Kakko failed to develop with the Rangers, and is now thriving in Seattle. Zac Jones has toiled away into nothingness, surely to be traded for a mid-round draft pick in June. The Jacob Trouba situation was a train wreck. Waiving Barclay Goodrow was a smart move, but should have come with a message to the leadership group that this was purely hockey/cap related, and nothing against him as a person. Jimmy Vesey and Calvin de Haan, though PTO players, also voiced concerns. There’s also the dumb trade memo that threw Chris Kreider under a bus.
Drury’s need to control everything has led to him being the face of everything going wrong with the Rangers right now. He has a clear weakness in player relationship management, and it’s something he has yet to rectify.
6. Player development, scouting, and drafting has also taken a major hit, and all three again come to light with the Drury contract extension. The 2021 draft may go down as one of the Rangers worst of all time, as Brennan Othmann has just 2 points in 25 games and, while certainly an aggressive player, hasn’t shown he can adjust to the NHL just yet. There’s an outside hope for Brody Lamb and Jaroslav Chemlar, but that’s really it.
The 2022 draft is banking on Noah Laba being a steal and Adam Sykora figuring it out. But that draft is looking bad as well.
Remember that Braden Schneider, Will Cuylle, Brett Berard, Matt Rempe, and Adam Edstrom were drafted by Gorton.
7. The Drury contract extension also comes despite all the drama in the organization spilling out into the public for the first time in the Dolan era. Drury’s need to control everything has led to many leaks and a weakened PR department that simply can’t control the message anymore, the way they were able to with, say, the Tony DeAngelo / Alex Georgiev fallout.
Normally off-ice issues like the trade memo and the Panarin allegations remain internal to the Rangers. But now with Drury inserting his control over everything, there are more leaks than Alex Georgiev.
But it’s not all bad
8. Objectively, Drury’s trades have ranged mostly from fine to good outside of the Pavel Buchnevich trade, with one or two outliers. This year, the outlier was Carson Soucy, which was a bad trade from the start because anyone watching Soucy knew he wasn’t it. I tried to sell it as a low risk move, and in reality a third round pick is a dart throw, but it wasn’t the right move to make simply because Zac Jones deserved a real look, and Soucy ensured that would never happen.
But aside from Soucy, the Kakko trade was fine since that relationship was torched, the Reilly Smith trade was fine, the Ryan Lindgren/Jimmy Vesey and Jacob Trouba trades were both solid, borderline masterclass moves. The JT Miller trade turned out far better than expected, though Victor Mancini looks to be turning a corner into a solid defenseman.
Looking at prior seasons, the Patrick Kane trade wasn’t needed but that reeked of Dolan’s influence. Alex Wennberg might have been a slight overpay, but that was the market. That’s really it. Everything else was anywhere ranging from fine to good.
9. After that first offseason, the free agent signings weren’t that bad either. The long term deal given to Vincent Trocheck was questioned at first, but he’s been great. The other deals have been mostly inconsequential, and his RFA deals have again been mostly fine, though that Alexis Lafreniere contract could be a blemish if Laf doesn’t figure it out.
10. But let’s be real, the Drury contract extension was given largely because of the two Eastern Conference Final appearances in his four years as GM. They also won a President’s Trophy in that span. Most GMs would be rewarded for that, and the Drury contract extension is no different.
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