The New York Rangers are very good, and it's clearly not enough this season

Watching this 2024-25 New York Rangers team, theres so much talent.

Igor Shesterkin , bound for a record-breaking contract here or elsewhere is firmly established as one of the three best goalies around.

Artemi Panarin , earning every penny of that monster deal he signed five summers ago, is firmly established as one of the 10 best players in the league.

Chris Kreider , with flecks of gray in his beard, is firmly established as one of the most effective special teams players of the 2020s.

Adam Fox , Alexis Lafreniere , Filip Chytil , Will Cuylle , 38-year-old Jonathan Quick this Rangers team has a wealth of very good players who can play very good hockey much of the time.

Advertisement And, as Tuesday nights loss to the unstoppable Winnipeg Jets and much of the past eight games have shown, all that talent and very good play means precisely squat.

There is one goal for the Rangers.

Its not another Presidents Trophy, though winning it two years in a row would be a feather in Chris Drury and Peter Laviolettes caps.

Its not another trip to the Eastern Conference final, though thats a stepping stone.

If they make it again this May or June, that would mark six trips in 14 seasons, which sounds impressive only until you remember all those Final Fours have amounted to one Stanley Cup Final appearance and that heartbreaking loss to the Los Angeles Kings 11 years ago.

Drury has tinkered with the excellent core he inherited from Jeff Gorton to very good effect, turning this franchise away from The Letter in the winter of 2018 and into a real contender.

Each years deadline deals have been noteworthy and productive, at least in two of the last three years.

Contracts have been shrewdly distributed among the young players and a couple of older core players.

Vincent Trocheck , the big free-agent signing of Drurys tenure, fits right in and gives the Rangers talented forward group a heartbeat.

But there is still something missing, as evidenced by the 4-4-0 run the Rangers are currently on after a 5-0-1 start.

On some nights its a few things, like Mika Zibanejad s month-long funk that hit its low point on Tuesday with three turnovers leading directly to Winnipeg goals and a couple of missed scoring opportunities.

Zibanejad is the whipping boy so far this season among the diehards theres always a main character, from Ryan Strome a few years back to Jacob Trouba last season but the Rangers warning-light indicators go beyond their No.

1A/B center.

GO DEEPER How Rangers failed to overcome Mika Zibanejad's rough night in loss to Jets: 3 takeaways Trocheck, a reliable fit among the skilled Rangers elite, has just four even-strength points far fewer than Zibanejad, whose struggles at five-on-five are well-documented and both the Rangers top centers are way down the list of Clear Sight Analytics expected goals plus-minus, a measurement of a players high- and mid-danger chances for and against on the ice.

Advertisement The Rangers need the lines centered by Zibanejad and Trocheck to dominate five-on-five play, even if it doesnt lead to huge offense.

It can lead to power-play opportunities, where the Rangers excel, and to keeping pucks away from opposing teams counterattacking, a place in which the Rangers have been far too vulnerable.

Not just this season, mind you, but every season since Drury took over.

Heres where the Rangers have ranked in expected goals against off the rush the last four years, again courtesy of Clear Sight Analytics: That last ranking doesnt include Tuesdays game, so the Rangers might drop a spot or two given all the rush chances they allowed against a well-oiled Winnipeg machine.

Looking back to the breakout 2021-22 season, the Rangers started the year a lot like they have the current one.

Shesterkin was saving his teams bacon again and again while the skaters used their skill to score timely goals to get the team out to a 7-3-3 start.

But after a crazy 4-3 win over the Florida Panthers on Nov.

8, 2021, and then staring at a four-day break in the schedule, Gerard Gallant and associate coach Mike Kelly took their team back to school, holding a minicamp of sorts to adjust the teams defensive-zone structure and try to prevent so many open looks in front of the net.

The Rangers reeled off 10 wins in the next 11 games and were on their way.

Shesterkin continued to be elite; Panarin, Fox, Zibanejad and Kreider all had major seasons, and the team coached by Gallant, whose brief tenure has strangely been hand-waved away as a failure by many corners of the fan base, got to a 2-0 lead in the series and in Game 3 against the two-time defending champion Tampa Bay Lightning in the East final.

They should have finished that season off with at least a shot at the Cup against the Colorado Avalanche .

Advertisement Now, under Laviolette, the Rangers ability to defend teams off the rush has gotten worse.

Laviolettes teams love to play up-tempo and have defensemen join the rush; it worked well last season even though, as the rankings above show, they were still leaking far too many high-danger chances the other way.

Some of this lies with a defense corps thats not really in sync.

KAndre Miller and Fox had good underlying metrics but it was too much skill on one pair, leaving the Ryan Lindgren-Trouba pair flailing.

Miller-Trouba has still been bad, and Lindgren-Fox hasnt had the same mojo it had for years; too often you see Rangers defensemen trying to do the octopus, belly down on the ice and arms and stick flailing, to defend an odd-man rush against.

And with mediocre play from their top two centers, this season seems worse.

The Rangers arent producing enough with their big boys the Cuylle-Chytil- Kaapo Kakko line has been the Rangers best by a significant amount, which showed again on Tuesday when it scored a couple of greasy ones in tight on Connor Hellebuyck .

And worse still, the Rangers four- and five-man attacks have been undermined by the high forward in the offensive zone losing his place too often, creating odd-man chances against, or what Panarin did on Tuesday, leaving his high spot outside the offensive zone to make a futile attempt to get the puck from Neal Pionk with two Jets steaming up the ice and three Rangers caught low in the offensive zone.

Thats defensive structure 101.

On a team loaded with talent, players can sometimes forget about the other end of the ice when visions of points are dancing in their heads like Cookie Monster picturing a fresh batch of chocolate chip out of the oven.

Against the Jets and the handful of other elite teams in the league, thats a recipe for disaster.

And sometimes, when your all-world goalie has an off night, its a recipe for disaster against a callow team like the Buffalo Sabres , who put Shesterkin on the bench by converting rush chance after rush chance.

So here we are, 14 games in.

The Rangers record is very good.

There are a few players with very good numbers.

The very good play of that Chytil line, plus some very good play from Braden Schneider and Zac Jones , has been welcome.

Lots and lots of very good.

And none of it matters if the teams defense and some of its key players cant get their act together.

(Photo: Wendell Cruz / Imagn Images).

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