The Rangers Need to Solve Their Ryan Lindgren Problem
Ryan Lindgren has been a great Ranger. His time in New York is likely done at the end of the year. It should probably be done sooner.
It has been a pretty busy few weeks for the New York Rangers. Chris Drury has thrown down the gauntlet that the team isn't good enough by publicly shopping captain Jacob Trouba and defacto captain Chris Kreider, then traded said captain to Anaheim in a brilliant trade that required no salary retention.
Drury mentioned post-trade he wasn't interested in making another move right away, citing that he felt the room had been through a lot and he wanted to "let the dust settle."
From that comment the Rangers have lost another series of games – although they did squeak by the flailing Buffalo Sabres the other day.
With Trouba gone Peter Laviolette has had to re-work his defensive pairings. Schneider is with Miller, and Jones and Mancini are a nice pairing of kids. The Lindgren-Fox pairing everyone knows doesn't work has been a mainstay. And more often than not, it results in analytics like this:
Updated New York Rangers Impact Card after data update from NST pic.twitter.com/d34ui1GgCe
— HockeyStatCards (@hockeystatcards) December 12, 2024
The numbers over the past two seasons of Lindgren and Fox being paired together paint an even starker picture:
this is over the past two seasons, each of these samples has over 500 5v5 minutes. make it stop. #FreeFox pic.twitter.com/pi2usyG1db
— JFresh (@JFreshHockey) December 12, 2024
On the most recent episode of the podcast I talked about how Ryan Lindgren is the next easiest player to move on from if Drury wants to continue to press buttons to see if he can fix this mess.
