Pavel Dorofeyev scored 37 goals last season. Twenty of them came on the power play. One of the highest totals in the NHL. He was 25 years old, playing on a Golden Knights team stacked so deep with stars that he barely registered in the national conversation. And the Rangers just traded two first-round picks and a third to get him locked up for seven years at $11 million per.
This is a great deal.
Dorofeyev traded to NYR.
— Darren Dreger (@DarrenDreger) June 26, 2026
Vegas buries people. Jack Eichel, Mark Stone, Jonathan Marchessault, a blueline that eats minutes — if you’re not the headliner, you don’t exist to the casual fan. Dorofeyev was a complementary piece on a championship-caliber team, which is another way of saying he was exactly the kind of player whose numbers get dismissed because the context feels too good to be true.
Except the numbers are real. Thirty-seven goals is not a fluke, and 20 power play goals isn’t a hot streak. That’s a skill. Pavel Dorofeyev was operating at an elite level while the hockey world was busy writing think pieces about guys with bigger names on worse teams.
Over two seasons, Dorofeyev put up 72 goals — more than Eichel, Stone, Marner, and Hertl over the same span. That’s a first-line scorer hiding in plain sight because everyone else in the building had a more famous last name.
The Rangers’ power play last season was a problem everyone saw and nobody fully solved. They had the personnel to be dangerous and still managed to feel middling in the moments that mattered. Adding a left wing who posts 20 power play goals while third or fourth on the Vegas depth chart is not a minor tweak. That’s a targeted surgery on a specific wound. Chris Drury identified the gap, found the player who fills it exactly, and moved before someone else woke up.
Two firsts and a third is real cost. Nobody’s pretending this was free. Vegas didn’t move him because he stopped producing. His agent demanded a contract the Golden Knights wouldn’t match: they chose their cap structure over their leading goal-scorer. That’s the inefficiency. The Rangers found it and paid for it, which is exactly what good front offices do.
The alternative framing: New York paid two first-round picks for a proven 37-goal scorer who was undervalued because he shared a locker room with too many other good players. That’s the kind of deal that looks overpaid on the surface and looks prescient by March.
Dorofeyev is going to score on the Rangers’ power play in October and some percentage of the fanbase will react like it’s a surprise. It won’t be. He’s been doing exactly this for two seasons — the only thing that changed is he’s no longer disappearing into Vegas’s highlight reel. He’ll have the ice time, the role, and the spotlight that match what he actually produces.
By January, the question won’t be whether this trade was worth it. It’ll be why it took everyone so long to notice him.
