The New York Rangers spent the summer adding two forwards who can score and still walked into August without a real answer at the position that’s supposed to set everyone else up. Rangers’ recent Dorofeyev acquisition cost a 2026 first-rounder, a 2026 third-rounder, and a conditional 2028 first. Pavel Dorofeyev got a seven-year, $77 million extension before playing a shift in blue. Oliver Bjorkstrand followed on a one-year, $4.5 million deal. Both moves make sense on their own terms — Dorofeyev scored 37 goals with 20 power-play goals, second-most in the league, and Bjorkstrand has hit 20 goals four separate times. Neither of them plays center.
That’s the part getting lost in the offseason afterglow. The Trocheck trade sent Vincent Trocheck to Utah on July 1 for Sean Durzi, Cole Beaudoin, and a third-round pick, removing a center who’d put up 53 points in 67 games and leaving the depth chart thinner where it was already thin. What’s left is Mika Zibanejad, J.T. Miller, rookie Noah Laba, and Joe Veleno. Laba managed 24 points centering the fourth line as a rookie, and neither he nor Veleno projects as a top-six option, so the safety net under the top two spots barely exists.
J.T. Miller posted a team-worst minus-30 with 17 goals and 53 points in 68 games, his least productive full season since 2018-19. He’s currently penciled in at second-line center. Zibanejad bounced back with 34 goals and 44 assists, his best year in a while, but he’s 33, and asking him to be both the answer at 1C and insurance if Miller doesn’t rebound is the kind of plan that works right up until it doesn’t. The Athletic’s Harmony Dayal ranked the Rangers’ center group 21st in the league, squarely in the “below average” tier. Miller’s season is most of the reason why.
Vince Mercogliano put it more bluntly than the Rangers probably wanted read back to them: “The long-term outlook is potentially catastrophic.” Mercogliano isn’t just talking about this season; he’s talking about what happens the year Zibanejad’s bounce-back doesn’t repeat and Miller’s slump turns out to be more than a one-off, with nobody in the system built to replace either of them.
Chris Drury, to his credit, isn’t pretending the search is over: “We’re still tinkering, still looking, and any which way we can help the team between now and Opening Night, we’re going to keep trying,” he said this offseason. Fine. But “still looking” in early August reads differently than “still looking” the week before camp. Per Foreverblueshirts, Miller can’t have another season like the last one if this team wants the playoffs.
Matt Rempe’s situation is smaller in scale but not unrelated. A thumb injury from an October fight with Ryan Reaves (the kind that requires multiple surgeries, not just a cast) limited him to 26 games, one goal, and 8:36 a night. He’s no longer waiver-exempt, either, meaning the Rangers can’t stash him in Hartford without risking losing him for nothing. They’ve done exactly that before, without much hesitation:
UPDATE: Matt Rempe has been assigned to the Hartford Wolf Pack.
— NY Rangers PR (@NYR_PR) October 25, 2024
A team fully sold on its bottom-six center doesn’t have that kind of paper trail sitting around. Per Yahoo Sports, Rempe has “a lot to prove” just to make the Opening Night roster, let alone stabilize anything above the fourth line.
None of this is bad luck. Drury’s retool strategy built a roster good enough to compete now. Landing a true difference-making center in the center-heavy 2027 draft would have meant blowing it up first, and he chose not to. That’s a defensible bet. It still needs Miller to be the player he was two years ago, Zibanejad to keep aging like he hasn’t been, and training camp, which opens September 21, to answer what the offseason didn’t. New York opens the regular season September 29 in Boston with those questions unresolved, and Dorofeyev’s shot totals won’t be the ones that decide whether that’s a problem.
