The New York Rangers have fallen apart in just over a week. What’s next?

They’re not going to tell you that things have gone off the rails. But you have eyes.

You can see how wrong things went for the New York Rangers. Eight days ago they were on the ice in Calgary, a 12-4-1 team that had scored incredibly well and scored in time to get off to a fast start to the season.

Eight days later, things are going wrong not only on the ice and in the rankings, but also in the executive suite and in the locker room. Friday’s 3-1 loss to the Flyers was the fifth straight loss for the Rangers, something they haven’t done since the end of the 2020-21 season – a string of defeats that includes the Tom Wilson-Artemi Panarin incident, the incident at Madison Square Garden subsequent public criticism of the NHL and the firing of president John Davidson and general manager Jeff Gorton.

That they haven’t had such a bad week in four years shows how good Rangers have been since then. That the second bad week in four years has brought nearly as much turmoil to this organization as the last shows how this team and its bosses seemingly spiral into full-blown panic when things start to snowball.

And this time, the previous three seasons of rebuilding are not the cause of the pent-up frustration. The bad eight days in November still leave the current Rangers in a playoff spot, still with one of the best goaltenders in the league and a collection of pretty good talent all around.

The last eight days for the Rangers:

Thursday: Lose 3-2 in Calgary
Saturday: Blown out in Edmonton
Monday morning: Word leaks that Drury is open to trades, names Kreider and Trouba among league GMs
Monday: Lose 5-2 to STL
Wednesday: Lose 4-3 at Carolina
Friday: Loss 3-1 at PHI

— Peter Baugh (@Peter_Baugh) November 29, 2024

So this chaos, this incredibly bad atmosphere, is all our own fault. And you can see what Chris Drury’s overreaction caused last weekend.

A first period on Friday so thoroughly lifeless and borderline embarrassing that only Igor Shesterkin stood between the Flyers and a 5-0 or 6-0 lead. Panarin went to work with an entire five-man Flyers squad after the whistle, with zero teammates coming in to support him. An entire team, one that has played pretty much on its own before, seemingly allergic to the space between the lines at the Rangers end, where the Flyers produced about a dozen high-risk scoring chances in the first 40 minutes.

Then, finally, Shesterkin — you know, the guy the Rangers have to pay to maintain even a remote chance of becoming a Stanley Cup contender — skates off on his own, without acknowledging anyone, after yet another a defeat.

“That can’t happen with a team that sits here and is looking for ways to win hockey games,” Peter Laviolette said afterward.

As we outlined earlier on Friday, the resonances of Drury’s ‘come and get it’ memo are still being felt across the league on Sunday. Chris Kreider, one of the two Rangers veterans specifically mentioned in Drury’s note, is still on the road with the back spasms he so carefully noted a few days ago in Raleigh that you’d think he had one of those anatomy charts next to him had.

That was perhaps Ranger’s longest-lasting way of telling the hockey world that he’s not feeling great and that trading for him might not be in their best interest.

Jacob Trouba, the other party mentioned in the note, hasn’t struck much lately. He hasn’t spoken to the media much, except when he has to answer to the GM who is trying to trade him for the second time in about four months. The idea of ​​Trouba throwing his helmet and yelling at his own bench to wake up, as he did this time two seasons ago after a huge hit and fight, seems absurd at this point.

You can call that indifferent behavior unprofessional. Inappropriate for an $8 million a year man who wears the C. All true. But consider how we got here: Drury tried to put the cart before the horse in June, trying to force Trouba to make a move before the player was ready and before any other team, including the Red Wings, even had given a lot of thought to the takeover. it. That poisoned the situation.

Now it seems irreparable. No one is trading for Trouba while he’s playing like this, not now and maybe not this summer without a decent sweetener in the deal.

And there is a domino effect. Trouba was named captain despite not being a Ranger, as long as some teammates did, because he did everything you need to do as a leader. Fans might have wanted Kreider or Mika Zibanejad or Adam Fox, but it’s Trouba who has stirred up the team behind the scenes, going to coaching and management with player requests and being a go-between on sensitive issues between the front office and the locker room.

Kreider prefers to do his leadership work one-on-one with younger players. Zibanejad and Fox are types who lead by example and are otherwise very gentle. It’s not a boisterous room full of outsized personalities and Trouba was the man they all looked to for leadership. Now he’s adrift; it is not surprising that the ship also lists.

In such a pivotal year, with Shesterkin needing to make a lot of money, Alexis Lafrenière already making money (and not doing much since securing the bag) and K’Andre Miller mounting a very curious campaign to earn a big extension , the Rangers needed some rest. . They needed a steady hand.

They currently have a snow globe being worked by a jackhammer. And all that in just eight days – unrest off the ice, disinterest on the ice, you name it.

It’s kind of a world record for how quickly this thing falls apart. The Rangers found themselves within two games of a Stanley Cup Final in June, a team that was flawed but had enough skill in net and up front to feel like a contender at least for a while.

The Barclay Goodrow saga, with Drury informing the alternate captain and beloved teammate that he would be on the 2:00 waiver wire at approximately 1:45 p.m., didn’t keep the offseason moving in the right direction. The Trouba thing hindered Drury’s attempts to reach the top four of his defense again and also had the effect outlined above.

The first sign of real trouble this season is a tire fire.

What will Saturday bring? The Canadiens, another young, fast team, are coming to the Garden. The Rangers have certainly missed Filip Chytil, as well as Kreider, but even at full strength this season they have seemed painfully slow – either to respond to teams counterattacking based on turnovers or simply reverting to a plain old rush. During this losing streak, they have stopped defending O-zone possessions from opponents, leading to situations like Friday’s three-against-Shesterkin on a low after a faceoff.

So what’s next? Will you strip Trouba of the C? Give him or someone else an exemption? All that does is further humiliate a core player, one of the reasons the Rangers are in this mess. Is Laviolette next? That would mean three coaching searches for Drury in four years. What about Drury? There’s no indication the president/GM is in the top spot here, but remember what happened the last time the Rangers lost five in a row.

The Rangers need something to change and they are getting older a lot faster than you would think when you watch them play two of the last three playoffs deep into the postseason. They play poorly. They’ve gone from sitting comfortably at the top of the Metro Division to nervously peering down at all the mediocre teams right behind them.

But the only thing that has really changed for the Rangers is that their own boss is making them increasingly unhappy. Hard to see how that helps – or how it gets resolved quickly.

(Photo: Kyle Ross/Imagn Images)