The greater difficulty the Rangers face in deciding what to do with Panarin is that it’s not exactly clear in which direction this team should steer.
Even if the Blueshirts continue to respond to new Head Coach Mike Sullivan’s structural changes, the best-case scenario for this season seems to be a point total in the low 90s and an underdog first-round playoff matchup as a wild card.
That might satisfy young, playoff-hungry teams like Buffalo or Detroit. For a Rangers team that is almost exclusively led by veterans, that’s no-man’s land. More pertinently, that would hardly justify keeping Panarin past the deadline and losing him for nothing in July.
It also begs the question of how invested the Rangers, a middling team, should be in Panarin, who will turn 34 next season. This is a team already committed to several aging players whose long-term contracts will not age well, including Mika Zibanejad, J.T. Miller, and Vincent Trocheck.
Yet this is already a team devoid of true offensive talent. It’s no shock that a team deploying Taylor Raddysh and Connor Sheary in the top-six at times this season is second-to-last in the NHL by goals-per-game. It would get categorically worse without Panarin, who tallied 120 points just two seasons ago.
Maybe the answer, then, is to blow it up. But how? Again, you have a number of aging players whose contracts are tough to move, even before considering trade protections; most prominently, Miller, who was just named captain a few months ago. Adam Fox (27) and Igor Shesterkin (29) are in their primes. Even if the Rangers decide to waste their primes — a catastrophic outcome in itself — that duo alone will ensure the Rangers are not bad enough to truly rebuild.
There are no simple answers for how the Rangers should proceed here. Every outcome is laden with traps.
That one tool at GM Chris Drury’s disposal is time. The Rangers have four months and 50 games between now and the March 6 NHL Trade Deadline. Based on the performance and how contract negotiations evolve in that timespan, perhaps the right path will become illuminated.