2025 Rangers Report Card: Adam Fox

You're probably familiar with the tale of The Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs. There are multiple versions of it, most famously in Aesop's Fables, but the version most relevant for our purposes goes like this: A farmer discovers a goose that lays eggs made of pure gold, but is limited to laying one per day. The man and his wife surmise that the goose must contain a giant lump of gold inside it, so they decide to kill the goose to get the store of gold. When they execute the bird and open it up, they discover that the goose is no different from any of their other hens, with no jackpot of gold inside it. With the goose dead, now instead of getting a gold egg every day, they have nothing.

Most modern interpretations of this story are as a lesson about greed. The farmer and his wife want more gold than the goose can produce daily, and their greed costs them everything. That's a perfectly good interpretation, to be sure. But I think the bigger lesson is about gratitude. Instead of having gratitude for the gift that has been given them, they want more. So they launch foolhardily into the unknown, kill the great thing they have, and end up empty-handed.

Why do I bring this up here? Well, because we're talking about Adam Fox, a player drafted by the Calgary Flames who forced his way, via the Carolina Hurricanes, to the team he cheered for as a child. Fox was named an All Star and won the Norris Trophy as the league's best defenseman in only his second season with the Rangers, and finished second in Norris balloting two seasons later. And yet, it seems like most of this season, precious few were grateful for the elite defenseman they have.

Expectations

The expectations for the Rangers' number one defenseman this season were just that: to be the Rangers number one defenseman. Fox plays top minutes against some of the league's toughest competition, quarterbacks the top power play unit, and kills penalties. In the 2023-24 season, Fox posted 17 goals and 56 assists for 73 points—just one fewer than the career-high 74 points in 2021-22, and in six fewer games.

For the 2024-25 season—one in which the Rangers were expecting to be serious Stanley Cup contenders after falling in the Eastern Conference Final two of the previous three seasons—expectations were for Fox to continue being the team's top defenseman, hopefully improve his counting stats, and help lead the team on a deep playoff run.

Performance

The best laid plans, amirite?

As I said numerous times on the podcast, part of untangling the utter mess of this disastrous season for the Rangers is determining which players' failures created this disasterous season, and which players were victims of the season itself. To me, Fox lands in the latter category.

Let's start up front with this: Yes, I believe Fox is still dealing with the lingering effects of the knee injury he suffered in a knee-on-knee collision with Sebastian Aho of the Carolina Hurricanes—something that seems to be a recurring theme with Aho—and that was aggravated in a similar collision with Nick Jensen of the Washington Capitals in the first round of the 2023-24 playoffs. The Rangers, like the rest of the NHL, are cagey with injuries, but Fox was believed to have suffered an MCL sprain. Just to what extent he was still battling that injury this past season, we'll probably never know. That he hasn't needed surgery is a good sign (though the Braden Schneider prolonged injury issue gives pause there) and hopefully the extended time off this summer will put that injury completely behind him.

Aside from any lingering effects of the knee injury and the eight games he lost this year to an upper-body injury, Fox was very good. His counting stats were the lowest of the last four seasons, but were far from outrageously bad, especially against the depressed backdrop of this supremely sub-par season for pretty much everyone wearing a Blueshirt.

But, and stretching back now to the story of the Golden Goose in the introduction of this Report Card, tell that to ungrateful crabs of the fanbase.

A lot of that carping starts with his skating. No, Adam Fox is not the best or fastest skater in the league. Yes, both Quinn Hughes and Cale Makar are more dynamic skaters than him. There's no denying that. But, nonetheless, Fox continues to put up comparable analytic numbers to both of those players, as Tom Urtz, Jr. went to great length to point out in a piece back in February arguing that Fox should get Norris Trophy consideration this season. What Fox lacks for in raw, pure foot speed he makes up for in well-above-average hockey IQ.

The other most frequent complaint was about Fox's defensive play. On this, three thoughts. First, my approach to analytics is that they should help you understand what you're seeing on the ice in the games. Can you point to individual instances in games where Fox got beat defensively? Of course. But you can always find individual bad plays from every player, including the great ones. They're only human, after all. That alone is not dispositive of the indictment against Fox's defensive play. Analytics are just what they are, amalgams of available metrics that measure something so you can compare it to other things measured similarly. If you think what you're seeing on the ice doesn't match what they numbers are saying there are two routes you can take: The first is to dive deeper into the analytic metric to see if you think it's missing something and not communicating what it's supposed to. The second is to ask yourself if there's something you might be missing when you're watching. If you want to know how fallible our eye witness memory is, read up on the unreliability of eye witness testimony in trials sometime.

Which bring us to point two: Adam Fox has been dragging around the other half of his defensive pairing for the past several seasons. Fox played the most minutes this season paired with Ryan Lindgren, his long-term defensive partner. The results this year were predictably not good, because unfortunately neither is Ryan Lindgren. In 611:31 minutes played together, Fox-Lindgren had a 53.03 CF% and a 50.02 xGF%, according to NaturalStatTrick. Now, you might be saying to yourself that isn't as bad as you thought it would be. Well, credit Adam Fox for buoying Lindgren to that extent.

After Lindgren was sent packing to the Colorado Avalanche, Fox played most frequently with Carson Soucy, who the Rangers acquired from the Vancouver Canucks at the trade deadline. To quote from Tom Dianora's Soucy Report Card:

Soucy and Fox were a fine pairing together, but again, that was all Fox. Perhaps Soucy deserves a modicum of credit for not massively messing things up when he was with Fox, as the pair had a positive combined impact. In any event, Soucy himself couldn’t move the needle positively without an elite partner. Heck, he couldn’t even tread water in that situation.

It bears mentioning that Fox started the season playing with K'Andre Miller while Ryan Lindgren was recovering from an injury sustained in the preseason. They were quite good together. In 314:46 minutes played on the same tandem, they produced a 64.72 xGF%, according to NaturalStatTrick. But, of course, once Lindgren was healthy he was once again stapled to Fox. Because reasons.

Third and finally, there's the issue of the man-on-man defensive system that Peter Laviolette deployed. That system was such a disaster that I find it nearly impossible to tell where the performance of the individual players start and the failings of that defensive system end. There are plenty of reasons to look forward to next season, and top among them is a new defensive structure that hopefully better maximizes the potential of the players in it, including Fox and whoever Sullivan decides he's best paired with.

Grades

Author Grade: A-

Banter Consensus: A-

Final Evaluation

Adam Fox's 2024-25 season was not as good as his previous three seasons were. But that doesn't mean it was bad, especially when understood in the context of the dumpster fire that was the Rangers this season. Fox is among the top defensemen in the National Hockey League. Any general manager of any other team would leap at the opportunity to add him to their roster, even with the "flaws" in his game. This is a guy who wanted to play for the Rangers and forced his way here to do so.

We should be grateful for what we have in Fox instead of wishing he was someone else (who the Rangers never had a chance of acquiring) or making ludicrous suggestions like trading him for a grab bag of players and picks that would be less than the sum of Fox himself. Remember the lesson of the golden goose.