2025 Rangers Report Card: Artemi Panarin

This post is part of an ongoing series of Rangers Report Cards, grading the performance of each member of the 2024-25 New York Rangers. To view more report cards in this series, go here.

Expectations

Determining a successful season for Artemi Panarin is straightforward. It's as simple as leading the team in points and elevating those around him. To meet expectations, he needs to keep performing as the team's offensive superstar and give the Rangers a winning chance in every game he plays.

Last season, we witnessed both the best regular-season performance by the New York Rangers and Artemi Panarin, as both established new highs. It's not an impossible task for either the team or the player to replicate this performance again. However, if Panarin scored closer to his career average of just under 100 points, this would still be regarded as a successful campaign for the winger.

Performance

This report card will strictly focus on Panarin’s performance on the ice. Blueshirt Banter published a report on the allegations and settlement, which you can read here.

Panarin checked off all the boxes for a successful season in 2024-25. He led the team in points by a significant margin, 27 points ahead of the second-highest scorer, and his presence made his linemates dangerous on a nightly basis. In every game he skated in, there were plenty of opportunities for the Rangers to find the back of the net, even during what was a team-wide miserable season. However, the Rangers’ struggles of this past year also affected Panarin. Scoring 89 points in 80 games is nothing to scoff at, but it marked his lowest point total since joining the Rangers, excluding the COVID-19 season. It was also his lowest point-per-game average since coming New York City, and considering he scored 120 points just a year ago, it’s hard not to feel underwhelmed.

Historically, Panarin’s production has benefited from his wizardry on the power play, while the Rangers' mediocre 5v5 performance has been masked by their exceptional power play as a team. However, this past year finally saw those metrics return to reality. The team’s power play percentage ranked fifth worst in the NHL, with a dismal 17.6% success rate. Additionally, the number of power-play opportunities the team received was the lowest since Panarin joined the Rangers (again excluding the COVID-19 season). When a team isn’t performing well and consistently threatening to score, the opponent won’t feel as pressured to take penalties, which is a trend the team certainly experienced this season.

The Rangers’ woes with the extra man don’t entirely rest on Panarin’s shoulders, but he is one of their primary weapons, and the puck often filters through him. Like the chicken and the egg, it’s a complex subject to factually parse regarding what came first and where the root cause originated. Were the Rangers’ power play struggles largely due to Panarin, or did their power play struggles cause Panarin to struggle? There’s no wrong answer when dissecting this, and both points of view have merit.

Most of Panarin’s even strength ice time this season involved skating as part of the familiar trio that achieved tremendous success the previous year. Individually, Panarin posted a Corsi of 60.8 percent, and with Vincent Trocheck and Alexis Lafrenière, it was still a positive 55.7 CF%. While the production of all three players declined this season, their overall impact when together on the ice remained positive—a rare occurrence for the 2024-25 New York Rangers.

Even in a down year, Panarin led the team in goals with 37, which was his second-highest career total. In the 2023-24 campaign, something changed in Panarin’s game, as he began to shoot the puck more frequently, achieving a career high of 651 shot attempts. He carried that mentality into this past season, and although he averaged 19:41 of ice time—26 seconds less than the prior year—he still made 586 shot attempts, the second most in his career.

If we examine those numbers more closely, out of the 586 shot attempts, only 237 resulted in shots on goal. This rate of 40.44 percent is 6.1 percentage points lower than the previous year. Breaking down his shots on goal percentage since he became a Ranger, it has decreased every year, with the most significant drop occurring in the past season. Granted, the more you shoot the puck, the more shots you’ll miss. However, we only need to look at the 2023-24 season to see a higher shot volume and a superior on-goal percentage of 46.54 percent. An outrageous statistic to learn is that Panarin’s 349 shot attempts that didn’t reach the net exceed the total shot attempts of all other Rangers, except for Mika Zibanejad and Trocheck. Whether Panarin felt pressured to force shots in less-than-ideal situations due to the Rangers' struggles or if this was simply poor decision-making remains to be seen. Nonetheless, the fact is he shot the puck far more than anyone else on the team, yet almost 60 percent of his shots didn’t hit the net. 

Another indicator of an unusual year for the superstar winger was his +/- performance. These metrics should always be approached with a considerable degree of skepticism, but for the first time in his NHL career, Panarin found himself in the negative with a -9. This figure points to more than just his struggles on the power play. It also reflects the Rangers' overall snake-bitten season and Panarin’s slight decline in production at even strength since joining the team. Notably, many players and forwards on the roster managed to avoid a negative +/- rating, and Panarin’s numbers ranked as the third worst on the team.

Grades

Author Grade: B+
Banter Consensus: A-

Final Evaluation

Even in a down year littered with off-ice and locker room issues, Panarin still mostly delivered on the ice. Rangers fans have been spoiled by his career-best production and the Rangers' overall success, but the Breadman still scored in bunches. Even in most losses, Panarin found a way to get his name on the score sheet, and at the end of the day, that’s what he’s paid to do.