2025 Rangers Report Card: Matt Rempe

Expectations

Jiminy Crickets, I’m not entirely sure what people expected from Matt Rempe coming into this season. The second-year player burst onto the scene last season as a fun, high-energy, fourth line winger whose massive size and mean-spirited hits were completely contradicted by his exuberance, kindness, and wide-eyed “kid living the dream” approach. A lot of digital ink was spilled over a guy who averaged under six minutes over his 17 games played. Some fans loved the enthusiasm. Others thought he was bad at hockey and had no place being in the NHL. Those arguments continued through the offseason and into the start of this season (spoiler alert: they’re still going on). Rempe updated fans on the fact that he was working on his skating and shooting with Chris Kreider, but all anyone seemed to care about was the fact that he also was training with former NHL enforcer Georges Laraque.

Performance

Season Total: 42 GP, 3 G, 5 A, 67 PIM, one big-ole suspension

I think any evaluation of Rempe’s performance has to be broken into two parts: pre-suspension and post-suspension.

Pre-suspension Matt Rempe was used primarily as a sideshow. He would get a shift here and a shift there to go hit people or to participate (badly) in pre-arranged fights with pugilists from other teams in what were often futile attempts to inject energy into the Rangers' game. He would then spend the rest of the game serving as a cheerleader from the bench or trying to not use up all the hot water in the locker room because he had been ejected from the contest early. He was in and out of the lineup, dressing for only two of the club’s first seven contests in favor of Jonny Brodzinski (all hail, the great Jonny Brodzinski), and then was shuttled between MSG and Hartford. 

When the season started to turn to poo and Laviolette was looking for energy, Rempe was brought back up. While there were rare occasions where Rempe showed flashes of just how much of a matchup nightmare he could be—using his size and strength to completely dominate Noah Hanafin in a game against the Golden Knights and using his speed to draw penalties against bigger defenders like Lian Bischel of the Stars—his role was defined as, “go hit something.” As a result, despite any flashes of possible talent, Rempe was cultivating a reputation as a dirty player. And that reputation, coupled with the fact that he was a 'Mats Zucarrello' taller than everyone else, led to him being singled out for penalties. Some definitely were deserved, but some that were just based on the fact that when a tank hits a Prius, it’s going to look bad. 

Avery had a great writeup about the issues surrounding Rempe back in October and Eric had one a couple of months later in December.

Eric’s piece came out just after Rempe received an eight game suspension for this hit. The really crappy thing about it was that—as Eric noted—it came in a game where we saw all the good that Rempe can do. 

Following the suspension, Rempe was assigned to Hartford to make room for Arthur Kaliyev, whom the Rangers claimed off waivers because Chris Drury thought he could help, but Peter Laviolette decided he should never play. Rempe was recalled a day later. After the suspension (and subsequent conversations with officials within the NHL’s (mostly useless) Department of Player Safety, Rempe returned to the Rangers with an understanding that he was not going to get another chance.

When he returned to the ice he was still being deployed in the same sideshow way he had been prior, but his style was remarkably different. It was ugly. You had a player who was clearly being asked to go out there and throw his body around (recklessly) but who also understood that if he wanted his NHL career to continue, he couldn’t do what he was being asked to do. At the same time, he also didn’t want to be demoted to Hartford (again) for not doing what he was told to do by the coaches, so he tried to find a middle ground. Instead he looked about as comfortable as a baby colt taking its first unsteady steps. He was pulling up on hits, he was tentative going into corners, he was, in short, ineffective in every part of the game. 

Eventually though, he started pulling it together, he figured out what he should and shouldn’t do as opposed to worrying about what he could and couldn’t do. Rempe credited the 18 games he spent in Hartford as being important to showing him that there are ways he could use his size to be an effective player and not just a goon. You could again see the flashes where he could present matchup issues against smaller players by using his freakish size and strength to disrupt players and use his better than expected speed to get around defenders who were more his size. He only engaged in a couple of fights after the suspension, and they were legitimate ones where he was sticking up for teammates, not pre-staged crap. He seemed to, when given the opportunity, shift from sideshow into legitimate 4th line disruptor—playing more the style that he was assigned to play in Hartford.

One thing that was consistent about Rempe was that on a team that too often didn’t come to play every night, Rempe was never like that. Whether you liked his style of play or not, you could always count on him giving everything he had for as long as Coach Dumbass would let him play.

Grades

Author Grade: B+
Banter Consensus: C+

Final Evaluation

If you can’t root for a guy like Rempe I don’t know who you can root for. Since being undrafted into juniors, all he has done is work. He worked himself into a draft prospect, then from there into a player who was intriguing enough to get signed, then into a legitimate AHL player, then into a guy worthy of a call-up to the NHL.

Rempe has said he’s going to spend this summer working again on all aspects of his game, everything from skating to tip drills. I’ve often said that I desperately wish that more talented guys like Vitali Kravtsov had Matt Rempe’s work ethic or that Rempe had their skill. 

A restricted free agent, I would be shocked if The Rempire State Building is not back next year to compete for fourth line minutes. The hope is that Mike Sullivan finds a better use of Rempe than as a sideshow.