2026 Rangers Report Card: Alexis Lafrenière

This article is part of an ongoing series of Rangers Report Cards, grading the performance of each member of the 2025-26 New York Rangers. To view more report cards in this series, go here.

To read the Season Preview for Alexis Lafrenière, go here. 

This fall will mark six years since the New York Rangers used their first overall pick in the 2020 NHL Draft to select Alexis Lafrenière from Rimouski Oceanic. In those six seasons that followed the COVID-19 draft, the Rangers have gone from being a young team on the rise, to playoff contender, back to a team declaring a retool.

Last summer, we were all in agreement that this season was going to be a make-or-break one for Lafrenière’s future as a Ranger. While it took some time, as well as a trade that shipped Artemi Panarin out of town, Lafrenière has stepped up and proven himself a capable top-line winger for this Rangers team. The question is, was tying his career high a fluke, or was it a sign of more to come now that he’s officially the Rangers best winger?

Expectations

Coming off an incredibly underwhelming 45 point season last year, I would almost say that the expectations were more demands, in that Lafrenière needed to be significantly better this season. After signing that (at the time) massive seven-year extension, the time for Lafrenière to prove he was going to be a key part of the future for this Rangers team was here, and another underperforming season would have been seriously alarming. 

This quote from my season preview piece summed his expectations up perfectly:

In terms of an actual number, it’s no secret he needs to be better than last season, but simply hitting the 50 point mark isn’t going to qualify as a success anymore. Lafrenière needs to hit the 60-point mark for the first time in order for this season to truly be considered a success. At 23 years old, Lafrenière is far from his ceiling and is just now entering his prime window.  

Performance

82 GP | 24 G | 33 A | 57 PTS | -7 | 164 SOG | 20 PIM

He may have just missed that 60 point mark, but across the full 82 game season, Lafrenière tied his career-high point total with 57 points, assisted on more goal in a season than he has in prior years, and was just four goals behind the 28 he scored in 2024. Most of that comes as encouraging new,s but one of the things the Rangers need the most help with is indeed goalscoring. 

It’s no secret that the Rangers had another atrocious season, and despite a borderline satisfactory start to the year, scoring goals was never a strong suit for this group. Across the first three months of the season, Lafrenière had just 20 points to show for his efforts. Under normal circumstances 20 points in three months might not be so bad, but given that half the season was played in this stretch because of the Olympic break in February, there was real concern about the direction this player was headed. 

He picked things up in January with four goals and eight assists for a total of 12 points, as he started hot with three assists in the Winter Classic and finished the month with a pair of goals and an assist in a 6-5 loss to Pittsburgh. Then, of course, came February, which brought the biggest news surrounding the Rangers this season. Artemi Panarin was dealt to Los Angeles and the Rangers announced plans for a retool. With that came yet another huge opportunity for Lafrenière. 

I know we say it sort of tongue-in-cheek, but the fact of the matter is Alexis Lafrenière’s season drastically improved once Panarin was no longer on the team. That’s not a dig at Panarin, nor is it to suggest that anything about Panarin as a player or person was what was holding Lafrenière back. It's just a plain, statistical fact. Lafrenière scored in the first game that followed the Olympic break and in the month of March, collected 19 points in 16 games, nearly doubling his season point total in the span of a month. 

Now there are many factors that likely went into this. Obviously without Panarin, Lafrenière had a permanent spot not just on the team’s top line, but on the top power play unit. That's not to mention that so much hockey was played in the three months leading up to the Olympics. Everyone needed a bit of a reset and Lafrenière surely was not an exception. The Rangers were all but guaranteed to miss the playoffs for a second season in a row, meaning there was far less at stake compared to the start of the season.   

So, what do we take from that? On the one hand, it’s a bit alarming that it took Lafrenière three months and the trading of Panarin to get going. On the other, it’s encouraging to know that he formed chemistry with Gabe Perreault and Mika Zibanejad on that top line, which could be a promising sign for the team moving forward. Without Lafrenière’s efforts in March, the conversation surrounding him this summer would be incredibly bleak. The Rangers would surely be shopping him and probably wouldn’t get any respectable offers.

Could the Rangers still be shopping him this summer? There’s a case to be made that perhaps selling high on him is the right play, and I’m sure we’ll have conversations about that as we get into the dog days of summer. But as things currently stand, I’d say you should feel at the very least, more confident about Lafrenière’s future with the Rangers now than you did this time last season.  

Grades

Author's Grade: B-

Banter Consensus: B+

Final Evaluation

Based on what we saw from Lafrenière and the Rangers in the later parts of the season, there are justifiable reasons to be optimistic about him moving forward.

As things currently stand, Lafrenière is all but guaranteed a spot on the Rangers top line alongside Zibanejad and Perreault which, in reality, is the first time in his career we can say that about his place in the lineup. While he’s been given opportunities on the top line, it was never promised and it never stuck. And that's not to mention that the Rangers always had Panarin around, who despite often being listed on the second line, was always the team’s top forward.

Aside from Mika Zibanejad, that role now belongs to Lafrenière.