2026 Rangers Report Card: Taylor Raddysh

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 Taylor Raddysh, go here. 

The New York Rangers have somewhat of a history of having the "wrong" player of a certain name.

They had Marcel Hossa, when the one you really wanted to have was Marian. They had Julien Gauthier, when you'd much rather have Cutter. They had Vitali Kravtsov, when you'd rather have literally anyone else plucked from Russia named "Kravtsov." They had Joby Messier and Barry Richter, but at least they had Mark and Mike, too.

The Rangers continued that tradition this past season when they signed Taylor Raddysh. The Raddysh you'd much rather have this year was clearly Taylor's brother, Darren. As a matter of fact, the Rangers did have Darren once before trading him to the Tampa Bay Lightning, where this year in 73 games he posted an insanely unexpected 22 goals and 70 points. (In the Rangers' defense, Darren didn't give them much in the way of signals he had this in him; his best season in Hartford was 2019-20, where he posted 28 points in 62 games.)

This isn't to say the signing of Taylor Raddysh was bad. He was fine. But he was clearly signed for the team the Rangers were hoping they would be, and proved not to make a lot of sense for the team that they actually were.

Expectations

In my Season Preview for Taylor Raddysh, I highlighted analysis from Japers' Rink about his time the prior season on the Washington Capitals. The general thrust of it was: Raddysh was a defensively responsible winger who could kill penalties and who had the second best offensive season of his career. But, despite all that, his finishing left a lot to be desired.

His best offensive season was in his first full season in Chicago after being traded to the Blackhawks in the steal-of-a-deal where Tampa acquired Brandon Hagel. It now seems obvious that Raddysh's 20 goals and 37 points on that very, very bad Blackhawks team was a single-season anomaly—much as I assume the 22 goal and 70 point explosion his brother had this year with the Lightning. (Someone is going to pay insane money for Darren this summer, and I'm fairly certainly they're going to quickly regret it when the reversion to the mean comes, but I digress.)

From the Season Preview:

We can be pretty sure that we'll all be spared the Taylor Raddysh power play experience that Capitals fans were subjected to last year. Although he barely sniffed the penalty kill in Washington, he did spend 113 minutes on the PK the year before in Chicago. So there's at least a decent possibility that Raddysh will see some time on the kill with the Rangers.

...and...

Pencil him in for 10 goals and 15 assists for 25 points. This would be roughly around his career average, and fairly similar to what he posted playing 4th line minutes last year in Washington. He some benefit from some increased ice time, but the other parts of the Rangers third line for this year are far from settled.

Performance

68 GP | 9 G | 10 A | 19 PTS | +5 | 53 SOG | 12 PIM

I was not far off when it comes to counting stats. The goals were there (including a hat trick in that infuriating OT loss to the San Jose Sharks early on in the season), and he wasn't far off on the assists. I don't put much stock in +/- as a meaningful statistic, but he finished tied with Adam Fox for the team best at +5 while playing 13 more games. And, as predicted, he spent some time on the penalty kill—the seventh most of any forward.

I though he'd be fine. And, he was fine. Defensively responsible, but not much in the way of offense.

The problem is that description is all too apt for too many players on the Rangers.

Grades

Author's Grade: C

Banter Consensus: C-

Final Evaluation

Raddysh's grade here was, I think, hurt by the curve. He was average, so in that sense, a "C" is a perfectly fine grade for him. On a better team, that average performance might have been enough to earn him a "B," grading on the curve. But because the Rangers were collectively so awful, it drags him down some.

In one sense, it's a surprise that Raddysh is still on the Rangers. A defensively-responsible depth winger who can kill penalties and occasionally chip in some secondary scoring is the kind of player you can typically get some playoff-bound team to overpay for at the trade deadline. The reason Raddysh is still on the Rangers is, not dissimilar from the case of Carson Soucy, an episode of Chris Drury trying to do right by one of his players, in spite of his reputation.

On March 3—just three days before the NHL trad deadline—Taylor and Darren's father, Dwayne Allan Raddysh, passed away at 64 after a battle with stage-four pancreatic cancer. Raddysh had taken a leave from the Rangers to be with his father before he passed. And, given the close proximity to the trade deadline, Drury opted not to ship Raddysh out in the midst of the anguish he'd just experienced. He certainly could have, but this was the right thing to do.

Raddysh was one year left on his 2-year, $3 million contract with the Rangers. I'll be quite surprised if he finishes that out in New York.