2026 Rangers Report Card: The Coaching Staff

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 the Coaching Staff, go here.

Chris Drury's biggest move, arguably, happened last summer and it happened behind the bench.

Mike Sullivan, widely considered one of the top-three coaches in the NHL, finally teamed up with longtime friend and Team USA mafia brother-in-arms Chris Drury this year in New York.

Sullivan brought along a familiar face in former New York Rangers head coach David Quinn, but aside from that there was a level of excitement and anticipation about the Rangers having an actual head coach behind the bench for the first time in a long time.

Remember, names like Alain Vigneault, Quinn, Gerard Gallant, and Peter "the quitter" Laviolette graced these halls before Sullivan. Things were bleak. But now there was a light at the end of the tunnel.

Expectations

In truth this is sort of hard to judge.

I think there were fair expectations that Sullivan was going to bring a level of accountability, structure, and prospect/youth nurturing we hadn't seen in decades. There was an expectation that Sullivan's system was going to help secure the Rangers' defense and create a layered forechecking system that was going to allow the Rangers to attack the puck and play an aggressive form of in your face hockey. As Eric said on a podcast at the start of the year, the Rangers wanted to play with a "junkyard dog" mentality.

Performance

I think this is hard.

Sullivan did a lot of the things he promised to do. I think he was super influential in the growth we saw from Gabe Perreault—and eventually Alexis Lafrenière. I continue to question his usage and motives with Scott Morrow, but that's for another time and place.

The problem with judging Sullivan's performance is ... well ... the team he had access to.

I think Sullivan tried to have a team that aggressively forechecked, that attacked in layered waves, and made life difficult for the opposition every night. Occasionally, the Rangers even played that type of hockey!

The issue all year was consistency, and that theme reared its head across the season for long periods of time. Not so unlike 2024-25, the Rangers got into a rut early and never managed to work their way out of it. They had a historically bad offensive performance through November, setting a record for the number of consecutive shutouts at home, and never seemed to find their footing.

To be fair, J.T. Miller was hurt before the season began and never looked like himself—outside of the Olympics, sort of. Vincent Trocheck was hurt early as well, Adam Fox missed a fair amount of time, and even Igor Shesterkin sat out injured. The Rangers were battered and bruised all year.

Add that into a roster that was already devoid of talent, and, well, you get whatever that was. The Rangers were a mess pretty much from the jump and it just sort of continued through the season. I have a hard time blaming Sullivan for that.

Where I can blame Sullivan is his ice time distribution throughout the year.

Conor Sheary was a 16-minute player for about 80 percent of the games he played in. There's no reason for that to be the case, especially down the stretch when the Rangers were miles outside of playoff contention. Same thing for meaningful ice time for guys like Urho Vaakanainen, especially when it came at the expense of waiver pickup Vincent Iorio and Morrow.

I also think removing Perreault from the top power play unit to insert a returning Miller was an enormous mistake that made no one happy but Miller. It also made the team worse. While we're griping, I think that not running Morrow as the PP1 QB when Fox was out was an egregious error that once again hurt the team in the short and long term.

Eric will tell you—as he argued with me—that coaches are wired to win no matter what. I think that might be the case, but for a guy who is one year into a seven-year contract with the team, there's a longer term outlook here Sullivan ignored. And it was foolish to do so.

It's also worth noting, however, Sullivan was not afraid to get dirty and wield the reputation and ethos he has earned through his career when he suspended Mika Zibanejad for missing a meeting – from a game he likely really wanted to play.

Grade

Author's Grade: B

Banter Consensus: B-

Final Evaluation

The grade, technically, is for all the coaches, but when I gave it I was giving it about Sullivan. The assistant coaches, their responsibilities, and their roles are his call and thus fall on his head. And again, this roster wasn't really good enough for me to make any glaring opinions about the assistant coaches.

Sullivan did a lot of what we wanted him to, and some of what we didn't. Hopefully as the summer rolls on he can have more of a say in the team he wants to build.