2026 Rangers Report Card: Will Borgen

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 Will Borgen, go here.

Expectations

As was the case for quite a few New York Rangers players who were part of the disastrously dysfunctional 2024-25 season, expectations for defenseman Will Borgen were tempered heading into 2025-26.

As the main returning asset in the Rangers' jettisoning of 2019 second overall pick Kaapo Kakko, Chris Drury and the New York brass were seemingly expecting significant contributions from Borgen. And, even without those, Drury was apparently so eager to have Borgen donning the blueshirt for the foreseeable future that he signed him to a five-year extension after the now-29-year-old had only played in 17 games on Broadway.

In 2024-25, the Rangers were a train wreck defensively. Borgen did nothing to stop the bleeding there. That season, he ranked second-to-last in expected goals-for percentage (44.71 percent) among Rangers defensemen with at least 250 five-on-five minutes played. So, the hope was that this would be a pretty low bar to clear, and that the team could eliminate at least some of the stench from that season.

A new coaching staff spearheaded by Mike Sullivan helped the club improve its defensive game for large swaths of the 2025-26 season. The problem, however, was that the Rangers could not score goals for similarly large swaths.

With Borgen's role as a mainstay on the blueline, and his decent skating ability, the Rangers needed him to contribute a bit more offense from the back end. While he hadn't ever demonstrated notable offensive abilities at the NHL level, his deployment was largely geared towards defense (30 percent offensive zone starts during his time in New York in 2024-25).

As I mentioned in my season preview for Borgen:

(Vladislav) Gavrikov's presence defensively should mean a slightly more even split of offensive and defensive zone starts for him and Fox as long as they are together. That should then lead to more balance for Borgen and his defensive partner, and as such, a slightly less difficult role for Borgen compared to the one he played last year.

The flip side, of course, is offense. Given Borgen's skating ability, the Rangers might have to look for him to spark more offense from the back end, which is not something he's done with any consistency at the NHL level.

Of course, I also mentioned that expecting any meaningful offense from Borgen would be difficult, but that I nevertheless looked for him to produce slightly better underlying results and ballpark counting stats of 6-8 goals and 15-20 assists.

Performance

75 GP | 5 G | 10 A | 15 PTS | +3 | 69 SOG | 41 PIM

Borgen's counting stats did not quite reach what I predicted for him, as he did not end up being much of an offensive play-driver for the team. The Rangers leaned on him fairly heavily, though, as he averaged 18:03 of total ice time per game across 75 contests. For a full NHL season, that represents his career high (he averaged 18:18 for the Rangers last season, but only 17:05 across the whole season because of his lower deployment with the Seattle Kraken).

While still paltry, Borgen did manage to clear last season's low bar in terms of on-ice expected goals-for percentage (xGF%) at five-on-five, with a mark of 46.83 percent. He played most of his minutes with either Matthew Robertson or Carson Soucy (before the latter was traded to the New York Islanders). He also saw similarly heavy defensive zone starts (66 percent at five-on-five) as he did the previous year.

Borgen's underlying on-ice numbers with Robertson were better than they were with Soucy. In 437 minutes with Robertson, Borgen's xGF% at five-on-five was basically breakeven (50.07 percent). The duo also helped limit high-danger chances, as New York owned 55.47 percent of the high-danger chance share while they were on the ice. In about 367 minutes with Soucy, these two figures were notably worse (43.77 percent and 42.42 percent, respectively).

So, part of Borgen's performance was dependent on his environment. Isolating his own performance paints a picture of someone who didn't make the Rangers demonstrably worse on defense, but also actively hindered relative to a team that already had plenty of trouble on that side of the puck:

Grades

Author Grade: C

Banter Consensus: C-

Final Evaluation

At the end of the day, Borgen did not have a particularly impressive season, but he didn't fall woefully short of expectations, either. The Rangers also thrust him into a top-four defenseman role for most of the season; some of that was necessitated with Adam Fox's time missed due to injuries, but he was typically deployed on the team's second pair regardless.

Borgen's defense was...fine, and actually even slightly decent when he was freed from the shackles of Carson Soucy. But he does nothing to drive offense, which is surely part of the reason why Chris Drury and Mike Sullivan talked about the need to add puck-movers on defense.

Of course, I'm not sure what Drury envisioned when he acquired Borgen, extended him quickly, and had him penciled into a second-pairing role. In some ways, Borgen is playing a bit out of his depth. This is a third-pair-caliber defenseman on a contending team. Nevertheless, his overall results were tepid, with his inability to drive play a glaring weakness.

The Rangers will continue to be mired in mediocrity or worse until they address their conspicuous lack of play drivers both up front and on the blueline.

Besides the HockeyViz visual, all advanced stats were obtained via Natural Stat Trick.