Don't Judge Chris Drury for What He Was Never Asked To Do Until Now

Let's jump in the Wayback Machine with Mr. Peabody and Sherman for a moment.

The date is May 5, 2021. The Letter is three years in the rearview mirror. Two nights prior, at 7:40 of the second period in a game against the Washington Capitals, Tom Wilson infamously rag-dolled Artemi Panarin. NHL Player Safety, as is too frequently their wont, would look the other way on supplemental discipline. One day prior, the Rangers released a statement taking shots at the league for their failure to do so.

Then came the shocking move: Team President John Davidson and General Manger Jeff Gorton were suddenly and summarily fired, and Assistant GM Chris Drury was elevated to assume both roles. Reporting for ESPN, Emily Kaplan called the dual firings "a stunning move considering the Rangers are on the tail end of a rebuild, one they completed ahead of schedule."

That last bit is the important part for what I want to discuss about Chris Drury's tenure running the New York Rangers.

Let's remember where the Rangers were at the time Drury took over. Gone already in the immediate wake of The Letter were captain Ryan McDonagh, J.T. Miller, Rick Nash, Kevin Hayes, and Mats Zuccarello. The months that followed saw Jimmy Vesey and Vladislav Namestnikov shipped out. Brady Skjei and Marc Staal would follow not long after. The contracts of Henrik Lundqvist, Dan Girardi, and Kevin Shattenkirk were bought out.

The major work of rebuilding the New York Rangers after The Letter was already complete, the timeline expedited by landing the marquee free agent of the 2019 offseason in Artemi Panarin, just a little more than a year after they announced they were blowing it all up.

When Drury took over, the Rangers' roster already had Panarin, Mika Zibanejad, Ryan Strome, Pavel Buchnevich, Chris Kreider, and Jacob Trouba, with Kreider and Panarin the oldest of that set at age 29. There was also an influx of youth joining the team in Alexis Lafrenière, Kaapo Kakko, Adam Fox, Filip Chytil, Ryan Lindgren, and K'Andre Miller—all 22-years old or younger. Prospects Vitali Kravtsov and Libor Hájek had yet to bust out. And then, of course, there was Prince Igor Shesterkin inheriting the crown of King Henrik Lundqvist.

The new core of the New York Rangers was already set. Now that we have the benefit of hindsight, we can have mixed feelings about this core, or worse. But you had little reason to have those feelings at that time. The new direction of the Rangers was already firmly established by the time that Drury took the reins.

I recap all of this to remind you of exactly what Chris Drury inherited when Gorton and JD were fired. One of the most frequent lines of criticism I've heard aimed at Drury is that he didn't immediately begin wheeling and dealing in a major way. As a critique of Drury, I think this is wrong on two counts.

First, Drury did attempt to swing a major deal, pursuing Jack Eichel when it was clear his time in Buffalo was coming to an end. In the name of taking that big swing came Drury's original sin: the trade of Pavel Buchnevich to St. Louis for Sammy Blais and a second round draft pick. As the story goes, assuming he was about to land a big fish in Eichel, Drury moved Buchnevich to clear roster and salary cap space. And then, because the Pegula's decided they didn't want to ever deal with the Rangers, or because of some billboard or some combination of these things, there was no deal for Eichel to be had. It was a terrible blunder by Drury, and one for which he deserves much opprobrium.

But second, and perhaps more importantly, Drury didn't proceed to blow up the Rangers roster to reshape it in his image because that just wasn't what Rangers owner Jim Dolan would have been asking of him to do at that time.

In the following season, under new head coach Gerard Gallant, the rebuilt, new-look New York Rangers would arrive earlier than expected. Heading into the 2021-2022 postseason my thinking (and I believe the thinking of a good number of Rangers fans) was, "if they can make some waves and maybe win their first round series, that's great, and anything beyond that is purely playing with house money." Ultimately they'd take that run all the way to the Eastern Conference Final, jumping out to a 2-0 lead in their match up against the Tampa Bay Lightning before falling in six games.

That run was facilitated, in part, by the smart marginal moves Drury made at the deadline: adding Frank Vatrano, Tyler Motte, and Andrew Copp. The following year's trade deadline saw Drury add bigger names, even if they weren't necessarily big deals: Vadimir Tarasenko and Niko Mikkola for Sammy Blais and Hunter Skinner, and Patrick Kane for prospects and picks. Those Rangers would, as you know, go on to fall to the Devils in seven games.

Then last year's deadline looked more like the one from two years prior. Feeling the cost too prohibitive (read: Gabe Perrault) for the deadline's big get—Jake Guentzel—Drury added role players in Alex Wennberg and Jack Roslovic. With the benefit of hindsight, you can argue Drury should have made the move for Guentzel, but it's far from certain he would have been able to push the Rangers past a much better Florida Panthers team.

That brings us, mostly, to the present. I'll remind you that Drury wanted to make major alterations to the core of this Rangers team in the offseason—a clear recognition on his part that the roster, as currently constructed, wasn't good enough. A lot of other NHL general managers might have looked at a team that was two wins away from a Stanley Cup Final twice in three years and concluded tinkering on the margins was all that was necessary. Drury came to a different, and more accurate, conclusion. As I've argued on the podcast, after the Buchnevich trade, Drury's biggest mistake was not realizing that the only way out of the Jacob Trouba situation was through and pulling out all the stops to get a deal done over the summer.

Fault him for failing to follow through there when he should have, but it was clear he recognized major moves were necessary. It was time to reshape this team in his image, an image best represented by new reacquisition J.T. Miller.

But to suggest he should have started blowing things up the moment he took over is to engage in revisionist history. Jacob Trouba and Ryan Lindgren's decline hadn't really started yet. The idea of moving the players most people want gone now after this debacle of a season—namely, Mika Zibanejad and Chris Kreider—would have seen absurd at the time, with the two of them coming off two of the best (albeit, abbreviated) seasons of their careers.

Now, the situation is different. Now, the current state of the New York Rangers calls for major alterations. Many have already happened. Gone are Barclay Goodrow, Jacob Trouba, Kaapo Kakko, Filip Chytil, Victor Mancini, Ryan Lindgren, and Jimmy Vesey. In are Urho Vaakanainen, Will Borgen, Juuso Parssinen, Calvin de Haan, and—most importantly—J.T. Miller. By this summer, if not by Friday's trade deadline, more big names like Zibanejad, Kreider, and K'Andre Miller could be gone.

For the first time as Rangers GM, Chris Drury is both empowered and has the justification for completely reshaping this team to be exactly the way he wants it to be.

It's this work for which you should judge him.

But you can't judge him for what he was never, until now, asked to do.