Media Bytes: It's Drury's Show, Sherwood, Panarin
James Dolan’s patience, Chris Drury’s runway, and the slow march toward acceptance—plus trade buzz around Kiefer Sherwood and renewed smoke around Artemi Panarin. It's all in this week's Media Bytes.
Welcome back to Media Bytes, a weekly column from Blueshirt Banter. Every Sunday, we’ll help you start the week right with a quick catch-up on the latest stories and developments around the New York Rangers and the broader NHL media landscape.
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Jokes On You
1. On Tuesday's edition of Blueshirts Breakaway, Ryan Mead and Greg Kaplan dug into James Dolan's rare showing on Craig Carton's WFAN show. No bombshells, no sweeping revelations—just another public confirmation of what most reasonable people already suspected. But Kaplan used the moment to send a pointed message to one very online—one might say Extremely Online™—corner of Rangers fandom: the #FireDrury outrage brigade isn't operating in reality.
"It's really just a reminder that the Chris Drury clown-face Twitter pictures—you’re living in a reality that's not on this planet," Kaplan said. "I'm not saying you should be happy with Chris Drury. I'm not saying you should be thrilled that James Dolan backs his general manager. But going on Twitter everyday to say 'fire Chris Drury' is not accomplishing anything. It does nothing."
He's not wrong. And he's not the only one saying it. Blueshirt Banter's own Eric Kohn has been hammering this point for some time now.
Whatever frustrations you carry about the direction of the Rangers, whatever conclusions you’ve drawn about Chris Drury’s body of work, whatever sweeping overhaul you believe would rescue the franchise, none of it matters if it requires pretending the current power structure doesn’t exist. James Dolan still implicitly trusts Chris Drury, and by extension, Mike Sullivan. Any line of thinking that tries to bypass that fact is dead on arrival. Full stop.
What Dolan's interview lacked in substance, it more than made up for in forcing a certain subsection of Rangers fans to confront their circumstances. To borrow from the immortal wisdom of Burgess Meredith in Grumpier Old Men: "You can wish in one hand and crap in the other and see which gets filled first."
There's scant evidence to believe this will change any time soon. This is the ecosystem the Rangers operate in. And it's the ecosystem fans must navigate alongside them. Refusal to do so is your choice. But it's a choice indistinguishable from shouting into the void.
