A little more than five weeks since New York Rangers general manager Chris Drury traded the team’s top scorer this season, Artemi Panarin, to the Los Angeles Kings for prospect Liam Greentree and a draft pick, the Rangers are the hottest team in the NHL. The Broadway Blueshirts have won six of their last nine games since the NHL returned from the Olympic break.
Panarin may have been the best playmaker to ever put on a Rangers sweater. Sorry, fans of Brian Leetch, Mark Messier or Jaromir Jagr. The Breadman scored 607 points in 482 games as a Ranger and some big goals, including a game seven, overtime winner in the first round of the playoffs in 2022. However, all of that is in the past and the question is, are the Rangers’ recent results proving that they are better off without ‘Hartemi’?
Reason #1: Panarin didn’t body check
Panarin was on pace for 89 points this season with the Rangers, which would have been the most on the team (current top scorer Mika Zibanejad is on pace for 79). That production would have helped but can his flaws be overlooked?
As much as we loved the Breadman, he didn’t backcheck, hardly forechecked and hardly ever played the body, as evidenced by the eight hits he had in 52 games with the Rangers this season.
One reason why Panarin doesn’t body check, is that at 176 pounds– 25 pounds lighter than the average NHL player (201 pounds)—Panarin is frankly unable to body check effectively as he is in the lower third in terms of weight in the league.
Lighter skaters: Logan Stankoven (165), Jared Spurgeon (166), Nikolaj Ehlers (168), Bobby Brink (169), Pius Suter (172), Gavin Brindley (173), Martin Pospisil (173), Clayton Keller (175), Jack Hughes (175), Jesper Bratt (175).
Is it common for undersized stars in the NHL to have a physical ‘edge’ to their game? No, but even Mitch Marner, who is 180 pounds, has more than double the number of hits that Panarin has had this year. So, Panarin is an outlier as far as not having any ‘sand-paper’ in his game, which is one reason the Rangers will be better off without him when they eventually become playoff contenders again after the retool.
Reason #2: Rangers Youth Taking on ‘More Prominent Roles’
Alexis Lafreniere, the Rangers’ former first-overall pick, is beginning to spread his wings now that Panarin is gone. The 23-year-old had long been Panarin’s linemate on the Rangers second forward line centered by Vincent Trocheck. Since Panarin played his final game as a Ranger on January 26, Lafreniere has 15 points in 13 games.
Because of this recent hot streak, Lafreniere is on pace to finish the season with 23 goals, which would not be a career high but would be an accomplishment based on how he started the season. He’s also taken on a much bigger role on the team and has been moved to the first line where he has been playing right wing next to Mika Zibanejad and Gabriel Perreault.
Perreault, the rookie whom the Rangers picked 23rd overall in 2023, has seen second power play unit time in recent weeks in addition to being bumped up to the first forward line. Since Panarin played his last game as a Ranger on January 26, Perreault has scored 10 points in 13 games. Prior to this hot streak, he had eight points in 20 games this season.
It’s clear that Panarin’s departure has had a positive effect on the Rangers’ two recent former first round picks by allowing them to take on more responsibility and more playing time, specifically on the power play, which Panarin was a big part of.
At the media availability held the morning of March 16, 2026, Rangers head coach Mike Sullivan was asked if Panarin’s departure in early February has allowed some younger players to gain their footing. He didn’t really answer the question but what he did say illustrated part of the problem with the finer points of Panarin’s game.
We still have some offensive people that are going to act on their instincts and go off the grid a little bit, maybe not quite as much as a guy like Bread [Panarin], but we still have offensive people who have the ability to produce or create out there just through their own offensive instincts and we’re trying to allow for that as well. It’s an important element of trying to coach offense.
Sullivan also described what Lafreniere has done to raise his game, recently.
He’s always been a player whose gifted offensively…Where Laf has improved more recently is in the down-low game, the grind game…just hanging onto pucks down low, challenging people one-on-one, his willingness to get inside, get to the net front. And I’ve had a number of conversations with him this year about getting inside more. If you want to score 30 goals in this league, you’re not getting 30 from the perimeter, you’re not getting 30 that end up on ESPN every night. You got to get a fair amount of them that are deflections, tips, rebounds that go off your skate and in because you’re fighting for the blue paint. That’s a lot of the game where Laf has made a commitment there to embracing that element of the game and I think he’s getting rewarded for it.
Reason #3: It takes Pressure off the Coaching Staff
I don’t want to say that Panarin was a difficult player to coach, but on this Rangers team, his skill-set as a one-dimensional offensive juggernaut was so different from the other players on this team that it made it hard for the coaching staff to find the right linemates for him.
The evidence of this is that after primarily putting Panarin on the second line centered by Vincent Trocheck with Alexis Lafreniere on the opposite wing, he tried Panarin at left wing on a line with Mika Zibanejad centering and Will Cuylle on the opposite wing. Those are some very different linemates and this probably indicates that there was some confusion as to where Panarin would fit in best. One of the main reasons why there was confusion was that Panarin is not a physical player. So putting him with two more physical players in Zibanejad and Cuylle was deemed advantageous.
That being said, there is no evidence that Panarin didn’t get along with his teammates or coaches during his seven years with the Rangers or was difficult to coach. In fact, during press conferences, his teammates often spoke glowingly of him.
We will get to see what his former teammates and the Ranger fans think of him tonight when the Rangers host the Kings at the Garden at 7 p.m.
