1994 Cup-winning Rangers GM believes current team ‘cannot be retooled’
Neil Smith is the first to admit that he has no inside information about what the current New York Rangers regime has in store as part of their retool. Where once he was the architect of the Rangers most recent Stanley Cup winner in 1994, Smith now hosts the NHL Wraparound podcast, often offering analysis and critique from the outside.
But it’s fair to say that Smith, with his successful background as Rangers general manager for 11 seasons from 1989-2000, is more than an interested and casual observer. And he has plenty of questions and opinions about what he’s observing, watching current GM Chris Drury dismantle a team that reached the Eastern Conference Final twice in three seasons, and now call for a retool — not rebuild — amid back-to-back non-playoff seasons.
“They need to go about the plan of restocking the shelves in the Rangers store,” Smith told Forever Blueshirts on the most recent Rink Rap podcast. “I don’t understand the whole thing that they’ve started doing right from when that letter went out (in January), and you just did a letter a few years ago (2018). And the words they’re using, not a rebuild but a retool, is not true because this team cannot be retooled.
“If you tear something down, you can’t retool it, you’ve got to rebuild it. That’s semantics. But if that’s the direction they’re going then they’ve got to do it properly. They can’t do it half-assed. They can’t do it where ‘We’re going to do it but we’ve got to keep the fans happy.’ No! The worst thing you can do is do half of one and half of the other. It will not work. And they’ve got to decide how they’re going to do this.”
Since losing the best-of-7 conference final in six games to the Florida Panthers in the spring of 2024, Drury jettisoned — in one fashion or another — captain Jacob Trouba, forwards Artemi Panarin, Chris Kreider, Kaapo Kakko, Filip Chytil, Barclay Goodrow, Jimmy Vesey and Brennan Othmann, and defensemen K’Andre Miller, Ryan Lindgren, Erik Gustafsson and Zac Jones. Veteran backup goalie Jonathan Quick also retired.
That’s a ton of turnover for a pretty successful group. To be honest, many of the moves were borne from the need to generate more salary cap space. For years, the Rangers were pressed up against the cap’s ceiling, especially when it remained flat in the seasons following the coronavirus pandemic. But Drury also wanted to shake up a roster he believed wasn’t good enough to win the Stanley Cup.
Fair enough. But Smith doesn’t quite get trading Panarin to the Los Angeles Kings in February — even with his bloated $11 million cap hit.
“I know what my opinion is, but I’m like everyone else, I’m not there, I’m a Monday morning quarterback,” Smith explained. “And obviously when they gave away Panarin to L.A., they decided at that point they didn’t need a guy that gets a hundred points a year and, in my view, was probably the second-best free agent that the Rangers ever signed — the first being Adam Graves, and I’m being a little bit selfish there. But I don’t understand what they’re doing, I don’t understand the whole plan, if there is one.”
Former Rangers GM Neil Smith doesn’t ‘understand why they did some of these things’ in past few years
But that’s not all. For a team seeking to get younger and faster, why is J.T. Miller at the center of the current retool, Smith wondered? The Rangers re-acquired Miller in a trade with the Vancouver Canucks on Jan. 31, 2025, and named him captain ahead of the 2025-26 season. He’s now 33 years old and has four years remaining with an $8 million AAV on his contract. Yes, that’s $3 million less per season than Panarin, but the Breadman led the Rangers in scoring six straight season before being traded.
“J.T. Miller didn’t have a good reputation when he was with the Rangers. He continued not to have a good one with Vancouver because of the argument he had with [Elias Pettersson], and he had to take time off,” Smith stated. “I didn’t understand why they made him the captain, with all that history that went with him.”
But Smith didn’t stop there.
“And I gotta tell you, I didn’t understand the overwhelming need and desire to get (coach) Mike Sullivan, other than he’s from Boston and Drury’s from Boston,” he said. “Now, Mike Sullivan won two Stanley Cups, but he didn’t make the playoffs his last three seasons with Pittsburgh, then he comes to the Rangers and they get worse. The Rangers assistant coach Dan Muse goes to Pittsburgh, and Pittsburgh gets better. That’s just factual. That’s not my opinion on who’s good and who’s bad. That’s just the facts.”
Ouch! Well, OK, Smith does see a positive with having 11 picks in this year’s draft. That should help the long-term rebuild — because remember that Smith doesn’t see the Rangers in a quick-turnaround retool.
But even here there’s a note of caution.
“Eleven picks, you won’t get 11 NHL players out of that. If you’re really good, you’ll get four, and if you’re unbelievable, you’ll get five.”
Again, that’s the former GM delivering his unvarnished take. As was his final comment.
“So, there’s just a lot of things that’ve gone on there. I’m not being critical of them. My point is I don’t understand why they did some of these things, and I don’t have to understand because they don’t owe me an explanation. It’s just hard for me to dissect these things because I just don’t understand what the plan is and I don’t understand how they came to these decisions.”
