Rangers should rebound, make playoffs next season but ‘don’t see them as contender’: Neil Smith tells Forever Blueshirts
Only four times in NHL history has a team won the Presidents’ Trophy one season, only to miss the Stanley Cup Playoffs the following season. Incredibly, the New York Rangers account for half of those instances.
They were the first team to accomplish this ignominious feat in 1992-93, and the most recent to do so this past season.
Each of those seasons went up in flames after beginning with such promise, much of it fueled by finishing with the best regular-season record in the NHL the year before. There are many similarities, including locker-room dissension, stunningly poor play on the ice and a furious fan base that often ushered their beloved Rangers off the ice at Madison Square Garden in a shower of boos.
According to Neil Smith, who was the general manager of that 1992-93 Rangers team, the biggest similarity was the inability of each coach to get his team back on track amid much dysfunction.
“The coach lost the team. That was the same for both teams,” Smith told Forever Blueshirts in a recent exclusive phone conversation.
Each of those Rangers squads was led by a veteran coach, not new to ironing out issues with his teams, but unable to do so in these instances. Roger Neilson, who ultimately coached 1,000 games for eight teams in the NHL and is 35th all-time with 460 coaching victories, was behind the Rangers bench in that fateful 1992-93 season. Peter Laviolette, who coached the Carolina Hurricanes to the Stanley Cup in 2006 and is seventh in NHL history with 846 wins, was the Rangers coach in 2024-25.
The circumstances were not exactly the same for these respected coaches. Neilson faced a player uprising led by captain Mark Messier, who believed the Rangers could not win a Stanley Cup championship with the quirky, defensive-minded coach. Laviolette was handed a mess — no pun intended — when his GM, Chris Drury, upset the players with his heavy-handed approach in handling the departures of several respected veterans, including captain Jacob Trouba.
“With our team, we had some injuries and had some problems in the locker room, and Roger wasn’t able to straighten those things out to get the team back going as it could. He wasn’t able to get ‘Mess’ and the rest of them to come to come back together as a team,” Smith explained. “So, I think that’s a similarity to Laviolette, whose team imploded and he wasn’t able to get them to come back together sufficiently to make the playoffs. That’s a similarity to our situation.”
When Smith mentions “some injuries,” he’s primarily referring to a pair of serious injuries sustained by Brian Leetch, who was coming off winning the Norris Trophy as the top NHL defenseman in 1991-92. Leetch missed significant time with a shoulder injury; and then just when it appeared he was hitting stride late in the season, he broke his ankle in an off-ice incident.
The 2024-25 Rangers didn’t have that same injury misfortune to blame their disappointing season on.
“The one thing from last year that startled me was there was so much self-inflicted wounds on that team,” Smith shared. “Right from the start of the summer with Trouba, then they expected him to come to training camp and still lead the team … [Barclay] Goodrow, they got rid of him in a way that was distasteful to the players. Whether you feel sorry for them or not, and I know they’re making all the money, the players are like ‘if they do that to him, who knows what they’ll do to me.’
“That was the worst stuff because that was all friendly fire. That put the team into a funk where during that slide (4-15-0 from mid-November through December), they were completely disillusioned. They looked like mummies out there.”
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Neil Smith ‘couldn’t do nothing’ after Rangers took massive step back in 1992-93
The Rangers were 34-39 with 11 ties in the 84-game schedule in 1992-93. They finished last in the six-team Patrick Division with 79 points, 10th out of 12 teams in the Eastern Conference.
Less than a year after winning the Presidents’ Trophy, the Rangers fired Neilson during the 1992-93 campaign. Ron Smith replaced Neilson and was unable to turn things around in 44 games as coach (15-22 with seven ties).
“You couldn’t do nothing (as general manager),” Smith explained. “Mess had the locker room. And if he said ‘we’re never going to win with this guy’ then we had no chance. When I realized that — and remember this is happening to me for the first time — I had no choice but to changes coaches. I certainly wasn’t getting rid of Mess. And it was tough, I was loyal to Roger … but I believed in Mess.”
Smith admitted he was “petrified” of his losing his job and understood the Rangers had to reverse course in 1993-94 or he was in big trouble. Smith hired Mike Keenan to coach the team shortly after that disastrous season ended, added Steve Larmer early next season to a star-studded roster, and the Rangers course corrected in a major way.
They again won the Presidents’ Trophy in 1993-94, made a flurry of key trades ahead of the deadline and went on to win the Stanley Cup that spring, their first championship in 54 years.
“I knew that I couldn’t have another year like ’92-’93, there was no way I could’ve survived that, that much disappointment,” Smith said. “That’s the worst thing you can do as a manager, and that’s disappoint people. Everybody thinks you’ve got a great team and you shit the bed. Look what’s going on in Toronto right now because everybody’s expectations were so high.”
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Neil Smith shares biggest difference between current Rangers and 1992-93 squad
Smith believes the biggest difference in these Rangers teams separated by three decades is the roster itself. That 1992-93 team was stocked with Stanley Cup winners and leaders like Messier, Kevin Lowe, Esa Tikkanen, and Jeff Beukeboom. Along with some great homegrown talent, that Rangers team, in Smith’s opinion, was built to bounce back in 1993-94.
“Even players like Brian Leetch. They had an edge to them,” the former GM remembered.
Not so with this current roster. The core is not made up of proven winners, and instead has a soft reputation, especially the deeper they’ve gone in prior postseason appearances. There’s not much of an “edge” with this group, one that was 39-36-7 and finished six points out of a playoff spot in the East.
That is what makes Smith skeptical about New York’s championship aspirations moving forward, even after Mike Sullivan — a two-time Stanley Cup winner — was hired as coach when Laviolette was fired.
“In some ways I really feel sorry for them because I don’t know how to dig yourself out of this,” Smith said. “I don’t know that Mike alone covers all the holes they have right now. They’re gonna have to do some work, find some guys who want to go north-south and not east-west.”
But that doesn’t mean Smith doesn’t see better days ahead for the Rangers. He just sees more limitations with this group than his team.
“I don’t think they’re going to miss the playoffs next year. I think Mike Sullivan with [Mika] Zibanejad and [Chris] Kreider and especially [Igor] Shesterkin, they’re a playoff team,” he explained. “How good can they be on top of being a playoff team? I don’t know how they go back to being a contending team with the roster the way it is. Will they make the playoffs? Yeah, I don’t know how you miss the playoffs with those players unless you have a year like this which is an aberration. But I don’t see them being a contender next year. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe they’ll do something in the summer that will make them a contender. I don’t see it.”
Smith rode the rollercoaster that Drury now finds himself sitting in the front seat. And he has some simple advice for the current Rangers GM.
“Chris can’t have another year like this year or I’m sure his zip code will change. You’ve got to learn from things. I learned from things every year I was doing it. So, learn from things and do better the next year.”
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