The NBA's New York Knicks won a championship this past season, delivering joy for long-suffering New York sports fans. Will the Knicks' NBA title win increase the spotlight and pressure on the NHL's New York Rangers?
To put it mildly, it’s not hard to garner attention in New York City. You’ve got a constant barrage of sensory overload in the world’s biggest city, and you’ve got multiple teams across multiple pro sports battling to attract eyeballs daily.
But if you’re a winning franchise in the New York area, you can capture the love of New Yorkers for a long period of time. That’s now true of the NBA’s New York Knicks, who won their first championship since 1973 this past season.
But that distraction lasts only so long until it goes to the other end of the spectrum and the Knicks’ success winds up casting a harsh spotlight on the other New York City teams – including the NHL’s New York Rangers, who are coming off two consecutive seasons of finishing out of the Stanley Cup playoff picture.
The Rangers have made extensive roster changes this summer, trading veteran center Vincent Trocheck and defenseman Will Borgen. They also acquired former Utah Mammoth D-man Sean Durzi, ex-Vegas Golden Knights star right winger Pavel Dorofeyev, and former Vancouver Canucks blueliner Marcus Pettersson.
Still, while Dorofeyev comes in as one of the Rangers’ top players, and Pettersson and Durzi will bolster the Blueshirts’ defense corps, the Knicks’ championship season puts the Rangers in what could be a harsh spotlight in a compare-and-contrast way. And if Rangers GM Chris Drury doesn’t get his team thriving out of the gate next season, he could be on the unemployment line.
The Knicks put the lie to the notion that a team can’t win a championship in a mega-metropolis like Manhattan. Yes, there’s more media in New York City than almost anywhere else – but that’s a reflection of the millions who reside in or around that area, not anything innately terrible about the region. The Rangers have also won a Cup 33 years ago, so winning in NYC is doable for the Blueshirts.
Unfortunately, although it'll be hard for the Rangers not to improve on their 2025-26 record of 34-39-9 and their eighth-place finish in the Metropolitan Division, the rest of the division is also improving. A third straight season without any discernible progress for the Rangers is not only possible, but probable, and that won’t sit well with their fans.
Rather than embarking on a full rebuild, Drury has chosen to go the retool-on-the-fly route, and in many ways, it’s hard to blame him for it. With stars including Igor Shesterkin, Adam Fox, J.T. Miller and Dorofeyev now on board, the Rangers have a foundation - not long-term friendly - and that should excite and terrify fans.
It’s entirely likely the Rangers make a modest improvement in 2026-27 and miss the playoffs by two or three points. And if that were to be the case, another Rangers season would have been wasted.
The honeymoon period for the Knicks isn’t going to last long. Soon enough, New Yorkers will be moving into the ‘what have you done for me lately’ territory, if they haven’t gotten there already. That means the Rangers are going to be under the microscope as Drury and coach Mike Sullivan work furiously to steer the Blueshirts back into relevancy.
And if the Rangers don’t leapfrog some teams in the Metro, their failures – and the Knicks’ successes – will guarantee that the situation for the Rangers isn’t a status quo much longer.
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