Two Wins, Four Injuries, and a Rotation That Cannot Hold
The 6–1 demolition of the Islanders on September 25 looked like confirmation. The defensive reconstruction worked, the depth signings fit, the new-regime blueprint was translating. Enjoy it — because Taylor Raddysh is currently playing nearly 15 minutes a night, and that number is the actual story of this Rangers start.
Raddysh's ice time has climbed to 14.8 minutes per game over the last ten games, up from a baseline of roughly 11 minutes. That is a 35% surge, and it did not happen because Mike Sullivan suddenly discovered Raddysh was underutilized. It happened because Matt Rempe is on injured reserve since late July, because Aidan Thompson is out, because Vincent Iorio is out, because Adam Sykora is out. Four forwards unavailable, and the coaching staff is redistributing the missing minutes in real time to whoever is standing. Raddysh is standing. So he plays 15 minutes. That is not a deployment philosophy — that is a fire drill.
The Rempe side of the ledger makes the picture stranger still. His ice time has shrunk to 8 minutes per game, down nearly a third from where it sat before the injury cascade. Whether that reflects ongoing recovery or a deliberate recalibration of his role, the effect is the same: the Rangers are getting almost nothing from a player they presumably need healthy to execute the physical, defensive identity they spent the offseason building. Two players, opposite trajectories, both pointing at the same structural problem.
What makes this genuinely worrying is the context the 2-0 start is sitting inside. Last season's Rangers finished 36–50, and the season before that was a collapse from a 65-win baseline. The front office rebuilt around defensive tightening and affordable depth — Durzi for puck movement, Dorofeyev for offensive upside, Veleno for a fourth-line center role at $1.2 million. That is a sensible architecture. But the entire bet on depth scoring depends on having depth. Right now, the Rangers are running a depth group that is simultaneously shorthanded and overextended, and the players absorbing the extra load are exactly the kind of players who break down when overloaded.
Artemi Panarin at 1.09 points per game remains the foundation — he was the one constant through last season's wreckage too, posting 49 points in 45 games while the roster around him cratered. Mika Zibanejad contributed 42 points in 48 games. The top of the lineup is real. But the reason last year's team finished where it did was not that Panarin stopped producing; it was that the structure beneath him dissolved. The Rangers went 3–11 in January last season when injuries and lineup chaos compounded. The current injury list is shorter, but it is early September, and it is already forcing a depth forward to play like a middle-six regular.
My read is this: the 2-0 record is genuine, and the defensive framework Sullivan and Drury assembled deserves credit. But a roster that cannot absorb four simultaneous forward absences without immediately spiking a role player's workload by 35% has no margin. The moment Raddysh's legs go, or the moment a fifth name gets added to that injury list, the rotation stops being improvised and starts being impossible. Two wins is not a buffer. It is barely a head start.