BOSTON — The Rangers aren’t fixed because J.T. Miller is here. The way his new team played on Saturday afternoon — not like the Rangers did during the December to forget, but nowhere near as tight as they played in their January recovery — showed one player is not going to solve this team’s problems.
GM Chris Drury made a big play adding Miller on Friday night but this is still a team sitting five points away from a playoff spot with 31 games to go, but the 6-3 loss to the Bruins demonstrated that Drury’s work is likely far from over in this season of change.
Miller, who arrived in Boston from Dallas at around 3 a.m., seems like he might be on the way to feeling the turmoil of the last couple seasons in Vancouver is finally behind him. He scored twice on Saturday and sounded like a man who has gotten to the end of a long and bumpy road after his Canucks conflict with Elias Pettersson spun out into the hockey world and forced Vancouver’s hand, culminating in Friday’s trade.
“I will say it was a team effort to find a different place,” Miller said. “And obviously a special place here in New York … Just for my family, outside of hockey there’s a thousand reasons to want to come here and then with the team as well, been one of the best teams in the league for a handful of years in a row. I’m excited to be part of getting them back in the playoff picture.”
There were a bunch of different threads that intertwined Saturday. The most poignant one came postgame: Vincent Trocheck, childhood friends and teammates with Miller in Pittsburgh, tearing up when asked what it means to be reunited in the NHL with “my best friend in the world.”
“This has been a pipe dream for 10 years in the making,” Trocheck said. “We came in the league around the same time, grew up together since we were nine years old, live about 500 yards from each other back in Pittsburgh, our kids are really close … We’ve been talking about it forever. It means a lot.”
Asked the last time either one of them scored a goal as teammates, Trocheck named off a couple stops along the way — the World Cup of Hockey in 2016, when they were together on the under-23 North American squad, as well as the 2013 World Junior tournament when they represented the U.S. together. But teammates for more than just a week or two?
“Pittsburgh Hornets,” Trocheck said. “Maybe around 2000, 20001.”
Peter Laviolette said he and the coaching staff gave Miller some system stuff early Saturday morning, but the advice was primarily this: “Don’t think too much. Play.”
And Laviolette made an intriguing change with Miller in the fold, putting Mika Zibanejad on the right side and Artemi Panarin on the left of Miller. Miller and Zibanejad ended up splitting faceoffs pretty evenly, Miller taking 11 and Zibanejad eight, so having two centers on the top line allowed for strong-side preferences and, in Zibanejad’s telling, a bit more aggressiveness up the ice.
“I think it frees you up a little bit offensively and defensively to know you have another center on your line,” said Zibanejad, who set up Miller’s second goal early in the third on the power play. “You’re more inclined to go (up the ice) because you have someone you can trust down low a little bit more. I think there were some good things, first game and we’ll see where it goes.”
J.T. MILLER’S SECOND GOAL OF THE GAME 🚨🚨
Quite the return for the former Ranger 😤 pic.twitter.com/mgdH7914KJ
— ESPN (@espn) February 1, 2025
Zibanejad said he was a rookie in Ottawa the last time he played wing for any length of time. Miller has pivoted between center and wing more recently, so there’s the potential for some interchange there. Laviolette felt that line generated plenty even if there were stretches where Miller’s lack of familiarity with the Rangers’ system — and lack of sleep — seemed to cause some chaos in the defensive zone.
And oh yes, that defensive zone. The Bruins came into this one four points up on the Rangers but coming off back-to-back pantsings by a combined 13-4 score. The hosts had the puck an awful lot, especially in a second period that looked all too much like a lot of periods the Rangers played in that 4-15-0 slide. Ryan Lindgren and Adam Fox had a genuinely rotten night, starting with Fox being pushed off a puck behind the Rangers net by pocket-sized Bruins youngster Matt Poitras, who fed David Pastrnak for the 2-1 Bruins goal with 2:51 to go in a fairly even first period.
The Rangers’ entire crew was MIA to start the second, with Charlie Coyle getting position on Lindgren to deflect a point shot past Igor Shesterkin. Laviolette called time out after that one but his team didn’t respond until the Rangers were down three in the third.
“I hated the start of it,” Laviolette said of the second. “Everybody’s first shift and then the goal. Tried to catch it with the timeout … There’s so many things that are preventable with what we’re doing. We’re not executing and getting it done. It’s not a volume thing, just a quality thing. We’re there. We need to execute something and we’re not executing.”
The reality of it all is here: The Rangers are still a long shot to make the playoffs, even with Miller in the middle. He has a chance to reset himself with the Rangers and change his perception around the league; he admitted that things got “ugly at the end” in Vancouver, with team president Jim Rutherford acknowledging that the rift between Miller and Pettersson was basically unfixable earlier this week, before the final iteration of a deal between the Canucks and Rangers was completed.
Trocheck’s voice catching as he spoke about Miller opens up another door, one that goes beyond whatever happens with the Rangers this season: This team has shifted its center. Jacob Trouba was the stoic leader for a few seasons, the unquestioned captain of a weird mix of long-serving vets (Chris Kreider, Zibanejad, Panarin) and highly touted young guys (Alexis Lafrenière, K’Andre Miller, Fox, Chytil, Kaapo Kakko). The leadership group was a business-like cadre who spoke louder with their play than with their mouths.
Drury took a hammer to that, for salary-cap reasons to be sure but also cultural reasons. The GM clearly wanted and still wants more brashness in the Rangers room. More sandpaper. Miller was a paper cut with lemon juice squeezed into it in Vancouver, a supremely talented player who demanded a lot of those around him. He and Trocheck are now the heart of this Ranger team, even though Miller just got here.
Trocheck spoke loud and clear on Saturday. The Rangers may not move up much the rest of this season, but in his telling, they’re not going back to the turmoil and defeat that reigned through December.
“I’m not going to let the negativity back into this locker room,” Trocheck said. “We’ve seen it. We’ve done it already this year. And then we add a piece like J.T., things are really looking up.”
(Photo: Brian Fluharty / Getty Images)
