The Rangers Blew Up Their Roster. Nobody Agrees What’s Left.

Reading the projections against each other

There’s a version of every Rangers offseason recap that reads like a press release: names in boxes, arrows pointing up, optimism baked in before a single puck drops. NHL.com’s projected lineup graphic — Zibanejad centering the top line, Fox and Gavrikov anchoring the blue line, Shesterkin in net — is that version. Clean, confident, official-looking.

It’s also one of at least four different educated guesses currently circulating about what this team looks like on opening night, and the gaps between them tell you more about this roster than the consensus does.

Chris Drury didn’t tinker this summer. He gutted and rebuilt. Pavel Dorofeyev came over from Vegas in a trade that cost New York three draft picks, including a top-10-protected 2028 first-rounder. Sean Durzi arrived as part of the return for Vincent Trocheck. Marcus Pettersson came from Vancouver, Joonas Korpisalo from Boston. That’s four new bodies stepping into meaningful roles on a team that finished with the worst record in the Eastern Conference last season. When a roster turns over that much, “projected lineup” stops being a formality and starts being a genuine argument.

Where everyone agrees

Strip out the noise, and there’s a stable core across every projection: Zibanejad, Lafrenière, and Perreault holding down the top of the forward group in some arrangement; Fox-Gavrikov as the first pair; Shesterkin as the unquestioned No. 1. That much isn’t in dispute anywhere.

The larger disagreement lives in three places — the bottom-six forward mix, the third defense pairing, and the backup goaltender battle — and each one is worth pulling apart on its own, because each has a different kind of uncertainty behind it.

The fourth line is a five-man competition for two jobs

NHL.com’s graphic slots Adam Sýkora and Jaroslav Chmelař on the wings next to Joe Veleno at fourth-line center. That’s a defensible pick. It’s also just one outcome of a competition that, as of late July, still had five real candidates for two roster spots: Sýkora, Chmelař, Taylor Raddysh, Matt Rempe, and Juuso Pärssinen. Multiple outlets tracking the battle have Raddysh and Chmelař as the likelier tandem, with Rempe projected as the extra forward rather than a lineup regular to start the year.

Veleno himself is a known quantity — he signed as a free agent specifically to fill the 4C void — but everything around him is still training-camp business. Treat any specific wing pairing here as a projection, not a roster.

The third pair isn’t the open question it looked like a month ago

This is where it’s worth updating the record. As of early July, Braden Schneider’s third-pair spot looked genuinely unstable — he’d filed for salary arbitration after his qualifying offer, and persistent trade rumors had circulated around him for close to a year. That uncertainty is largely resolved now. The Rangers and Schneider avoided arbitration entirely, agreeing to a one-year, $5.5 million bridge deal in mid-July, well before his scheduled July 29 hearing. General manager Chris Drury had already signaled the team wasn’t finding trade interest at the price it wanted, and the new deal — a raise from his previous $2.2 million AAV — points toward Schneider opening the season in New York rather than getting moved.

What’s still unsettled is who plays next to him. Matthew Robertson is the projection most outlets lean toward, but 2026 fifth-overall pick Alberts Šmits is squarely in that conversation too, with the organization reportedly viewing him as potentially NHL-ready. Names like Urho Vaakanainen, Drew Fortescue, Scott Morrow, Vincent Iorio, and Dennis Cholowski round out the depth chart but look unlikely to break into the regular rotation. So: the third pairing’s right side is close to locked. The left side is not.

The backup goalie battle is the one storyline every source treats as genuinely open

NHL.com’s graphic lists Shesterkin and Korpisalo as the two goalies, which flattens a real competition into a settled depth chart. Dylan Garand, the organization’s top goaltending prospect, put up a 2-0-1 record with a .948 save percentage in a late-season NHL cameo last year — the kind of performance that gets a 24-year-old real consideration. The Rangers still went out and traded for Korpisalo, a veteran who posted a 28-14-9 record in Boston last season and is entering year four of a five-year deal.

The financial logic points toward Korpisalo opening the year as backup — that’s the argument most projections lean on. But it’s explicitly being framed as a training camp and preseason battle, not a foregone conclusion, and it’s the one position group where the “official” projected lineup and the actual competition are most clearly out of sync.

The whole roster still runs through one health question

Every projection, regardless of how it fills out the bottom six or the third pair, is built on the same assumption: Igor Shesterkin stays upright. He missed 13 games last season with a lower-body injury, and the Rangers went 2-11 in his absence — a stretch that effectively ended their playoff hopes and dropped them into last place in the East. Shesterkin turns 31 in December and remains, by every account, in his prime. But “in his prime” and “durable” aren’t the same claim, and last season is recent enough that nobody’s projection accounts for what happens if it repeats.

Everything else here — the new top-four defense, the retooled bottom six, the goalie competition — is downstream of that one variable holding.

The bottom line

NHL.com’s graphic isn’t wrong, exactly. It’s a snapshot of the most probable outcome as of the day it was published, presented with more certainty than training camp usually allows. The honest version of this lineup has real dispersion in three spots — fourth-line wings, third-pair left side, backup goalie — and one health question sitting underneath the entire projection. That’s not a concern about the graphic. It’s just what “way too early” roster projections are supposed to look like in late summer, before camp settles anything.

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Sourcing note: Lineup projections and depth-chart details drawn from The Hockey Writers, Yardbarker, Forever Blueshirts, Blueshirt Banter, Blue Line Station, Last Word on Sports, and SI/Rangers OnSI reporting through late July 2026. Schneider contract terms confirmed via multiple outlets reporting the July 13 signing. All figures reflect reporting as of early August 2026; training camp battles (backup goalie, fourth-line wings, third-pair left side) remain unresolved and should be re-verified closer to the season opener.