On 25 November, the New York Rangers had a 12-6-1 record. With 25 points, the Rangers sat in fourth place in the Metropolitan Division, holding a playoff wildcard place. The team had just completed a swing through the Pacific Division, where they won against San Jose and Seattle before dropping two in a row to Calgary and Edmonton. As the Rangers headed back to New York City from their western road trip, there were rumblings of trouble, for at some point during that week, Rangers general manager Chris Drury had sent a memo to all NHL teams in which he said he was open to a trade to shake up his roster. And he made clear that the changes could be big. The two names he floated to the other teams were Jacob Trouba, the team’s captain, and Chris Kreider, a Ranger since 2011.

We’ll never know whether the Rangers were always at that point on the cusp of a terrible month, or if it was the memo that spun the team into a downward spiral. The vibes have certainly been off ever since. But it’s also worth noting that, even at the time, while the team’s overall record was a winning one, most agreed that the Rangers didn’t look like the team that had come within just two wins of the Stanley Cup final a few months prior. Their winning record concealed the fact that many of those victories had come against weak teams. And one loss – a 6-1 drubbing from the lowly Buffalo Sabres in early November – saw the team’s all-star goaltender, Igor Shesterkin, give up five goals on just 12 shots. Behind the scenes, there were hints of things amiss, including an awkward episode in the offseason, when the team gave forward Barclay Goodrow only 15 minutes’ warning before making him available for a trade.

In any event, Drury meant what he said in the memo. In early December, the Rangers offloaded Trouba to Anaheim, uncomfortably pushing him out by essentially threatening to place him on waivers if he didn’t accept a trade. (Trouba was in the final year of his seven-year, $56m contract which included a no-move clause to 15 teams of his choice; putting him on waivers would have meant that all teams had the right to claim him.) The next day, the Rangers signed Shesterkin to a new eight-year, $92m deal, making him the highest-paid goaltender in the league. But a week later, Shesterkin allowed three goals in just under three minutes against the Los Angeles Kings and was pulled from the game.

Four days after that, the Rangers traded Kaapo Kakko to Seattle. A players-only meeting followed that deal, at which players reportedly vented about Drury – though forward Vincent Trocheck made a point of calling media to assure everyone that wasn’t the case. A day later, Drury held a team meeting of his own, amid what the New York Post, apparently unjokingly, described as having “a light-hearted aura … that has been missing lately”. The Rangers won that night, but lost their next game against Carolina, bringing them to .500 on the season. Rangers’ head coach Peter Laviolette then benched Kreider for the next game, a 5-0 loss to the New Jersey Devils. The Christmas break solved nothing. In their first game back, the Rangers lost 6-2 to Tampa Bay. Shesterkin again let in five goals before getting pulled again, solidifying a season-long trend. But he’s not alone. Forward Mika Zibanejad, who notched 26 goals and 46 points last season, is now emblematic of the Rangers’ equally anemic offense. Zibanejad has just six goals in 35 games and ended December a brutal minus-21 on the season.

All told, between Drury’s November trade memo to the NHL’s general managers and the end of 2024, the Rangers went 4-13-0, finishing the year in last place in the Metropolitan with just 33 points – only eight more than they had pre-memo – and now a full five spots back of a wildcard playoff berth. What now?

Like any team with a long history, the Rangers are no strangers to bad seasons, even total implosions. Back in 2004, Glen Sather was at the helm of a similar (though not identical) meltdown by a Rangers team loaded with talent, including Mark Messier, Eric Lindros, Brian Leetch, Jaromir Jagr and Aleksei Kovalev. That New York team had been floundering for a while, and longtime manager Sather had a year prior stepped in to coach as well. As 2004 dawned, the Rangers were 15-13-5, and coming off an “undisciplined, mistake-filled” 5-4 loss to St Louis, as the New York Times reported. Sather, unlike Drury and Laviolette, wasn’t prepared to bench anyone for their errors. He told the Times he preferred a different approach – “talking and coaxing players through their slumps,” as the paper described it – including with Lindros, who rebounded from a scoring slump. “Benching somebody for a couple of shifts is fine,” Sather told the paper that January. “Taking a guy out of the lineup is another whole ball of wax. … When you do bench someone, there’s no coming back from that,” Sather said. “I would rather trade a guy than bench him.”

Which he did, eventually – in spades. Through January that year, the Rangers won just four games, tied two more, but lost the other 11. In the end, the difference between Sather’s approach and Drury’s current one is that Drury seems more prepared to act quickly. That March, Sather cleaned house, offloading a dozen players, including Leetch (who’d been with the Rangers for 17 years) and Kovalev, along with others like Martin Rucinsky, Vladimir Malakhov, Jussi Markkanen and Petr Nedved. “We are obviously rebuilding,” Sather told reporters, admitting the obvious. “To see it unfold the way it has and see [Leetch] traded in the end, I guess it’s bottomed out,” Messier acknowledged.

It happens. Sometimes teams fall apart. It’s possible that the 2024-25 Rangers haven’t quite bottomed out, but it feels like they’re close. Barring an unprecedented run to start the new year, New York may yet again be facing a painful rebuild. If anything, Drury seems, however poorly, to be hastening that effort. And for what it’s worth, the old Rangers did it. Amid the fallout from Sather’s house-cleaning that March, the Rangers held “high hopes for the Swedish goaltender Henrik Lundqvist”, the Times noted. Rangers fans will have to hope that history repeats in good ways as well as bad.