Rangers returned to the ‘familiar’ to fix unsatisfactory defense

Peter Laviolette inherited well over 2,500 minutes of analytics as it pertained to each of the Rangers’ top-two defense pairings when the now second-year bench boss first took over the team ahead of the 2023-24 season. 

To be more precise, there was 3,370:49 of TOI for Ryan Lindgren and Adam Fox from 2019-’23, and 2,929:33 TOI for K’Andre Miller and Jacob Trouba from 2020-’23. 

Laviolette said he was in no way married to the lineup configuration — both forwards and defensemen — that had dominated two of his predecessors’ tenures in New York. 

And yet, that’s exactly what he deployed in his first game behind the Rangers bench on Oct. 12, 2023 in Buffalo — not only sticking to the Chris Kreider-Mika Zibanejad duo on the top line and the framework of the forward group, but also keeping the recurring top five defensemen in the same alignment as they had been. 

They’ve stayed that way for a majority of Laviolette’s 109 games at the helm of the Rangers, who were forced to start the 2024-25 season with a different defensive unit due to Ryan Lindgren opening the season on injured reserve. 

So when it became apparent that the lineup had grown stale in recent days, Laviolette may have thrown the forward lines blueprint out the window, but he turned back to the defense pairs that have served as a foundation for this Rangers team for years.