Surging Rangers will face plenty of distractions again with trade deadline coming

The Rangers have put the noise and distractions behind them. It has been about hockey and only about hockey since the calendar flipped to 2025.

And it has been pretty successful hockey at that with the Blueshirts extending their point streak to seven games (5-0-2) with Saturday’s 1-0 shootout victory over Columbus at the Garden in a playoff-implication match through which Igor Shesterkin did not give a single puck to the Jackets.

But there is more noise on the horizon and, if the Rangers allow it, there will be more distractions which this team will have to navigate. It won’t be unique to the Blueshirts in advance of the March 7 trade deadline but the chatter has already — and only — just begun.

In any dialect, J.T. Miller’s body language in Vancouver can be translated to a cry to get the winger back to New York, where the 15th-overall selection of the 2011 draft spent the first five-plus seasons of his career before going to Tampa Bay in the purge of 2018.