Brandon Pirri
Pirri was a guy that the analytics crowd had begged the Rangers to bring aboard for a few seasons. Through the preseason, he looked like a great fit. The Rangers used him on the power play and planted him in the right circle, where he was thriving at first.
When Mika Zibanejad got hurt in mid-November, Pirri, who was asked to play a bigger role, disappeared, not physically, but on the scoresheet.
Pirri didn’t give the Rangers any reason to keep him in their lineup other than the fact that they absolutely had to with all the injuries that their forward group had sustained. Once the team regained its health, Pirri was asked to sit in the press box and he never really escaped, for good reason.