New York Rangers: Four players that need to put 2018 in the past

It takes hundreds of thousands of hours to make it as a player in the National Hockey League. These four New York Rangers need to forget about the 8760 hours of 2018 and get things back on track.

Pretending that it’s easy to make the National Hockey League is silly. It takes a lifetime of hard work starting from the time a child can walk to even have a chance of playing hockey in high school let alone the best league on the planet. That’s why it’s so frustrating to watch players that have been successful in the past struggle.

The New York Rangers didn’t go into the 2017-2018 season expecting to finish eighth in the Metropolitan Division. In fact, following a summer in which the team signed New Rochelle native Kevin Shattenkirk, the Rangers were expected to make a jump and improve upon the previous season in which it was one of the two Eastern Conference wild-card teams.

Such a drastic drop off from expectation to actual results means that someone or in this case, several players failed to play up to the level they were expected to. Every single year players will struggle and have a regressive season worse than their career average as that’s just part of the business in the NHL.

These four players had outright abysmal 2018s that need to be put behind them so the team can continue to move forward. In fact, the Rangers are counting on some of these players going forward, so improvement is imperative to future team success.