3 New York Rangers Training Camp Storylines to Follow – The Hockey Writers – New York Rangers

With the 2026-27 NHL season around the corner, training camps are opening up around the league this week. The New York Rangers are going to be one of the more interesting teams to watch, as they have shaken up their roster in hopes of getting back to the playoffs. While it is easy to guess the majority of the players who will be on the opening-night roster, no lines are set in stone quite yet. Here, we’ll look at three interesting storylines to follow as training camp opens.

What Will The Top-Six Forward Group Look Like?

The Rangers’ top six forward group is going to look a lot different going into this season than it has in the past few. Gone are players such as Artemi Panarin and Vincent Trocheck, and while it won’t be easy to replace them, general manager Chris Drury has made moves to make the top six more interesting this season. He brought in Oliver Bjorkstrand and Eeli Tolvanen as free agents on one-year deals, and he made a massive trade with the Vegas Golden Knights to acquire Pavel Dorofeyev. Adding them to players like J.T. Miller and Mika Zibanejad already makes the Rangers a better-looking team on paper than they were at the end of last season.

With Miller and Zibanejad being the top two centers, the question is which players fill out the four winger spots on those top two lines. It’s safe to assume that Dorofeyev, along with Alexis Lafreniere and Gabe Perreault, are going to take up three of those spots. So, it seems they will have multiple players fighting it out for one spot in the top six. Players such as Bjorkstrand, Tolvanen, and Will Cuylle are the likely candidates to earn that spot, but which one of them will it be?

Who Earns the Sixth Spot on Defense?

One area Drury focused on changing the most was the defense. Outside of Adam Fox and Vladislav Gavrikov, the defense was very underwhelming in all areas last season. In three separate trades, Drury traded away Will Borgen and brought in Sean Durzi and Marcus Pettersson to be a new-look second pairing behind Fox and Gavrikov. Along with Braden Schneider, they will make up five of the six defensemen the Rangers will dress on opening night. The question is who will take the sixth and final spot?

The only hole the Rangers have in their defense is the left side of the third pair next to Schneider. It seems most likely that Matthew Robertson is going to get the first chance in that role, but there are other players to keep an eye on, including Drew Fortescue and Alberts Šmits. Fortescue played with the team at the end of last season and looked well in limited minutes, while Smits was drafted fifth overall in June and looks to be NHL-ready.

Will Any Younger Players Stand Out?

One fun part of training camp for all teams is seeing which young players stand out the most and earn a spot on the opening-night roser. Last season, it was Noah Laba who stood out unexpectedly, and he became the Rangers’ third-line center for the majority of the season. The Rangers have lots of younger players who are looking to fight for a roster spot, and it will make training camp and preseason very interesting to watch. Some names to look out for are Adam Sykora, Jaroslav Chmelar, Liam Greentree, and Cole Beaudoin.

Sykora and Chmelar played on the team to end last season and brought speed and energy that made the games they played in exciting to watch. Greentree and Beaudoin are the Rangers’ two top forward prospects, brought in via the Panarin and Trocheck trades, respectively. While they are likely to start in the American Hockey League, they are going to put up a fight and will try to make the team out of training camp. There will be other young players to watch, both at forward and on defense, but these names are the top ones to keep an eye out for.

This time of year is always exciting for hockey fans, as the start of training camp means a new season is around the corner. The Rangers are looking to put the bad of the last two seasons behind them and move forward with a younger — and hopefully better — team. They are looking to get back the playoffs, but the way the team will look on opening night is not set in stone.