Are the New York Rangers for real? No, but they could be.

The job of a hockey analytics writer requires doing a lot of things: Parsing data, identifying trends, communicating them clearly, creating engaging visualizations, etc. 

To put it more bluntly, oftentimes it can be reduced to fulfilling two roles: being a hype-man or being a wet blanket. Sometimes it’s discovering a player like Devon Toews, Andrew Mangiapane or Jordan Kyrou and sounding the alarm that this is an elite talent in the making that should not be ignored. 

But other times it’s trying to deflate the excitement around a player or team riding unsustainable results whose fans are unknowingly en route to a crushing disappointment. Such is the job. 

The latter task isn’t an especially fun one, because the satisfaction of confirming that the laws of gravity do in fact still apply can’t compare to the fury of a fanbase whose success has been delegitimized by some guy and his fancy numbers. But it’s a necessary one if we want to actually understand how the game works.

So let’s talk about the Rangers.