Rangers are already utilizing their depth to aid stars

Management made a conscious offseason effort to add depth and reduce the burden on top Rangers players.President and general manager Chris Drury targeted not only skaters adept on special teams, but also emphasized adding versatile players who could play on both wings and both sides on defense, and move up and down the lineup.Join Post Sports+ for exciting subscriber-only features, including real-time texting with Mollie Walker about the inside buzz on the Rangers.

Now the actual deployment is in the hands of head coach Mike Sullivan.And through the first three games of the 2026-27 season, there is evidence of the organization’s intentions.“My hope is we can take some of those [penalty-killing] minutes away from J.T.[Miller] and Mika [Zibanejad],” Sullivan said during training camp.

“I think if we do, we’ll have the ability to get a better version of them, just because of managing workloads.I think we leaned on those guys a lot.

And my experience has been, if you put your top guys in — if they’re first over the boards in every situation — power play, penalty kill, top six — it adds up to north of 20 minutes every single night.That’s just my experience.

J.T.and Mika are excellent penalty killers, it’s not to say they won’t be a part of it.

They certainly are.“But we’d like to lessen their load there a little bit there.With some of the guys I think we have in the bottom six now, we should be able to do that.”The Rangers have been shorthanded an NHL-leading 10 times so far this season.

To put it in perspective, the Panthers, with Brady and Matthew Tkachuk, are the only other team that has also been shorthanded that many times entering Saturday’s slate of NHL games.Miller, whose average ice time of 16:24 ranks third among Rangers forwards, has logged just 32 seconds on the penalty kill.As for Adam Fox, the Rangers No.

1 defenseman has seen only 49 seconds of shorthanded time.It’s obvious that Sullivan is especially wary of...