The Rangers didn’t exactly set the tone for the season very well when they traded one of their best defensemen purely because he was in a rough spot in his career. K’Andre Miller was a guy who was in line to be the Rangers next big defenseman, however to start the 2025/26 season, he was traded to Carolina where he is thriving as one of arguably the league's best offensive d-men, something the New York Rangers could really do with right now.
Since being traded to Carolina, Miller has kept on pace with his usual offensive production, with 22 total points on the season, notably with 18 assists, only six points behind the Rangers top point scoring defenseman in Adam Fox. As a whole this season, the Rangers haven’t really found themselves any luck at all, and with massive decision to make in the next coming months, the question beckons that whether the Miller trade was the beginning of the slow downfall of the Rangers, and why how they dealt with the situation didn’t exactly help them get off to a great start.
Trading Miller hasn’t really led to any massive advantages at all. They are lacking strong puck moving defenders, they are lacking size on the blue line, and to put it quite simply, they are missing what K’Andre Miller always brought every night. In terms of being the tip of the iceberg, the Miller trade seems to have been the first of what would turn out to be a string of potentially franchise altering trades, with murmurs of Alexis Lafreniere on the block, as well as offers being listened to for Mika Zibanejad and Artemi Panarin, Miller was just the start, and was not a great tone setter for the year.
For New York, trading Miller wasn’t really a great rebuilding move if that was what they were going for, and if anything only created more complications for the team. They traded away a guy who despite being slightly inconsistent was still a massive part of the team's success in recent years, and for the return, the trade didn’t make sense at all. The Rangers themselves didn’t say anything about rebuilding at the start of the season despite a lot of worries about the team's chemistry, but trading Miller without taking any other big sacrifices just wasn’t a good trade, and looking back, it was a strong message that things just weren’t clicking all the way around in New York.
Even if Miller just wanted to be traded, or he felt it was time to move on and rediscover his form, it is easy to see why the trade was the first step of the poor season New York have been met with. Losing offensive touch on the blue line has led to a lack of scoring. A lack of scoring has led to loss of chemistry and faith in management, and that loss of faith has caused what could be a total rebuild in New York. It may have seemed like a miniscule trade at the time, but the domino effect it has caused was enough to turn the franchise upside down.