Mike Sullivan issues candid admission about NY Rangers amid dramatic NHL season

It doesn’t take a genius to understand just how deflating the 2025-26 NHL season has been for Mike Sullivan and the New York Rangers. They say every cloud has a silver lining, but finding one among the pitch-black clouds hanging over the Manhattan skyline is a tough task at the moment.

Sullivan has seemingly grown tired of sounding like a broken record with his postgame statements for the team. With the Rangers dragging a 2-8-0 form over their last 10 outings, the ‘hope core’ type messages are simply not doing it anymore for New York.

Although Sullivan is staying positive as he made a bold promise to help the Rangers amid the chaos, the head coach also dropped a very honest message about the Rangers. More precisely, about the costly penalties the team is taking. Indeed, the penalties help explain the current form, but limiting the reasons to that alone would be a massive understatement.

“We’re taking too many penalties, and they’re just lack of discipline penalties,” Sullivan admitted, via The New York Post. “Stick infractions in the offensive zone. It taxes some of our top players because we use them in the kill. I just think we’ve got to be better in certain areas of our game to give ourselves a better chance to get on the right side of the score.”

Mike Sullivan at UBS Arena in Elmont, New York.

The numbers behind Rangers’ penalties

Though Sullivan highlighted the amount of penalties taken by the Rangers, the numbers paint a different picture. New York ranks 25th in the NHL for penalty minutes (PIM) with a total of 426. The Boston Bruins currently lead the league in that department with a grand total of 752 PIMs. For the Broadway Blueshirts, it’s not as much about the quantity as it’s about the quality. And right now, they are taking bad-looking penalties.

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Regardless, the penalty kill hasn’t been a liability, either. Posting a 79.5 PK%, New York ranks 15th in the league. The penalty-killing unit is not great nor disastrous, it’s quite literally average. Sometimes being caught right in the middle is the worst scenario, though. Where the Rangers currently stand, making tweaks to improve can lead to an opposite effect.

Thus, many teams and coaches are found stranded in no man’s land. That may be exactly where Sullivan and the Rangers stand. As a result, the two-time Stanley Cup champion head coach he orders his team to be disciplined, even though the numbers suggest the Blueshirts are the seventh-most disciplined team in the league.