Five games into the 2026-2027 season, the New York Rangers and the Vegas Golden Knights sit atop the NHL standings, both at 4-1 with eight points. The Rangers lead the Metropolitan Division- a remarkable start for a team that went 34-39-9 last season, finished last in the Metropolitan Division, and opened last season by losing its first seven games at Madison Square Garden. Very few people outside New York, including hockeyfreeforall.com’s own preseason model, expected such a strong start. The Rangers were projected to finish sixth in the Metropolitan Division, with 41% playoff odds.

It’s only been five games, a small sample by any measure. Still, the question is whether this early success is built on something real or on a few lucky bounces, and that’s exactly what AB is designed to help answer. Using a new game-by-game version of AB, this article examines what’s driving the Rangers’ winning streak, which players are leading it, and whether the underlying numbers suggest this team can stay among the league’s best all season.

Methodology: Game-by-Game AB and Live Projections

Until now, AB Scores on this website have been calculated over full seasons. For 2026-2027, hockeyfreeforall.com has built a version that scores every skater in every game. Each night, the system pulls the NHL box score and play-by-play and applies the same AB formula used for full seasons.

Because a single game produces a very small number, game AB is easiest to read on a full-season scale. The 84 GP pace simply multiplies a player’s average game AB by 84, the length of the new regular season schedule. Replacement level is measured the same way, as the average game AB of skaters outside each team’s top 12 forwards and top six defensemen by ice time. Through the first week of the season, that works out to a replacement pace of +0.42 for forwards and +0.68 for defensemen.

The live player cards then turn those early numbers into a full-season projection. Rather than trusting five games, the projection blends a player’s current pace with his recent AB history, and the weight on the current season grows with every game he plays. The current season’s weight is calculated as games played divided by games played plus 25. After five games, that means this season’s results make up about 17% of a player’s projection (5 divided by 30), while his recent history still makes up the other 83%. By 25 games, the two count equally. That keeps a hot week from being mistaken for a breakout, while still letting a real breakout show up as the season goes on.

Team AB and the Early Standings

The first reason for optimism is that the Rangers’ record isn’t outpacing their play. Their team AB of +2.48 ranks fifth in the entire NHL and third in the Metropolitan Division, behind only Pittsburgh (+2.51) and right in line with Carolina (+2.33). Compared to their sixth-place preseason projection, the Rangers are five spots ahead of where the model expected, the largest positive gap in the Eastern Conference.

That alignment matters, because the early-season AB order has been a better guide to the standings than the preseason picks. These comparisons use Spearman’s rank correlation (rho), scored on a scale from -1 to +1. A score of +1 means two rankings match perfectly, 0 means no relationship, and negative 1 means they’re exact opposites. Across all four divisions, team AB has correlated with actual division placement at between +0.64 and +0.74, while the preseason projections have ranged from negative 0.05 to +0.36. Team AB currently matches 13 of the 16 teams in a playoff position, compared to 10 for the preseason picks. In the Metropolitan Division specifically, AB’s correlation with the standings is +0.74, the highest in the league, while the preseason picks sit at just +0.17. When a team is winning and grading out near the top of the league in AB, that usually means the results are earned.

The Rangers also graded out well in both directions. Their forwards and defensemen both sit above replacement level, putting them in the top-right quadrant of the league’s position-group outlook. Their defense corps ranks fourth in the NHL at +8.22 above replacement on an 84-game pace, behind only Colorado, Pittsburgh, and Edmonton. That’s a dramatic shift for a team whose biggest problem last season was keeping the puck out of its own net early in games, trailing after the first period in 32 of its 82 contests. The front office addressed the blue line directly this summer, adding Sean Durzi and Marcus Pettersson and drafting Alberts Smits with the fifth overall pick. Durzi is already playing above replacement, and the group now has the depth to support Adam Fox and Vladislav Gavrikov instead of relying on them alone.

Individual Contributors

The nightly rankings show a team with contributors throughout the lineup, not one player carrying the load. Alexis Lafreniere leads all Rangers forwards with an 84-game pace of +5.46, more than five points above the forward replacement level. Mika Zibanejad (+5.02), Gabe Perreault (+4.37), Oliver Bjorkstrand (+3.76), and Eeli Tolvanen (+2.78) follow, and 11 of the team’s 14 forwards are currently on pace above replacement. Several of those names are offseason additions, as Bjorkstrand, Tolvanen, Pavel Dorofeyev, and Joe Veleno all arrived this summer.

On the blue line, Adam Fox (+5.31) and Vladislav Gavrikov (+4.53) have been exceptional. Fox has finished as one of the Rangers’ top two defensemen in four of five games, and has been the best defenseman on the ice twice. Sean Durzi (+1.46), another summer addition, also sits above replacement.

Alexis Lafreniere: A Career Year in the Making

For the Rangers to maintain their good performance, Alexis Lafreniere must keep playing well. The 2020 first overall pick has three goals and five points in five games, and was the Rangers’ top forward in their most recent win over the Islanders, finishing with a +0.238-game AB.

His career trajectory explains why this start is believable, not a fluke. Lafreniere’s AB Score climbed steadily from 0.88 as a rookie in 2020-2021 to 1.45, then 1.98, before peaking at 2.83 in 2023-2024. After dipping to 1.80 in 2024-2025, he rebounded to 2.54 last season. The live projection, which still leans heavily on that history at this point in the season, puts him on track for a 2.87 AB Score and 60 points in 2026-2027, a new career high.

His contract also looks better every season. Lafreniere’s $7.45 million cap hit took roughly 8.5% of the $88 million cap when he signed his seven-year extension in 2024. It takes 7.2% of this season’s $104 million cap, and AB projects his value at $8.44 million, or 7.47% of the 2027-2028 cap. With six years remaining, that’s a contract delivering surplus value through his prime. His comparables point in the same direction: Juraj Slafkovsky and Ivan Barbashev both project well above their current deals, and his career path resembles Jared McCann, Chris Kreider, and Taylor Hall.

Gabe Perreault: An Emerging Top-Six Winger

Perreault might be the season’s most important development. The 2023 23rd overall pick finished last season with 19 points in his final 23 games, and he’s carried that into this year with two goals and four points in five games. He’s finished among the Rangers’ top three forwards in two of those games.

In 2025-2026, Perreault posted a 1.15 AB Score, just above the 1.14 replacement level used on the player cards. The live projection now has him at 1.69 for 2026-2027, with a projected 50 points. That combination of a rising AB Score and a full-time top-six role is exactly what a breakout looks like early on.

It also sets up an important negotiation. Perreault is earning $940,000 in the final year of his entry-level contract and will be a restricted free agent next summer. AB projects his next deal at $5.64 million, or 4.99% of the 2027-2028 cap. His comparables, Jack Quinn, Egor Chinakhov, and Matvei Michkov, are all young, skilled wingers who reached or approached that tier. If Perreault keeps this pace, that number will only go up.

Alberts Smits: An Encouraging NHL Debut

The most encouraging sign for the Rangers’ long-term future may be on the blue line. Alberts Smits, an 18-year-old Latvian defenseman selected fifth overall in June, entered training camp competing for a spot on the third pair. He’s played all five games.

Smits came to New York after splitting the 2025-2026 season between Red Bull Munich of the DEL, where he posted seven points in 16 games and a 0.55 AB Score, and Finland’s Liiga, where he peaked at 1.10. His NHL-equivalent AB of +0.55 already projected him as a player capable of competing at the NHL level, and his comparables include Zeev Buium and Viggo Gustafsson.

Through five games, Smits is on an 84-game pace of +0.53, just shy of the +0.68 defenseman replacement level and ahead of veteran Marcus Pettersson. For an 18-year-old defenseman in his first week of NHL hockey, sitting almost exactly at replacement level is a strong start. Most teenage defensemen take years to get there. He’s also logged a top-two finish among Rangers defensemen in one game, and the AB data suggests he belongs in the lineup rather than in Europe or the AHL. His development over the rest of the season could go a long way toward determining how good this defense group can become.

Mike Sullivan’s Coaching Profile

Mike Sullivan, now in his second season with the Rangers, ranks 20th in the AB Coaches study with a Coaching AB of 0.5527 and a 97.6 confidence rating, built on more than a decade of data, with Claude Julien as his closest comparable. His Coaching AB sits well above the study average of 0.472, and his Average Player AB (1.238) and Average Range Score (0.695) are both comfortably above the study averages of 0.961 and 0.392, respectively.

His return IMP% of 48.5% is slightly above the study average of 47.0%, while his advantage% of 48.7% sits just below the study average of 49.1%. Notably, his roster’s average age dropped to 26.1 in 2025-2026, the youngest of any season in his career. With Lafreniere, Perreault, and Smits taking on bigger roles, Sullivan is now coaching one of the youngest groups of his career, and the early returns suggest it’s responding.

Conclusion

The case for the Rangers is stronger than a typical hot start. Their record is backed by the fifth-best team AB in the league. Both their forwards and defensemen grade out above replacement; their defense ranks fourth in the NHL, and 11 of their 14 forwards are on pace above replacement. The players leading the way, Lafreniere and Perreault, have career trajectories that support what they’re doing, and the live projections, which deliberately lean on history this early, still forecast career years for both.

There are still areas to watch. Goaltending has been a major part of the opening week, with Igor Shesterkin outstanding: 3-1 with a 1.76 goals-against average and a .926 save percentage across four starts, allowing just seven goals on 95 shots. Whether Shesterkin can sustain that level will be a major factor in whether this play continues. The defense relies heavily on Fox and Gavrikov, while Braden Schneider, Smits, and Pettersson all sit at or below the pace of a defenseman replacement. Dorofeyev, signed to a seven-year, $77 million deal after scoring 37 goals in Vegas last season, has been closer to the middle of the forward group than the top, and the Metropolitan Division remains crowded, with Carolina and Pittsburgh grading out as well as or better than New York.

Through five games, the results look promising, and the data points to a team that has genuinely improved rather than one riding luck. The Rangers likely won’t finish with the best record in the NHL, but the gap between their sixth-place preseason projection and their current play suggests the model underestimated them. If Lafreniere stays near his projected career year, Perreault continues his breakout, and Smits keeps developing alongside Fox and Gavrikov, the Rangers have a legitimate chance to be a playoff team in 2026-2027.