The Adam Fox trade is the payoff from Jeff Gorton’s last two-asset acquisition

The Rangers have officially landed Harvard defenseman Adam Fox in a trade with the Carolina Hurricanes

If there’s one thing the New York Rangers still have, it’s the lure of NYC to young collegiate hockey players. They were able to land Kevin Hayes and Jimmy Vesey — one worked out better than the other, but I digress — as college UFAs. And given all the noise that Adam Fox, the standout Harvard defenseman, was trending toward that route, it made sense for the Rangers to trade for him a year early rather than let him hit the open market next summer.

This is what the past two years have been about: accumulating assets (draft picks and prospects) so you can pounce when another team has a player they can’t keep — RFAs on teams with cap-crunches coming, star players who are a year away from UFA, college players who have told the team that drafted them they don’t plan on re-signing, etc.

This is what Jeff Gorton has done since the Nick Holden trade at the 2018 trade deadline, which was the official start of the rebuild: