Any of you reading this that are familiar with my work know that I usually stay in my lane, which consists of two primary topics—hockey analytics and prospect analysis. Well, seeing that I write for a blog focused on the New York Rangers, there isn’t a whole lot to write about from the analytics perspective that I would particularly enjoy right now, and I’ve fairly recently published my initial 2019 NHL draft ranks with my colleagues Shawn Taggart and George Obremski and I followed that up with a prospects mailbag, so I decided I wanted to do something fun with my next piece.

So, early in January I was sitting down channel surfing and noticed that HBO was running a marathon for my favorite show ever, The Sopranos, and at the time my wife and son both unfortunately were under the weather and sleeping, so I kicked back with a brew and watched until bedtime. While watching I found out that the reason for the marathon of The Sopranos is because apparently it is the 20th anniversary of the show, and that’s when I realized, the perfect “fun” piece I could write would be this one, correlating New York Rangers players and front office personnel to characters in my all-time favorite show, The Sopranos.

Before I begin, because of the way the world is these days, I feel obligated to write the following disclaimer: Yes, I’m abundantly aware that I am comparing a bunch of hockey players to mostly ruthless gangsters who, many of which during the course of the show committed terrible crimes and are just down right awful human beings. Me saying Chris Kreider is Christopher Moltisanti is NOT me saying that Chris Kreider is a mostly terrible human being that is extraordinarily violent, impulsive and a drug addict. These comparisons largely are based on certain select personality traits and correlations between character story arcs and player career arcs. Also, and I can’t believe I am writing this but again, given the way some people are, I feel obligated to do so—if one of these correlations is regarding a character being killed, that is NOT me saying I want this actual human being to be killed. The comparable for a Sopranos character being killed in this piece—and therefore no longer being on the show—is a player or front office individual being traded/cut/fired etc.

With that ridiculous but unfortunately necessary disclaimer out of the way, let’s get to this piece. Please feel free to leave a comment or hit me up on Twitter if you’d like to debate some of my selections. Some of these I feel strongly about, but others are definitely far from perfect, and I’d be happy to have a friendly debate about them. Lastly, there were a few characters and Rangers players/personnel I did not include in the piece, such as Janice Soprano, Adriana La Cerva, Vladislav Namestnikov, Ryan Strome and Gordie Clarke; if you have any ideas for correlations for these individuals, and can adequately justify it, I’ll be happy to add it to the piece and give you full credit for the write-up. With all that said, I hope you all enjoy the piece!