Adam Fox Has Become Grossly Underrated and Is Still a Superstar NHL Defenseman

New York Rangers franchise defenseman Adam Fox has become the object of criticism, both in New York and in national media markets. Many in New York consider Adam Fox's 2024-25 season a letdown. Not as if it's an opinion, but an axiom. NHL Network managed to find 15 defensemen they think are now better than Fox. As did one writer at The Athletic. New Head Coach Mike Sullivan is being asked about Adam Fox's Olympic odds as if there is a "tough decision" to make.

This moment of scrutiny is unsurprising. That's not a judgment of merit so much as a rite of passage. There is not a single superstar that the masses have not attempted to discredit. Alexander Ovechkin was written off as a failure. LeBron James isn't clutch. Lionel Messi doesn't step up in international tournaments. Far better athletes have been piled on for the crime of being less than perfect. Under that lens, Fox is not special.

That does not make these diminutions any less counterfactual. Public perceptions of Fox have gone downhill, but Rangers fans should feel as confident in the 2021 Norris Trophy Winner as ever.

Contextualizing Fox's 2024-25 Season

Goals Above Replacement (GAR) is a stat that uses available data to estimate how many goals a player added to his team compared to what a replacement-level player would produce (0).

Per Evolving Hockey, Adam Fox was worth 15.5 GAR last season. It is indeed lower than his 2023-24 total (18.5), indicating a decrease in output. The simple argument for Fox is that 15.5 GAR still ranks among the best NHL defensemen, but let's dig deeper.

Among the Rangers' top minute-eaters last season, Fox had, by a notable amount, the least statistical change in performance. It leads one to wonder whether his play itself actually deteriorated or whether that decline is a result of a headwind generated by the dramatic collapse of everyone else around him.

Legendary NFL running back Emmitt Smith once explained away a terrible Dallas Cowboys season with, "We had some diamonds, but we had a lotta cow poo poo around it, and the diamonds was mixed in with the poo poo...it just all look like poo poo."

After a magical 2023-24 season in which the Rangers won the Presidents' Trophy, the New York Rangers were a trainwreck last season across the board. Hockey is a team sport, and when the team itself is a sinking ship, individual success stories should be measured by how well players were able to resist the collective nosedive.

That is particularly true for a player like Fox, who is a master of collaborating with linemates. If the other four players on the ice with him are asleep at the wheel, then there's only so much he can do to prop himself and the team up.

Ryan Lindgren's plummet is of significant importance. The longtime partner for Fox was always the Robin to Fox's Batman, but his steep decline into an active liability really hurt Fox last season. Following Lindgren's trade to Colorado, Fox played with Carson Soucy and was on ice for a 64.5 percent expected goal share at 5v5, outscoring the opposition 7-3.

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Lindgren, meanwhile, continued to struggle in a lesser role with the Avalanche. It cannot be stated enough how much Lindgren dragged Fox down to the point that Fox was able to flourish even alongside a different, generic defenseman.

Let's take a different approach to truly appreciate what Fox was up against on the 2024-25 Rangers team. "5v5 RelTM xG±" is a mouthful, but the premise of the statistic is intuitive. What was your team's expected goal total when a player was on the ice at 5v5? What was the weighted expected goal total of everyone else on the team, and how much better or worse was that player than the rest of the team?

For Adam Fox, that number last season was +17.39. Where does that rank among NHL players in 2024-25?

That's right. Fox was at the very top of a list with some heavy hitters. If the numbers are still difficult to understand, then let's put this in simple terms. At least by this measure, no team in the NHL saw a bigger gap between how they played with or without one individual player than the Rangers did with Adam Fox.

Bad Puck Luck

Decreased perceptions of Fox's abilities may also be the result of bad results overshadowing good process. On Jan. 1, Fox had just one goal in the column; an empty netter vs the Buffalo Sabres. For a marquee offensive defenseman, that limp output is going to stick out like a sore thumb.

Based on the shooting chances Fox took over those 36 games, per Evolving Hockey, he would be expected to score 6.1 goals. That type of underperformance isn't only bad luck. It's an outlier. No other NHL defenseman, as of Jan. 1, was even close to being as snakebitten.

Over the next 38 games, regression hit hard. Fox exploded with nine goals. But by then, the narratives about his season were baked in, and the Rangers' season was effectively over.

The Four Nations Flop

Fox did not play well in February's Four Nations Tournament. This much everyone can agree on.

The bigger question is why anyone should radically adjust their perceptions of Fox based on that. It was a four-game sample size under unique circumstances. The test for determining a player's abilities should be much more durable than that.

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Even the best athletes are human, and humans aren't at their best every day, every week, or every month. Evgeni Malkin had zero points in five games during the 2015 NHL Playoffs. Shohei Ohtani had just two hits in the 2024 World Series. Simon Biles forgot how to flip in the middle of the 2021 Olympics.

To remove Fox from the roster for the 2026 Olympics would be a massive error. But even if we took a massive leap and we suppose that Fox's game is not tailored for USA Hockey's roster and international-level competition, what would this matter to the Rangers and NHL-level evaluations? To put him anywhere outside of a top-five NHL defenseman list on that basis is ludicrous, as if we should assess Fox's value over an 82-game NHL season plus playoffs based on perceptions of his international tournament status.

Be Careful What You Wish For

To the extent that Fox has a "down" season in 2024-25, it was that he was merely a top-10 NHL defenseman rather than an inarguable Norris Contender. He achieved that despite the rest of the team embarking on a historical collapse. In every other season, he has been that Norris-caliber talent, and he will almost certainly continue on that path next season, with Sullivan getting the rest of the players to provide Fox with the rally partners he deserves. Vladislav Gavrikov is a perfect fit to be Fox's partner, but if the coaches separate those two for lineup reasons, then even Soucy has proven to give Fox enough room to do what he does best.

There is no price too high for a player like Fox, but his $9.5 million cap hit through 2029 is a comical low-ball of his value. That he took below-market value to stay in New York is no surprise, given that Fox, who grew up a Rangers fan in Jericho, basically forced his way to New York as an NHL prospect first drafted by Calgary and then traded to Carolina.

The Rangers, and Rangers fans, should not take that for granted. Mitch Marner was the local hero who nobody would end his career anywhere except with a jersey retirement in Toronto. Instead, rising tensions and animosity led to a messy divorce.

The circumstances of Marner's departure don't necessarily apply to Fox, but the pertinent takeaway is that there's always room for things to turn sour. Rather than questioning Fox and his own contributions, the Rangers and Rangers fans should instead have more anxiety about wasting the prime years of a 27-year-old Norris Caliber defenseman.