Urho Vaakanainen came into the 2025-2026 season as the 6D, a role many assumed he would hold for most of the season. Matthew Robertson turned into a pleasant surprise for the Rangers, jumping ahead of Vaakanainen on the depth chart and taking that 6D spot. This limited Vaakanainen to just 34 games last season, putting up just six assists in third pair minutes. It’s not that Urho Vaakanainen was playing poorly, it’s that he got passed on the depth chart. These things happen.
In fact, there’s a strong argument that Vaakanainen should have been playing over half the blue line. His metrics were far better than those of Braden Schneider, Carson Soucy, and Will Borgen.
Urho Vaakanainen only played 471 minutes at 5v5 this past season (it’s why he doesn’t have rankings in Evolving-Hockey’s player card), but his defensive metrics were quite strong. He excelled at transitioning the play up the ice from the defensive zone. He was pretty solid in his own zone, limiting both quality and quantity against. However when Vaakanainen played needs to be accounted for, as he was regularly a healthy scratch while the Rangers were absolutely awful from November through January.
Regardless, Urho Vaakanainen appeared to be part of a numbers game, with the Rangers looking to get others more ice time at his expense, even if he did have better numbers in a smaller sample size. There’s clearly a reason why Mike Sullivan chose other players over him, and why he still couldn’t be a regular in the lineup after the trade deadline. The Rangers probably could have used his defensive and transitional play at some point, but that ship appears to have sailed.
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