I’m a huge Charlie McAvoy fan. His family is from Long Beach, where I have tons of family. His father did plumbing for my family. His father also grew up playing hockey with my uncle and I used to see his father bring Charlie down to the roller rink to do off-ice drills. My stepfather worked with his father and aunts and uncles when they were young. I rooted so hard for Boston to beat St. Louis in 2019 because of Charlie.
However, if you think there is some massive gap between McAvoy and Fox, you probably don’t watch Fox at all. Fox is an incredible defender (I’ll concede that McAvoy is better defensively - one of the top 3-5 best in the league defensively, IMO) but Fox is scoring at a 73 point pace over an 80 game season with the Rangers power play being abysmal, 25th in the league - skewed because of the 2 games against the flyers in which they scored a total of 17 goals. McAvoy plays 2:11 on the PP, 2:25 SH, 19:36 at ES and 24:11 TOI overall. Fox plays 4:08 on the PP, 2:32 SH, and 17:50 at ES per game, 24:29 TOI overall per game. The PP TOI disparity is because Quinn BARELY uses the 2nd unit and McAvoy isn’t even Boston’s #1 d-man in PP TOI/game, Grzelcyk is at 3:30/game. Charlie also has to play 19:36 per game at ES because Boston has a very young defense and it’s kinda weird that Brandon Carlo, Matt Grzelcyk and Kevan Miller get less ES TOI/game than Connor Clifton and Jakub Zboril, despite the former three having more NHL games under their belt than the latter two.
Fox and McAvoy are clearly minutes eaters that are both playing Norris Caliber hockey. The eye test and analytics tell you this. Rangers and Bruins fans should both be happy to have their guys and expect to see them both play for team USA in the upcoming Olympics, if Bettman sends the NHL’ers.