There's literally a lot of evidence of this. He was drafted in June of 2015, Gorton took over the organization in July of 2015. Ever since Gorton took over, positional defenders who play a defensive style have been pushed out of the organization or been treated very differently than other styles of defensemen. We know all about what Gorton wants.
He bought out one of the organizations best ever defensemen because he didn't play the right style and used that free cap space to sign Brendan Smith to a big contract who has shown no evidence of being better than a marginal hockey player. But the corsi stats are good and he sucks at putting up points, so they call that a defensive defenseman. Sent him to the AHL a number of months later for failing to play like an NHL player. The player he bought out played better this season than almost his whole defense.
And then we see in some of the recent trades. Cal Foote was pretty unanimously regarded as Tampa's best defensive prospect by most of the scouting industry, but we've been told for months the Rangers didn't care and instead wanted Hajek. Why? I suspect it comes down to Foote's somewhat iffy skating. Thats not really part of Hajek's scouting report. They had all these spots available for defensemen late in the season, but gave no chance to Graves, instead trading him away for a player they kept in the minors. Gilmour, Sproul, DeAngelo, Pionk, O'Gara all played, some of them very badly. The guy who was good for two years in the AHL and showed decent upside was traded because he wasn't the most agile in his pivots.
They signed Bereglazov who was a pretty good defensive defensemen the year prior in the second best league in the world. They gave him no chance. Actually, they gave him less of a shot than some guys who played in the minors all season. He didn't even get two preseason games, which almost all the minor league players got. The shills have told us he just wasn't suited for the new NHL, even though they've likely never seen him play, and we just went through the team's worst defensive season of the current era. The Rangers with their preferences on defense are all about skating and puck moving. They'll fill in the needed info from there. If you don't have skill, they'll call you a defensive defenseman. If you do, you are an offensive defenseman. This organization has totally went radical when it comes to how they regard defenseman, and its showing in the results.
But I get it, a lot of you refuse to criticize Gorton, at all. He's the messiah, even though our defense still sucks, and he's made a lot of questionable decisions, especially on the back-end.