The Rangers have historically been pretty bad with top 5 and even top 10 draft picks.
I went over them a couple of years ago, and they had a load of busts picked early in the late 90s and early 00s.
Rangers gave considerable effort to trade up for Chris Pronger in 1993. San Jose had the #2 pick and their room was split, but their co-GM Chuck Grillo steered them to take Viktor Kozlov. The other co-GM Dean Lombardi was tasked with negotiating a trade down where they could still end up with Kozlov. But they knew that Hartford would take Kozlov at #6 (if Pronger went #2 to the Rangers), so trading down to #8 with the Rangers wasn't going to work.
In the end, they made a relatively small deal with Hartford. Fun side story that I didn't know until a couple years ago was that Quebec also badly wanted Pronger. They offered Mike Ricci and #10, but San Jose declined. Then at the last minute they offered the rights to Peter Forsberg. After the draft, Lombardi fumed to the press about Quebec basically implying that he would have done that trade contingent on Forsberg signing.
The issue was that CBA allowed certain unsigned European draft picks to sign offer sheets. In the summer of 1992, Teemu Selanne signed an offer sheet (400K x 3 years, 1.5 mil signing bonus) with Calgary that Winnipeg begrudgingly matched. There were rumors that teams might offer 4-5 mil signing bonus to Forsberg / Forsberg was eyeing the record rookie deal that Alexandre Daigle was about to sign. San Jose couldn't risk having to match a bloated offer sheet; They would have received no compensation if they didn't match.