The Rangers have their 23-man roster and leadership group set heading into their opening night matchup against the Lightning on Tuesday at Madison Square Garden.

There weren’t any surprises for a team returning 16 of the 23 players it started last season with. Though the $183,531 of cap space the Rangers will carry into the season likely will be difficult to operate under at a later date — Feb. 20, 2023, the NHL trade deadline, to be exact — team management seemingly had a clear idea of what it wanted the starting lineup to look like when it came down to personnel decisions.

When you finish among the top four teams in the NHL in the previous season and retain a majority of the roster, the decisions shouldn’t be overly complicated. But it’s the expectations that come with that could be complicated.

“It was easy last year when no one expects anything out of you and you kind of rally around that almost, it’s easy to get up when teams are saying the other team is going to beat you and everything like that,” defenseman Adam Fox said Monday. “So now to have a little bit of expectations — call it a target on your back — I think obviously that builds a little motivation as well. You want to be able to prove that last year wasn’t a fluke and that we do have the team to do that and get to that point.

“I think we’re a hungry group, we’re young and I think we want to get back to where we were last year.”

Even if there was some deliberation required when deciding whether to give Jimmy Vesey a contract after his professional tryout or if Zac Jones was ready to step into the sixth defenseman role, the Rangers had a layup of a decision when it came to who would serve as alternate captains. The team lauded the leadership group last season — Jacob Trouba, Mika Zibanejad, Chris Kreider, Artemi Panarin, Ryan Strome and Barclay Goodrow — so it was a no-brainer to have the players who are still with the club retain their letters.

Zibanejad, Kreider, Panarin and Goodrow will sport the “A” again this season, with Trouba earning the promotion to captain this offseason. Strome, of course, is no longer a Ranger after departing in free agency to the Ducks.

“It was a good group and it was tough, you hate leaving out guys, too,” Rangers coach Gerard Gallant said after practice in Tarrytown. “There’s a lot of guys knocking on the door for those roles. I just think last year we had a great group and why would I change it and take it away from those guys? They’re good people, they did a good job.”

The cliché, “Why fix what isn’t broken?” certainly applies here. For a team that hasn’t had a captain since 2018, when Ryan McDonagh donned the “C,” the Rangers now have a band of leaders who are all under contract for the foreseeable future. The group did a tremendous job rallying the team throughout the 2021-22 regular season and the playoffs, when the Rangers completed two series comebacks to reach the Eastern Conference final.

The new challenge for the four alternate captains and Trouba is not to get the team up to prove people wrong, but to foster the team’s confidence in order to attack the lofty expectations facing it this season.

“I think it’s just a great leadership group in general,” said Fox, who would probably be up for a letter himself if not for the return of five of the six alternate captains from last season. “A letter is a letter. It’s obviously a privilege for those guys, but I think they did a good job of just incorporating everyone. It wasn’t six A’s and then everyone else is just another guy on the team.

“I think it’s a whole group effort and they did a great job of letting everyone have a voice. It wasn’t just those individuals doing everything.”