Losing Igor Shesterkin for the season hurts the Rangers. It also exposes them.
On the night Shesterkin went down against Washington, one Rangers blog counted exactly one healthy goaltender left in the entire organization. That number should worry Chris Drury. Joonas Korpisalo, signed to back Shesterkin up, was already on injured reserve and hadn't even started skating. Spencer Martin was hurt down in Hartford. That left Callum Tung as the last body standing. A contender with Stanley Cup ambitions and a franchise goalie was one bad landing away from calling around for anybody who could stop a puck. Then the bad landing happened.
Luck is Shesterkin catching his right skate in the post at 8:20 of the second period, his leg bending under him as he scrambled back into the crease, and getting helped off the ice unable to put weight on it. Nobody saw that coming. But a team can plan for what happens the day its irreplaceable goalie goes down, and the Rangers didn't. They stacked all their injury risk at one position and crossed their fingers.
We've seen how this movie ends. Shesterkin missed a month last season with a lower-body injury, and the Rangers finished dead last in the Eastern Conference. That wasn't a fluke. This is a team built around elite goaltending, and when the goaltending leaves, there's nothing holding the structure up. They rode a four-game winning streak into Friday. Shesterkin had been playing some of the best hockey of his life, 3-1-0 with a 1.75 goals-against average and a .926 save percentage before he limped off. Take him away and you find out in a hurry how much of that record was him.
The optimists have a name, and it's Dylan Garand. The prospect recalled when Korpisalo first went down already has a shutout this season, and he's the presumptive starter now for as long as both veterans are out. Maybe he's good. Young goalies get thrown into the fire every year, and some of them come out looking like keepers. If Garand runs hot, this turns into a story about a kid seizing his chance.
I'd love to believe it. Betting your year on an untested AHL call-up is a prayer, and on the night it happened, the organization reportedly didn't have anyone else ready behind him. That's the spot the front office put itself in. The answer floating around is a trade for a rental goalie, and gutting a prospect pool to chase a goalie who may or may not be back later this year is the kind of panic that turns a bad month into a lost decade. Drury shouldn't do it. He also shouldn't have needed the option.
Injuries happen to everyone. The Rangers are in trouble because when this one hit, the team that was supposed to be ready had built a depth chart you could knock over with one shove. Blame the general manager for that.
