Igor Shesterkin scored a real goal. He lofted the puck the length of the ice into an empty Tampa Bay net at 17:26 of the third period, unassisted, in a 5-1 win over the Lightning at Madison Square Garden Thursday. It's his first career goal, and it made him the 18th goaltender in NHL history to score one. Andrei Vasilevskiy, a two-time Vezina winner and a Stanley Cup champion, was on the bench for it, pulled for an extra attacker with Tampa Bay down 4-1 and trying to manufacture something out of nothing. Shesterkin made them pay for it. Afterward he said it plainly: "I told everyone I would keep trying to score and I did." The building gave him the kind of reception goalies almost never get, and he earned every second of it.
None of that's in dispute. What's being argued is whether it means the Rangers are suddenly a better, more fun team than the one that got shut out 3-0 in Boston two nights earlier. The reaction has gotten ahead of the evidence.
A goalie scoring from his own crease is a novelty act, the hockey equivalent of a pitcher hitting a home run. It's thrilling precisely because it has nothing to do with the sport's normal mechanics. The four goals that came before it, with Vasilevskiy still in net, are what beat Tampa Bay. Every Rangers skater who scored Thursday did it exactly once: Mika Zibanejad, Vasily Dorofeyev, Juuso Tolvanen, Jonathan Perreault, one goal apiece through two games. That shows a team that hasn't generated offense in bunches from anyone other than its goaltender.
The comparison going around, that Shesterkin's goal total this early in the season technically outpaces Connor McDavid's, is funny for about as long as it takes to say out loud. McDavid has played one game to Shesterkin's two, he's a pass-first center coming off a season in the high forties for goals, and nobody in Edmonton is worried about his shot. Treating a box-score coincidence from the first week of October like it says something about relative talent is the same mistake as treating one empty-net fluke as proof the Rangers have solved their scoring problem. It hasn't. That's one goal, by a goaltender, in a blowout.
Look at the shape of the two games the Rangers have played: a 3-0 shutout loss on the road, then a 5-1 win at home where the only non-empty-net Lightning goal came off a puck that bounced in off a Rangers defenseman. Strip out the historic footnote and you have a team that still hasn't shown it can consistently create goals against a real NHL defense, with a goaltender who is, by a wide margin, still the best player wearing the uniform. That was true before Thursday night too.
Celebrate the goal and chant his name. It's one of the rarest things the sport produces, and Shesterkin earned the moment honestly. But if your read on this team's season got brighter because the guy stopping pucks also put one in, you've confused a magic trick for a turnaround. The Rangers need their forwards to start scoring in multiples. Nobody's goalie can do that for them for 82 games.
