NEW YORK — One of the signature moments of Friday night’s virtuoso (and solo) performance by Igor Shesterkin came during an Ottawa Senators power play with 10 minutes to play.
Shesterkin stretched out to deny Brady Tkachuk and stayed stretched out, frozen really, across his goal line to then stop Josh Norris alone in the slot twice. Norris looked like a kid whamming slap shots at his garage door. When the puck went out of play Norris, sitting on the ice a few feet from Shesterkin, locked eyes with the New York Rangers goalie.
“He just looked at me,” Shesterkin said after the game. “I got him.”
Shesterkin got just about all of them on Friday. This was his eighth start this season and Shesterkin’s save percentage is now .931, trailing only five goalies and just one, the Ducks’ Lukas Dostal, who’s started as many games as Shesterkin. Shesterkin has allowed one goal or less in four of those starts and Friday was his second consecutive 40-save night, which was great for him personally.
Not so good for his teammates, who weren’t as adrift as they were in Washington three nights ago but were still pretty sloppy against a fast Senators team. The Rangers were hard on the forecheck early on Friday and Alexis Lafrenière turned an attempted zone exit over right to Artemi Panarin, who snapped one by Linus Ullmark 3:03 in.
Artemi Panarin has been white-hot to start the season 💪
He’s up to 16 points in 10 games! pic.twitter.com/auBdEjdWw7
— NHL (@NHL) November 1, 2024
That held up until Filip Chytil banked a pass off Lafrenière’s skate and in on a Rangers power play at 2:56 of the third. Adam Gaudette finally beat Shesterkin with 7:32 to play but that was all for the Senators despite 33 shots over the last 40 minutes of the game.
A few observations on another night of brilliance in net and another night of discord in the other areas of the ice for the Rangers
Is Igor too good?
It’s a bit of a silly proposition — that the Rangers are allowing odd-man rushes and breaking down on defensive-zone assignments because they know they have Shesterkin back there.
One NHL scout on hand Friday night, who was granted anonymity to speak freely about another team, was rattling off some of the underachieving Rangers during the game. “It doesn’t matter though because he’s the deodorant,” the scout said of Shesterkin. “He cleans up the stink.”
Peter Laviolette was asked a question in that vein.”I don’t know how to answer that,” a clearly perturbed Laviolette said after his Rangers didn’t exactly put Tuesday’s poor performance to bed on Friday. “I would like us to play better.”
This is not a new concept for the Rangers during the Shesterkin era. The team spent the first half of the 2021-22 season answering for games similar to Friday’s, when Shesterkin simply refused to allow his team to lose despite some whopping breakdowns. Shesterkin posted one of the greatest seasons in post-1968 NHL expansion history that season, running away with the Vezina Trophy off a .935 save percentage over 52 starts.
A team that won the Presidents’ Trophy last season shouldn’t be retreating shift after shift and scrambling for coverage. Even if it does have the best goalie in the world at the moment.
Improvement from Zibanejad, Miller
Mika Zibanejad and K’Andre Miller have taken some heat for their recent play but both looked far more engaged on Friday, especially in the decent first period. Zibanejad threw the body and hounded pucks up the ice and Miller ranged around, got physical with Tkachuk and even dented the Garden video board with a high flip out of the zone, though that last one probably wasn’t intentional.
Laviolette went back to the Miller-Adam Fox pair that he’d separated late in the 4-3 loss to the Caps on Tuesday, a game in which no one really acquitted themselves well besides Shesterkin and the Chytil line. The coach cited the Miller-Fox pair’s solid metrics so far this season as a reason to keep it together.
Like most of the other Rangers skaters on Friday, that pair got a bit worse as Friday’s game went on. Victor Mancini had a real difficult go in front of his own net and the Ryan Lindgren-Jacob Trouba pair had the most trouble exiting the zone; Fox took two penalties and didn’t have his best night.
Zibanejad has been extremely streaky with his production over the years so a game like Friday, when he did some good things early but didn’t score, seems a bit rare. We’ll see if that can be a springboard to better five-on-five play.
Second power-play unit gets it done
Lafrenière’s power-play goal in the third was his sixth career PPG and it came during the lone power-play shift for the second unit, lasting 27 seconds. In fairness the Rangers only had two power plays in the game but the top unit, which could barely enter the Senators zone on a second-period power play before a Chris Kreider hooking penalty negated it 56 seconds in, stayed on for its usual minute-plus in the third and generated very little before giving way.
One wonders if Laviolette might give a little more ice time to the second unit to not only allow that group to get in a rhythm but also to remind the PP1 guys that you have to earn your minutes, even with that fivesome’s track record.
(Photo: Wendell Cruz / Imagn Images)
