Igor Shesterkin opened the season looking the part of the league’s highest-paid goaltender.
For nearly three weeks, he’s largely been living on reputation.
While the offense again gave the Rangers no chance of pulling out their first home win of the season, the star goaltender couldn’t match his close friend, Ilya Sorokin, in the Islanders’ 5-0 win at Madison Square Garden on Saturday night.
In the first six games of the season, Shesterkin allowed seven goals in six games.
In the six games since then, the former Vezina Trophy winner has allowed 22 goals.
While backup Jonathan Quick has been superb in four starts (3-1, 1.26 goals against average), Shesterkin has won just two starts since picking up a pair of wins in the opening week of the season.
“Of course we’re upset,” said Shesterkin, who allowed four goals on 25 shots. “We just need to keep working.”
Shesterkin allowed the first of two goals to Bo Horvat midway through the first period and failed to provide the momentum-changing stops of Sorokin.
But fault was found all around, with the Rangers allowing multiple odd-man rushes.
“We beat ourselves,” Rangers coach Mike Sullivan said. “We gave them three 2-on-1 goals. We gave them a 2-on-1 goal with 30 seconds left. It’s inexplicable to me. Tonight’s a very different story from some of the other games that have been played here. We beat ourselves in a lot of ways.
“I don’t know if we’re chasing it because we want to have success at home, but I think we were doing things that were uncharacteristic of the group. … You can’t give up the type of 2-on-1s we gave up tonight and expect to win many games.”
So much for momentum.
In Friday night’s win at Detroit, the Rangers scored the first of their four goals on Will Cuylle’s wrister, 17 seconds into their first power-play opportunity.
It ended the unit’s five-game drought, in which the Rangers failed to convert 12 straight power play opportunities.
On Saturday, the Rangers’ struggles with the man-advantage resumed, failing to convert two opportunities.
The Rangers also failed with three minutes of 6-on-5 in the closing minutes, but that only led to an empty net goal by Jean-Gabriel Pageau, prompting J.T. Miller to slam his stick against the post.
Vincent Trocheck missed his 14th straight game with an upper-body injury. … Defenseman Connor Mackey was assigned to Hartford after back-to-back games as a healthy scratch. … The Rangers continued their centennial celebration — recognizing iconic “milestones and moments” in franchise history — honoring Pete Stemkowski, Ron Greschner, John Davidson, Stephane Matteau, Adam Graves, Mike Richter, Henrik Lundqvist, Derek Stepan, Steve Vickers, Marek Malik and the family of the late Eddie Giacomin.
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