Dylan Garand Takes the Rangers' Net With Shesterkin Out for the Season

NEW YORK

The math is simple and brutal. The Rangers' $92 million goaltender is done for the year, his backup is out a month, and the net now belongs to a 24-year-old with four career NHL starts. Dylan Garand gets the crease Sunday afternoon when Vancouver visits Madison Square Garden, the first start of the post-Shesterkin era in New York — and there is no telling how long the era lasts.

Shesterkin was ruled out for the season Saturday, one day after jamming his right skate into the goalpost in the second period of Friday's 3-1 loss at Washington. He had to be helped off without putting weight on his right leg. The same day, the Rangers announced Joonas Korpisalo will miss four weeks with his own lower-body injury. Just like that, a team that had won four straight is down to its third goaltender — and the third goaltender is a kid.

But here's the thing about Garand: the kid can play. A fourth-round pick in 2020, he stopped all 22 shots he faced in a 2-0 shutout of Detroit on Oct. 2 — his lone start this season — and posted a .948 save percentage in three games as a rookie last year. He cleared waivers after training camp, got recalled when Korpisalo went down, and now coach Mike Sullivan says he'll get the bulk of the starts until Korpisalo returns. That's not a tryout. That's the job.

Captain J.T. Miller didn't sugarcoat Friday night. "He's a pillar of this team," he said of Shesterkin. "It stinks." He's right, and the numbers say so too: Shesterkin was 3-1-0 with a 1.79 goals-against average and a .927 save percentage in five starts, in the second season of an eight-year, $92 million deal that made him the highest-paid goaltender in NHL history. Last week he even scored a goal — lofting the puck the length of the ice into an empty Tampa net in the home opener, the first Rangers goalie ever to do it. Now the season is about whether a 24-year-old can hold the fort in the league's most unforgiving market.

Vancouver, for its part, arrives in no shape to be sympathetic. The Canucks have lost three straight and been outscored 14-5 in the process, and they turn to Kevin Lankinen in net. Somebody's misery gets company on Sunday.

The afternoon's first puck drop is in Washington, where the Capitals host Seattle at 2 p.m. PDT (Philipp Grubauer vs. Logan Thompson) in the franchise's first home game since announcing the death of Bobby Gould on Saturday. Gould, the two-time Selke finalist who played 600 games for Washington in the 1980s and scored the first playoff goal in franchise history, was 69. Expect an emotional building.

The late game is Philadelphia, where the Flyers — still winless at 0-4-2 after Saturday's 5-1 drubbing by Boston — host the defending-champion Hurricanes at 4 p.m. PDT. Pyotr Kochetkov goes for Carolina, with Woll confirmed for Philadelphia — and the Flyers' goaltending picture as unsettled as everything else in South Philly right now. Shots were 32-15 on Saturday. That's not a hockey game, that's a warning, and now the champs are coming to town.

Friday's one piece of actual roster business also deserves a line: Montreal traded defenseman Jayden Struble to Nashville for a 2027 second-round pick — a pick that originally belonged to Vegas, routed through the Colton Sissons deal. Struble, 25, was Montreal's second-rounder in 2019 and played 174 games for the Canadiens, but he was down to a career-low 12:05 a night this season and the Habs' blue-line logjam finally squeezed him out. Predators hockey ops chief Chris MacFarland called him a physical, mobile defender who can grow with the group. For a rebuilding-on-the-fly Nashville blue line, that's a cheap lottery ticket worth scratching.

Then Monday, the week's best game: the Golden Knights roll into Saint Paul to face the Wild at 5 p.m. PDT. Vegas is 5-1-0 with four straight wins and back in first place in the Pacific after Saturday's 2-1 overtime win over Los Angeles — Mitch Marner's first OT winner as a Golden Knight, the eighth of his career. Minnesota counters with the hottest winger on the planet: Kirill Kaprizov's seventh career hat trick ruined Florida's home opener Saturday, his sixth goal in five games. Streak versus streak, and the building will be loud.

Monday's undercard: Florida visits Buffalo at 10 a.m. PDT — the Panthers still without Aleksander Barkov and Brad Marchand, still 1-for-28 on the power play, still trying to figure out what's wrong in Sunrise — and Ottawa visits New Jersey at 4 p.m. PDT.

Around the league, the early-season weirdness keeps piling up. Los Angeles is 0-4 for the first time in franchise history under new coach Peter Laviolette. Edmonton has won four straight and has points in five. And somewhere in New York, a 24-year-old is about to find out what it's like to be the most important Ranger. For how Saturday's wild 12-game slate set all of this up, start with last night's roundup.