Igor Shesterkin scored a goal for the New York Rangers on Thursday night, and it took the franchise 100 years to get there for a reason that has nothing to do with skill. An empty-net goalie goal is close to the easiest shot in hockey. It is also the one almost nobody wearing a mask will ever actually try.
Shesterkin tried it anyway.
With the Rangers up late in the third period, Lightning coach Jon Cooper pulled Andrei Vasilevskiy for an extra attacker. The puck bounced off the end boards behind Shesterkin’s own net. He scooped it up, looked at 150 feet of open ice, and fired it the length of the rink.
It went in.
The goal came unassisted at 17:26 of the third period in a 5-1 win over Tampa Bay, the Rangers’ home opener at Madison Square Garden. Shesterkin also made 24 saves on 25 shots that night, which is the stat that actually required goaltending, and nobody in New York cared about it by the time the horn sounded.
Shesterkin scored a goalie goal, the 18th in NHL history, and the first goalie goal in Rangers franchise history. The Original Six club has existed since 1926. It had never once had a goaltender put the puck in the net until Thursday.
That gap is about nerve, not math.
Every goalie who has ever watched the other team pull its own net has had the same look at the same empty cage Shesterkin had. Almost none of them shoot. Airmail it wide and the clip follows a guy around for a decade, and goalies already live one bad bounce from becoming a punchline.
Shesterkin didn’t blink.
“I didn’t see the puck land so I didn’t know can I celebrate or not,” he said afterward. “Everyone started jumping on me. Unbelievable feelings.”
He got the Broadway Hat for it, the fedora the Rangers hand their best player after a win. The First Star nod came with it.
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The Garden gave him the kind of noise usually saved for playoff overtime winners, for a shot that traveled the length of the ice into a net with nobody standing in it. Nobody checked the box score for degree of difficulty.
An empty cage isn’t a save, and Shesterkin seems to know it. “This one counts,” he said, which is either a joke about his own stat line or the most honest thing said in that locker room, because an empty-netter was never going to sit next to real highlight-reel goals.
Ilya Sorokin got there first for the Islanders last season, which means the crosstown rival beat the Rangers to the whole goalie-goal club. A hundred years, and the Rangers still finished second to the team they share a city with.
Mika Zibanejad has been waiting on this one longer than most. “I feel like probably a dozen times I’ve been on the bench thinking, ‘OK, this one goes in,’ and he barely misses,” Zibanejad said.
It has been a strange year for hockey trivia already. The league enforced the NHL’s first jersey-tuck penalty in thirteen years before October had even gotten its legs under it, and now a Rangers goalie is scoring goals inside the same Garden that turned into a crime scene during the Knicks’ run a few months back.
Shesterkin was asked if he worried about getting run for trying something so reckless.
“Yeah, at least nobody is punching my face,” he said.
