93 Goalies, One Goal: Igor Shesterkin Finally Scores for the Rangers

The New York Rangers have used 93 goaltenders since they joined the NHL in 1926. Until Thursday night, none of them had scored.

Igor Shesterkin changed that with 2:34 left in the home opener at Madison Square Garden. Tampa Bay had pulled Andrei Vasilevskiy, John Carlson dumped the puck in, and it kicked off the boards to Shesterkin's crease. Down on one knee, he flipped it the full length of the ice and into the empty net to finish a 5-1 win.

He is the 18th goalie in league history to score, and his goal is the 21st by a goaltender when playoff goals are counted.

I didn't see the puck go across the line. Then everyone started jumping on me.

That was Shesterkin's version of it. The crowd saw plenty, and the "Igor!" chants that had followed his saves all night got louder.

A goal he'd been chasing for years

This wasn't an accident of timing. Shesterkin has talked openly about wanting an NHL goal, and he had one before, as a 19-year-old in Russia's junior MHL with Spartak Moscow in 2013. Mika Zibanejad said he'd lost count of the near misses: "I feel like a dozen times I've been on the bench thinking, 'OK, this one goes in' and he barely misses."

Pavel Dorofeyev, one of five Rangers now tied for the team lead with one goal, put it simply: "He's not just a great goalie. He's a great goal scorer now."

Mika Zibanejad scored on the power play less than six minutes into the home opener.

The rest of the night mattered too. A year ago the Rangers went nearly 181 minutes at the Garden before they scored, and became the first team ever shut out in its first three home games. This time Zibanejad scored on the power play inside six minutes. Dorofeyev and Eeli Tolvanen got their first goals for their new team, and Gabe Perreault tipped in an Adam Fox shot. That was four goals on 24 shots against Vasilevskiy, a two-time Vezina winner.

Shesterkin stopped 24 of 25 at the other end. The only puck that beat him was a Nikita Kucherov shot that went in off the skate of Rangers center Noah Laba.

A short night off

The Rangers play again Friday in Detroit, and Shesterkin is likely to watch this one. Backup Joonas Korpisalo is on injured reserve and week-to-week with a lower-body injury, so Dylan Garand, recalled from AHL Hartford, is in line to start the second half of the back-to-back.

As for the scoring, Shesterkin isn't done. "I will keep trying to score," he said. You can catch every Rangers game live on TVRivo.