Igor Shesterkin, All-Star, searches for a way out of his season-long funk

Asked what this weekend will be like in Toronto, Igor Shesterkin showed he still hasn’t lost his very subtle, biting sense of humor. Especially when it comes to his own play this season for the Rangers, which has been far, far below his standard.

“I will look in the mirror a few times,” he told The Athletic last week, “and say, ‘What the —- are you doing here?'”

Shesterkin is one of the three Rangers’ All-Star representatives — along with teammate Vincent Trocheck and coach Peter Laviolette — this weekend for a few reasons, but none of them have much to do with how he’s played this season.

Yes, the Rangers have pretty much gone wire-to-wire from the start of the 2023-24 season to now in first place in the Metro Division. Yes, Shesterkin still backstops plenty of Rangers wins, 19 in his 32 starts this season, tied for sixth among all goalies. And yes, the Rangers’ playoff fortunes likely still rest on their 2021-22 Vezina Trophy winner playing at an elite level when April rolls around.

But he certainly knows that he’ll be in Toronto primarily because Artemi Panarin’s wife is about to give birth. And Shesterkin’s reputation is still intact: That 2021-22 season ranks among the five or so best goalie seasons in the last 50 years, so even with his struggles this season, he still gets mentioned in the same breath as his good friends Ilya Sorokin of the Islanders and Andrei Vasilevskiy of the Lightning as one of the best in the game.

Something’s amiss, however. His .899 save percentage tells a very obvious story — that Shesterkin, who hasn’t had a season below a .912 save percentage since he was an 18-year-old getting a taste of the big leagues in the KHL for Spartak, is not playing to any sort of quality level. The deeper numbers, helpfully provided by Clear Sight Hockey, tell an even worse story — that Shesterkin has been very beatable this season by opponents. And also by himself, to a degree that made him invite a guest over to the U.S. in November.

During the Rangers’ five-day break in mid-November — and during a 16-day injury absence for Shesterkin — the Rangers’ goalie had Rashit Davydov, his goalie coach during his days playing for SKA in the KHL, fly over to work with him for an unspecified length of time. Shesterkin said he’s consulted Davydov throughout his time with the Rangers even as he’s spent the bulk of his NHL time working with Benoit Allaire, who has an unimpeachable record during three decades advising goalies in the NHL, the last 20 years of which has been spent with the Rangers.

“(Davydov) helped change my game when I was in St. Petersburg,” Shesterkin said. “I work with him in the summer sometimes, sometimes he send me videos when I make a play or we text… (When I’m here) I keep working with Benny.”

Shesterkin had a solid run of five starts in late December when he allowed seven goals total in a five-game win streak. But looking at his numbers overall this season, some unpleasant patterns have emerged through his 32 starts that are far, far off not just his amazing 2021-22 numbers but also last season, when he was good, sometimes great but not unbelievable.

With Shesterkin and the Rangers able to negotiate a new contract starting in July, when he’ll enter the final season of his current contract that carries a $5.67-million cap hit, this down season could not have come at a worse time for either the goalie or the Rangers. Even if Shesterkin would take a team-friendly deal coming off a tough year — and team-friendly is a pretty vague term, given that Shesterkin’s buddy Ilya Sorokin signed for eight years at $8.25-million per with the Islanders last summer — is this the goalie the Rangers want to commit to long-term?

The first set of screenshots details Clear Sight’s Start Quality metric. The categories are defined as follows: A great game is one where the goalie has saved 1.5 goals or more above expectation based on the quality of the scoring chances he’s faced; a quality game is in the 0.5-1.5 GSAx range; an average game is between minus-0.5 and 0.5; bad game is minus-0.5 to minus-1.5; a blown game is minus-1.5 GSAx or below.

The “goalie bailed out” section is the number of wins a team has when the goalie has a bad or blown game and a “stolen win” is when the goalie’s team has produced 1.0 goals less than expected compared to the opposition and the goalie’s team still wins.

Still with me? Great. Now, here’s Shesterkin’s Start Quality charts from the last three seasons, beginning with his wondrous 2021-22 on down to this year.

Here’s 2022-23:

And now this season:

Shesterkin already has more blown games this year than in either of his full previous two seasons. If he projects out to make another 25 starts this season, he would need 14 of them to be either quality or great to equal his totals in those categories from last year.

The location of goals going in on Shesterkin is unusual for him as well. Steve Valiquette, MSG Network Rangers analyst and founder of Clear Sight, gave us all a hint as to one of Shesterkin’s main issues during Friday’s game against the Golden Knights. Keegan Kolesar beat Shesterkin high to the glove side on a partial breakaway to put Vegas ahead.

He’s got to fix that exposure high glove.

— Stephen Valiquette (@VallysView) January 27, 2024

With a relatively new tool Valiquette and his team at Clear Sight have added to their site, we can see just how much Shesterkin’s high-glove exposure has been responsible for his drop in play. Here’s a look at the net locations of goals on Shesterkin from 2022-23:

And here are the net locations for goals this season:

Shesterkin has allowed 32 goals on 90 attempts high glove. He allowed 30 goals all last season on 150 high-glove attempts. This is a technical issue, one that Allaire (and possibly Davydov, when he was here) has almost certainly emphasized with Shesterkin. So it’s fixable, but once shooters see this kind of data — and they do — it’s an urgent fix.

Lastly, we have a chart from Clear Sight’s data on expected goals from score effects — how goalies perform at different stages of the game when leading, trailing or tied.

Shesterkin has been one of the league’s best goalies in close games, when the Rangers are leading or trailing by a goal or when the game’s tied. The chart below shows how well he performed in those situations the last two seasons — and how far off that standard he’s been so far this season.

Shesterkin is not despondent. He’s not in total despair. “There is still long way to go (this season),” he said last week. “My numbers are not good, but I think it’s not like I play so bad. So we have to keep working, working with Benny, go in the gym, relax.”

The All-Star festivities are not designed to showcase goalies, so this weekend may not be the respite Shesterkin was looking for. But in a hugely important season for his future and the Rangers, Shesterkin has to find a way to get his mojo back.

(Photo: Bruce Bennett / Getty Images)