After beating the Devils and Jets over the weekend, the Rangers lost to the Wild on Tuesday night. It was “one of those games” you can expect over an 82-game regular season.

Here are 10 thoughts on the Rangers.

1. The Rangers weren’t going to win every game for the rest of the season, and Igor Shesterkin wasn’t going to play every game for the rest of the season. After three straight wins over the Blues (5-3), Devils (3-1) and Jets (4-1) and three more wins to add to Shesterkin’s historic season, the Rangers were due for a letdown performance. Alexandar Georgiev was due to play at some point. Both of those things happened on Tuesday and the Rangers lost to the Wild 5-2.

Here is what I wrote about Georgiev nine days ago:

Georgiev isn’t Shesterkin. I don’t trust him and assume the worst for the Rangers when he’s in net. But that doesn’t mean he can’t be a starting goalie somewhere. It just means he’s likely unable to be the Rangers’ backup. It’s not easy to go weeks without seeing game action, like Georgiev does, and be expected to step in and play at your best. It’s an art, and it’s an art that Georgiev hasn’t come close to mastering and maybe he never will. When Shesterkin was out for an extended period of time and Georgiev was able to get consistent starts, he was at his best. But prior to Sunday (February 27), Georgiev hadn’t started since January 27.

Georgiev’s last three starts came on January 27, February 27 and March 8. That’s three starts in 40 days. I don’t expect anyone to be on top of their game when used that inconsistently, especially not someone who has been accustomed to starting or at least very regular playing time for their career. Georgiev was extremely shaky on Tuesday night when Ryan Hartman found the back of the net from the top of the circles to give the Wild a 1-0 lead and again when a fluttering Joel Eriksson shot beat him to give the Wild a 2-0 lead.

2. You now have to go back to January 8 for Georgiev’s last win (a 4-1 victory in Anaheim), and the Rangers have lost his last five starts (which came across eight weeks). Georgiev will only return to the goalie who at times made people question if he should be the heir to Henrik Lundqvist if he is to get consistent playing time. But that can’t happen and won’t happen with the Rangers over a full season. Not with how good Shesterkin has been, not just this season but in his career.

3. Barring a monumental collapse, the Rangers are going to the postseason. They could play under-.500 hockey for their remaining 25 games and still finish with 100-plus points. Because of this, and because their remaining 25 games will be played over 51 days beginning on Thursday, there’s going to be a lot of Georgiev over the final seven-plus weeks of the season. There are four back-to-backs left and only a handful of times are there two days of rest between games. It’s not outrageous to think Georgiev could play 12 games the rest of the way. Maybe even more depending on when the Rangers clinch.

4. The Rangers are going to need Georgiev to play and they are going to need him to play somewhat well to avoid the monumental collapse and to avoid having to overuse Shesterkin when they will need to ride him for hopefully an extended period of time beginning in May. Georgiev will get his chance to be the 1A some thought he might be to Shesterkin, and more importantly (for him), he will get a chance to show the rest of the league he could be some other team’s No. 1 for 2022-23.

5. Last week, I wrote that Shesterkin should not only win the Vezina (he’s going to), but also the Hart. Normally, you have to actually play to help your candidacy for league MVP, but the best thing Shesterkin has going in potentially winning both awards is not playing. The drop-off from Georgiev to him is startling and after Tuesday’s loss, the Rangers fell to 0-8-1 against teams currently holding a playoff spot when Shesterkin doesn’t play. They are 12-6-1 when he does.

6. While Shesterkin was sitting on the Rangers’ bench watching his backup allow as many goals as Shesterkin has allowed in his last three starts, Auston Matthews, who seems to be Shesterkin’s biggest competition for the Hart was scoring a hat trick in Toronto against the Kraken. Matthews leads the league in goals (43) and is fourth in points (75), but he’s having the same season that has been had many times in league history. Shesterkin is having a season that has never been had. Ever. And he’s single-handedly the difference between the Rangers being in the Islanders’ position right now or being where they are: headed to the postseason.

7. Shesterkin wasn’t the only important piece of the Rangers on the bench. Alexis Lafreniere found himself watching Ryan Reaves taking his playing time with Mika Zibanejad and Chris Kreider as the game went on. Yes, Reaves. Yes, playing top-six minutes over Lafreniere. Gerard Gallant decided a sloppy 30 or so minutes of one game against a very good home team was enough to screw with the lines and shuffle things to the point that a player who should more often than not be a healthy scratch is taking ice time from the first overall pick who has been scoring 0.50 goals per game over the last few weeks.

“They were playing the matchup game with their guys and I wanted Reavo to be on that side,” Gallant said. “Laffy did nothing wrong. Laffy has played great and I’m happy with him and I told him that. It was just the matchup for tonight and things will be back to normal.”

8. When Gallant made this inexplicable move, the Rangers were trailing. Not that it would have been acceptable or sensical if he had made the move to start the game or early in the game, but he waited until the game was essentially out of reach. Again, Gallant is extremely fortunate Shesterkin is having a season no one in history has ever had otherwise he would have to answer for a lot more of his decisions at more length than being able to brush them aside as final questions in his postgame press conferences.

9. Dryden Hunt scored, so that’s good. The goal breaks a 30-game drought. A 30-game drought for someone who plays top-six minutes and has Artemi Panarin as a linemate. It borders on the impossible of what Hunt just accomplished, but hey, that’s Gallant’s lineup. He can thank Shesterkin for being able to make decisions like that for nearly half a season.

10. In 163 games as a Ranger, Panarin has 215 points. He has averaged 108 points per 82 games and has done so with Hunt, Ryan Strome and Jesper Fast being his linemates the majority of the time.

Panarin should have been league MVP in his first season with the Rangers, the same way Shesterkin should be this season. In Panarin’s situation, while he was the league’s most valuable player, you could have argued the other finalists. In Shesterkin’s situation, you really can’t. And with each game Shesterkin does or doesn’t play, the argument against him becomes less valid.

The Rangers nearly followed up their disappointing weekend with a second straight disappointing loss. But after blowing a two-goal lead against the Blues in two minutes and 14 seconds, the Rangers rebounded to win a game against a tough opponent.

Here are 10 thoughts on the Rangers.

1. Alexis Lafreniere scored again on Wednesday. I don’t get it. I don’t understand how a former first overall pick could have so much success playing top-six minutes alongside two actual NHLers. It doesn’t add up. It’s almost as if playing under 10 minutes per game with fringe NHLers and career two-wayers isn’t productive to the growth and progression of a player with an elite playmaking skillset. Who would have known? Certainly not David Quinn last season, and certainly not Gerard Gallant for the majority of this season to date.

Lafreniere scoring yet another 5-on-5 goal since he isn’t allowed to play on the power play (it’s a rule not Gallant’s choice) means he now has has many 5-on-5 goals as Connor McDavid through their first 108 games. Luckily for McDavid he was drafted by a true last-place team and given top-line minutes and infinite power-play time right away, while Lafreniere has spent most of his NHL career playing third- and fourth-line minutes with players like Filip Chytil, Julien Gauthier and Kevin Rooney.

2. Ryan Strome scored his 12th of the season at 16:36 of the second, and the Blues had the Rangers right where they wanted them. Despite going on a Rangers-esque run by not having a shot for nearly 10 minutes in the first, a two-goal deficit against the Rangers was a good omen for the Blues, the way it has been for several other teams this season.

Igor Shesterkin had been perfect (yet again) through the first 37:30 of the game, but then the wheels fell off, and they fell off in seemingly a blink of an eye. For those at the Garden who wanted to get a headstart on the second intermission concession line or wanted to get in and out of the bathroom before the end-of-the-period rush, they missed out on watching the Rangers implode.

3. After Chris Kreider turned the puck over just outside the Rangers’ zone, the Blues quickly regrouped in the neutral zone. Brandon Saad and Ryan O’Reilly were able to evade the combination of a half-assed backchecking attempt by Mika Zibanejad and Ryan Lindgren coasting through his own zone to generate a 2-on-1 below the top of the circles. Saad made a nice pass around Adam Fox for O’Reilly to slide into the net.

4. One minute and seven seconds later the game was tied. Ivan Barbashev took a long outlet pass from Jordan Kyrou and broke down the left side, rifling a perfectly-placed shot over the left shoulder of Shesterkin. It was the only place Barbashev could shoot to potentially score from his angle and he did so.

Then with 16 seconds left in the second, Gallant had his fourth line on the ice against the Blues’ top line, and it wasn’t by accident as for the last week Gallant has opted to use his fourth line to defend against the opposition’s best line. Does it make sense? No. But neither does suggesting Filip Chytil should play like Mika Zibanejad, which is what Gallant did prior to the game.

O’Reilly camped out behind the net, an homage to Wayne Gretzky during what was a TNT-televised game. Fox, Lindgren and Ryan Reaves all got caught in the slot puck-watching like a trio of pylons and David Perron slid in to the left of Shesterkin untouched to bang in a one-timer from O’Reilly.

5. The three Blues goals came in a span of two minutes and 14 seconds and on three consecutive shots. Scoring on three consecutive in any game is improbable. Doing so against Shesterkin would seem impossible. It’s like Greg McKegg scoring a hat trick. Scratch that. It’s like McKegg scoring a goal.

6. New father Patrik Nemeth tied the game with 12:33 to go after Ville Husso found himself sprawled out on the ice out of the crease after from defending a Dryden Hunt-Strome partial 2-on-1. Nemeth sent a loose puck at the top of the zone toward the empty net to make it 3-3. (At that point the Rangers’ in-game money line was +105, and you better believe I took it.)

A little over four minutes later, the Rangers got a gift power play when Colton Parayko shot the puck over the glass for a delay of game. With 48 seconds left on the man advantage, Gallant wisely called a timeout to give his first unit a rest and a chance to score the go-ahead goal. The timeout worked brilliantly as Artemi Panarin took the puck to the left half-wall and fed Fox for a one-timer. Kreider beautifully tipped in Fox’s shot to give the Rangers the lead.

7. After assisting on the Strome and Fox goals, Panarin scored one of his own, an empty-netter to put away the Blues and clinch a 5-3 win. It was Panarin’s 80th home game as a Ranger and the 38th time he has posted a multi-point game (47.5 percent). Jaromir Jagr had 47 multi-point home games in 138 games as a Ranger.

8. There was a lot of talk on TNT on Wednesday night about whether or not the Rangers should “go for it” this season and trade away some of their abundance of assets and use up some of their abundance of cap space. The answer from everyone should be an unequivocal yes. The Rangers haven’t reached the postseason in five years. (Sorry, the 2020 bubble doesn’t count.) It’s been four years since The Letter. Just because they have experienced an inordinate amount of success this season (thanks single-handedly to Shesterkin) doesn’t mean it’s going to happen again next season. The Rangers wouldn’t even have to regress as a team in 2022-23 to not be a postseason team. They would just have to have Shesterkin be a superstar rather than have one of the best seasons a goaltender has ever had in the history of the league.

When given an opportunity like the Rangers have, a team should always “go for it.” There’s no trade or roster shuffle that will guarantee the Rangers anything in the postseason, but not doing anything will enhance their chances at a short-lived postseason even if Shesterkin continues to play at an unprecedented level all spring and into the summer.

9. There’s no guarantee because there’s no postseason series in the East that will be anything other than a tiring battle, and there isn’t one team in particular any of the eight teams in the conference would want to play in any round. Whichever team comes out of the East this season will have truly earned it. It won’t be like three years ago when the Bruins were able to get by the Maple Leafs and then had a Blue Jackets team who had just won their Stanley Cup by sweeping the 1-seed Lightning, followed by facing a young Hurricanes team that arrived early and was more occupied with planning their next postgame center-ice celebration. The Rangers don’t have the fortune of playing in the West where six of the eight teams currently holding a playoff spot have as many or fewer points than the East’s current 8-seeded Capitals.

10. There will never be a perfect time to go for it. Now is as good of a time as any and as good of a season as any for the Rangers to “go for it.” They aren’t a juggernaut or the juggernaut in the league because right now there really isn’t one, unless you consider the Avalanche to be that team, when this Avalanche core hasn’t won anything and has lost in the second round for three straight years. It’s unfortunate the Rangers’ rebuild has coincided with the Hurricanes evolving into a force, the Penguins retooling on the fly, the Panthers emerging as a contender and the core of Maple Leafs entering their prime. Not to mention the Lightning coming off a second straight championship and sitting atop of the Atlantic.

The Rangers will always be able to find a reason to not go for it or to wait until their young roster is a little older or a little more experienced, but they would be doing themselves and their fans a disservice.

The weekend (well, including Thursday) started out promising for the Rangers. But after their most complete win of the season against the Capitals, they were shut out by the Penguins and outplayed in a disappointing loss to the Canucks.

Here are 10 thoughts on the Rangers.

1. Igor Shesterkin is going to win the Vezina. If he doesn’t then the entire process for selecting the best goalie in the game needs to be rethought. But for as easily as he will win the Vezina is how easily I truly believe he should win the Hart.

What Shesterkin is doing in net for the Rangers is something Henrik Lundqvist never did, and Lundqvist was the top goalie of his era. That’s because what Shesterkin is doing has only ever been done once … in history. Shesterkin has a .941 save percentage this season and with a minimum of 30 games played, that feat has only ever been accomplished by Jacques Plante.

2. Here are the numbers from Domenik Hasek’s back-to-back MVP seasons:

1996-97: 37-20-10, 2.27, .930

1997-98: 33-23-13, 2.09, .932

(Hasek’s best season was actually in 1998-99 when he didn’t win the Hart: 30-18-14, 1.87, .937)

Here are Shesterkin’s numbers from this season:

2021-22: 25-6-3, 1.95, .941

3. To me, the Most Valuable Player is the player whose team’s season would have been drastically different if they were removed from the roster. Sure, Connor McDavid, Jonathan Huberdeau and Auston Matthews are all having great seasons, but Shesterkin is having a historic season and if you remove him from the Rangers, you get a lot of games like you got on Sunday night in the team’s 5-2 loss to the Canucks. When Shesterkin was injured in early December, the Rangers 4-3-1, and their four wins came against 25th-, 29th- and 32nd-ranked teams in the league. The Rangers are 11-5-1 against current playoff teams when Shesterkin plays and 0-7-1 when he doesn’t. They are 25-6-3 when he’s in net and 8-9-2 when he isn’t.

Like Lundqvist did for 15 years, Shesterkin is single-handedly carrying the Rangers to success, has them third in the Met and headed to the (real) postseason for the first time in five years.

4. Thursday’s 4-1 win over the Capitals was the Rangers’ most complete and impressive win of the season. Between the Rangers getting four goals from four different sources and all coming in 5-on-5, and Shesterkin stopping 36 of 37 shots in yet another masterful performance, it was as good a win as the team will have all year.

“I thought we had a lot of chances,” Capitals coach Peter Laviolette said after the game. “Some of them were good looks, chances that you want to get, redirects, partial breakaways, shots right through the slot … we just couldn’t beat him (Shesterkin), not tonight.”

Not on most nights, Pete. It’s OK, the rest of the league isn’t really beating him either. Unfortunately, Shesterkin lost the shutout bid with 1:02 left in the game on a goal from Alexander Ovechkin, of course.

5. Alexis Lafreniere had a goal and an assist against the Capitals as he continues to shine playing with Mika Zibanejad and Chris Kreider, despite playing on his off-wing. It’s hard to believe the 2020 first overall pick is experiencing success playing top-six minutes and playing with actual quality NHLers. Lafreniere has four goals in his last eight games with his top-shelf blast from Sunday night against the Canucks on a feed from Zibanejad being the highlight of those four. He’s now on an about-20-goal pace over 82 games and that’s with having played less than 10 minutes in six of his 51 games played this season and less than 12 minutes in 14 games, and close to zero power-play time. Only 16 players in the NHL have more even-strength goals than Lafreniere since the start of last season.

When Kaapo Kakko returns, I need:

20-93-13
10-16-24

It has to be that and it has to stay that.

6. The Rangers’ loss to the Canucks on Sunday was disappointing because they couldn’t finish for a second straight day. (At least not until they were already down by four goals.) The Rangers were outplayed for the first five-or-so minutes of the game before dominating the the rest of the first period. If not for Thatcher Demko playing like Shesterkin, the Rangers could have cruised in the second and third to an easy win. But for the second consecutive day, the Rangers got the absolute best from the opposing goalie and eventually the Canucks got to Alexandar Georgiev the way every team does, and the Rangers didn’t respond until it was too late.

Georgiev isn’t Shesterkin and I don’t trust him and assume the worst for the Rangers when he’s in net. But that doesn’t mean he can’t be a starting goalie somewhere. It just means he’s likely unable to be the Rangers’ backup. It’s not easy to go weeks without seeing game action, like Georgiev does, and be expected to step in and play at your best. It’s an art, and it’s an art that Georgiev hasn’t come close to mastering and maybe he never will. When Shesterkin was out for an extended period of time and Georgiev was able to get consistent starts, he was at his best. But prior to Sunday (Feb. 27), Georgiev hadn’t started since Jan. 27. An entire month between starts. The Canucks’ goals Georgiev “would want back” aren’t so bad when you consider the layoff he just went through.

7. I don’t know who’s more fortunate: Greg McKegg who has gotten in the lineup 33(!) times this season or Dryden Hunt, who continues to play in the top-six and on a line with Artemi Panarin. (Poor Panarin. On a line with Hunt and Ryan Strome and he’s on a 96-point pace.) Neither makes sense, especially since Filip Chytil was an inexplicable healthy scratch on both Saturday and Sunday. Not that Chytil and Hunt play the same position, but a lineup spot is a lineup spot, and if Chytil isn’t going to be in the lineup over either of those two or Morgan Barron then I’m not sure what we’re doing here.

When asked after Saturday 1-0 loss to the Penguins why Chytil didn’t play, Gerard Gallant said, “He was fine. He’s fine. Just that the team played really well the night before.”

With the team coming off the most impressive win of the season, it’s understandable to not want to change things up. I get it. (But it’s not like McKegg or Barron had some significant impact on the win.)

8. But then the Rangers lose to the Penguins. Not only lose, but are shut out. (And yes, it took Tristan Jarry having the game of his life for the Rangers to be shut out, but it also took another heroic Shesterkin effort to keep it a one-goal game.) The Rangers don’t score a goal on Saturday, and Gallant stays with the same lineup on Sunday?

Gallant has done a lot of the same, if not the exact same things that David Quinn did as coach of the Rangers that led to his dismissal. Because the Rangers currently hold a playoff berth and would have to endure a catastrophic finish over their remaining 29 games to miss the postseason, a lot of the decisions Gallant makes get to fly under the radar because of Shesterkin’s play. That doesn’t make it OK. It makes it worse. McKegg can’t be in the lineup. Lafreniere can’t be removed from the top six. Kakko has to be in the top six when he returns. And whatever those late-game decisions against the Penguins were on Saturday can’t happen.

9. The first of those late-game decisions was putting the fourth line on the ice with 9:32 remaining and an offensive-zone faceoff coming out of a TV timeout. The second was going back to the fourth line for another offensive-zone faceoff with 6:05 remaining. Did Gallant think some set play off the draw with that unit was going to lead to the game-tying goal? Did he think his fourth line would give his team the best chance to tie the game? He likely did it because he spent the weekend playing the fourth line against the opposition’s best line, and while it worked out on Thursday, it can’t be a consistent strategy since it will lead to the Rangers’ fourth line leading the team in time on ice. And it can’t be a strategy when trailing by a goal and less than 10 minutes left in the game.

10. I like Gallant. It’s easy to like him coming off of Quinn. But they are very similar in their lineup decisions, and if not for Shesterkin, Rangers fans would be wondering why a coaching change was even made.

Yes, Gallant has gotten an overall pass because the Rangers are having a fantastic season, even though the underlying numbers suggest they would be having more of an Islanders-type season if  Shesterkin was even above average rather than being otherworldly.