After the Rangers closed out the Capitals with a win in Game 4 on Sunday night in Washington, Igor Shesterkin came out to speak to reporters, dressed to board the team bus, having already washed the first-round series off him.
The Blueshirts netminder was asked about his play right off the bat, and his response echoed the same sentiment heard around the visiting locker room as his teammates reflected on Round 1.
Instead of an evaluation of the team as a whole, however, Shesterkin’s was directed inward.
“I could play better,” he said stoically, “but what’s important [is] we won tonight and we won the series.”
That was the consensus among the players, who wouldn’t diminish the significance of completing a sweep but also recognized they didn’t have to be at their best to make it happen.
The Capitals made it into the playoffs by the skin of their teeth and that was apparent against the No. 1 seed in the Eastern Conference that qualified in March, considering the fact that the Rangers trailed for only 3:17 through the four-game series.
What’s to come will not be so straightforward.
What’s to come will require so much more.
In that regard, Shesterkin is built for this time of year.
The never-satisfied, always-self-deprecating star goalie holds himself to the highest of standards.
Despite going 4-0 with a 1.75 goals-against average, a .931 save percentage and picking up his 17th career playoff win to tie Dave Kerr for the fourth-most postseason wins in franchise history, Shesterkin said he wanted to give up fewer rebounds, play more confidently with the puck, as well as in the net.
Shesterkin was difficult to beat from close range.
He tracked pucks well all series long and launched a tape-to-tape pass to Artemi Panarin on at least two occasions in the series, but to each his own.
And after giving up the first goal for the second straight game in the third contest, Shesterkin went lights out and was impenetrable for the remainder of that Friday night affair.
“I think he was being hard on himself, if I’m being honest,” head coach Peter Laviolette said the day after Game 3. “If you watch that puck from behind the net and the camera behind the net, this is a knuckle/screwball that twisted midair by at least a foot. It started here and it ended up down here and it did catch [Mika Zibanejad’s] stick, which sent it into a motion, the puck.
“You don’t see that very often, but sometimes it does happen and that one had some serious movement on it. I think he was being a little hard on himself. I thought he played an outstanding game [in Game 3].”
The Rangers didn’t need their A-game to incense Tom Wilson and end the Capitals’ season, that was just a by-product of simply being the better team and not letting the Capitals instigator have the effect he once did over them.
They’ll surely take a page out of Shesterkin’s book and follow his lead as they prepare for Round 2 against the winner of the Hurricanes-Islanders series.
As far as how good he thinks this Rangers team can be, Shesterkin left it up to the imagination.
“We will see,” he said.
