Rangers Hold Their Breath as Igor Shesterkin Exits with Lower-Body Injury

The collective blood pressure of Manhattan just spiked. According to Daily Faceoff, New York Rangers star goaltender Igor Shesterkin had to be helped off the ice with a lower-body injury.

When your franchise goalie needs physical assistance to get down the tunnel, you stop worrying about the current game and start worrying about the next month. Shesterkin is the undisputed backbone of this roster, and any extended absence turns a Stanley Cup contender into a team fighting for its life on a nightly basis.

This disaster scenario went down during Friday night's road tilt against the Washington Capitals, a game the Rangers were trailing 2-1 at the time. Up until this point, New York had been rolling, coming off back-to-back multi-goal wins against Utah and the New York Islanders to start the October slate.

Losing a guy like Shesterkin is the kind of roster earthquake that immediately shifts the ground under the betting markets. You can practically hear the oddsmakers scrambling to adjust New York's win totals and futures. Going from a Vezina-caliber starter to a backup is like trading in a luxury SUV for a bicycle with a flat tire right before a cross-country road trip.

The Rangers are scheduled to host the Vancouver Canucks on October 11, which gives the medical staff a very short window to figure out exactly what went wrong. Until New York drops an official timeline, Rangers fans will be refreshing their feeds and hoping this looked a lot worse than it actually is.