Rumor: Rangers have decided which goaltender will be traded.

Rangers appear to have made their choice.

HockeyFeed
HockeyFeed
Published 4 years ago
Rumor: Rangers have decided which goaltender will be traded.
Dirk Shadd/Tampa Bay Times/Zuma

The New York Rangers have found themselves with quite the log jam in their net. The feeling coming into the season was that once again veteran netminder Henrik Lundqvist would take the reigns and would run as the team's starting goaltender all season, but the Rangers got an unexpected surprise in the form of Alexandar Georgiev.

The 23 year old Russian goaltender was meant to serve as a backup to Lundqvist but strong performances resulted in him getting more starts and that in turn resulted in other teams from around the league paying attention. At this stage of the season Georgiev has appeared in 20 games for the Rangers while Lundqvist has backstopped just 25, and Georgiev  has taken on that workload all the while putting up better numbers than Lundqvist thus far in the 2019 - 2020 National Hockey League regular season. Now things were all well and good when it was a goaltending tandem between the pipes for thr Rangers, but the introduction of 24 year old goaltender Igor Shesterkin has completely changed everything. 

No one knows for sure but there is a widely held belief that Shesterkin put his foot down this season and made it clear to the organization that he wanted to play at the NHL level. The young Russian is considered by many to be the future of the organization and after being called up he has demonstrated that those predictions may be correct. Through his first two games Shesterkin recorded a 3.01 goals against average and a .926 save percentage, a very strong start to his young NHL career. 

This of course has created a problem for the Rangers who can not keep 3 goaltenders at the NHL level at the same time, much less keep all 3 on the roster while giving them enough starts to keep them happy. As a result there has been rampant speculation that the Rangers are close to making a trade for one of their goalies, and over the weekend Sportsnet's National Hockey League insider Elliotte Friedman all but confirmed that. Friedman made it clear that the Rangers are now listening to offers for Georgiev, presumably indicating that they will be sticking with both Ludnqvist and Shesterkin moving forward. 

You can listen to Friedman's comments in the short clip below.


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