Two Wins Don't Build a Safety Net
The Rangers signed James Reimer to a professional tryout with their AHL affiliate this week. Read that sentence again. The franchise's answer to a season-ending Shesterkin injury — with Joonas Korpisalo already on injured reserve — is a veteran on a tryout deal in Hartford. That is not a backup plan. That is a placeholder dressed up as one.
Dylan Garand has earned the attention he's getting. The 24-year-old made 19 saves in his first start after Shesterkin went down, helped the Rangers beat Vancouver, and followed it with a win over Tampa Bay. Those results are real. But two wins against two opponents, with a 1–7 demolition at the hands of New Jersey sandwiched in between, is not a sample size that should comfort anyone. What it has done is give the organization cover to move slowly on a problem that demands urgency. Garand went from waiver wire to franchise starter in the span of days — that is not a succession plan, that is a fire drill.
The structural problem here isn't Garand's ability. It's what happens if he falters, gets hurt, or simply hits the wall that young goalies sometimes hit when asked to carry an impossible load. The depth chart lists Korpisalo as the nominal number one, but he's on injured reserve. Shesterkin is done for the season. That makes Garand, a goaltender the organization itself deemed expendable less than two weeks ago, the only NHL-ready option. The gap between him and the next available option is not a step down — it's a cliff.
This matters beyond goaltending. I wrote after the Shesterkin injury that the entire organizational architecture had collapsed in a single fall. The offensive numbers reinforce why the margin for goaltending error is essentially zero: Panarin finished the prior season at 1.09 points per game across 45 games, a rate that dwarfed everyone else on the roster. The next tier — Cuylle, Miller, Lafreniere — all finished in the minus column with 25 or 26 points apiece. This team went 12–23 in one-goal games last season, a 34% conversion rate that exposed a chronic inability to close. When the offense can't manufacture cushion, the goaltender has to be exceptional nearly every night. Asking that of Garand, with no viable relief valve behind him, is asking for something the organization has not earned the right to expect.
My read is this: the Reimer signing in Hartford buys the Rangers perhaps two or three weeks of plausible deniability before the question becomes unavoidable. If Garand struggles — and the 1–7 loss to New Jersey suggests the team in front of him is capable of catastrophic defensive breakdowns — there is no answer ready. The front office spent the offseason reinforcing the blue line and acquiring Korpisalo for exactly this kind of contingency. Both moves failed simultaneously. What's left is a 24-year-old who was nearly waived, backed by a tryout veteran in the minors, carrying a franchise that already couldn't score its way out of close games. The wins feel good. The math behind them does not.