Recap: Bread & Shesterkin Lead Blueshirts Past Sharks

It is not every day you see a player beat a goaltender through the five-hole with a pass. And it is not every day you see a goaltender who came on the scene a month ago push his record to 9-1 in the National Hockey League.
Then again, it's not often you see a player with the skill set of Artemi Panarin, or the promise of Igor Shesterkin. But if you saw them on Saturday night you watched their brilliance carry the Blueshirts to another victory -- which is something, on the other hand, that the Rangers are becoming very much accustomed to.
Panarin set up a pair of goals with passes that had jaws dropping all around Madison Square Garden, Shesterkin turned in 44 saves to win for the seventh straight time, and Jesper Fast broke a third-period tie with his second goal of the night -- all of it propelling the Rangers to their latest victory, a 3-2, find-a-way win over the San Jose Sharks at the Garden.

The Blueshirts won for the third straight time, the seventh time in their last eight games, and moved to 10-3 since the All-Star break -- and now to within four points of the three teams sitting at the Eastern Conference playoff cut line. The Rangers will see one of those teams next, on Tuesday night, when they travel to Nassau Coliseum for the final time in 2019-20 for one last showdown with the Islanders.
That one is sure to have the kind of playoff feel that Friday's Ranger victory in Raleigh took on, right from the drop of the puck. Saturday's game was different: A Ranger team that was playing its eighth game in 14 days, and its 13th in 23 days since the All-Star break, seemed to be showing it in the first 30 minutes, and no one was claiming it was all that pretty once it was over.
"That's not the most important thing right now," said Mika Zibanejad. "The most important thing right now is to win the games and find a way to get two points. We did that today and now we move on."
"We just managed to win the hockey game, which you have to do," echoed David Quinn. "You're not going to play 82 great games. At this time of year, you've just got to find a way to win."
Panarin (nine games), Ryan Strome (eight games) and Zibanejad (seven games) all extended their point streaks for their streaking team, with Zibanejad scoring off one of Panarin's masterful passes and Strome assisting on both of Fast's tallies.
The ageless Joe Thornton scored twice for the Sharks, who fell to 0-2 on their four-game road trip despite a season-high 46 shots on goal. Four of those shots came from Evander Kane, who was returning from a three-game suspension but probably wishes he had gotten a fourth, because Shesterkin robbed him twice on breakaways and Panarin picked his pocket clean on the goal that erased the Sharks' final lead of the night.
Shesterkin's first save on Kane was with the catching glove, and it came on a shorthanded breakaway during a first period that the Rangers simply had to survive, and their goaltender had to get them through. Having finished a road trip with that high-intensity win in Carolina less than 24 hours before, the Rangers wound up being outshot 22-3 in Saturday's opening frame -- and yet retreated to their room for first intermission locked in a 1-all tie thanks to 21 stops from Shesterkin the first flash of brilliance from Panarin.
That came 9:35 in, when the Rangers' leading scorer got a pass from Strome below the left circle, saw San Jose's Aaron Dell coming out aggressively, and threaded one through the goaltender's pads that reached Fast in the crease with a vacated net in front of him.
"Probably one of the best passes I've seen -- five-hole on the goalie from the side, wide-open net," Fast said. "I've just got to thank him for that one."
Thornton answered with 2:05 left in the period, then put San Jose in front with a power-play carom off his skate 13:47 into the second. Less than four minutes after that, Kane was trying to move a puck behind his own net when Panarin came up from behind to sweep it not only away, but with one touch straight across the goalmouth to a waiting Zibanejad.
Zibanejad saw Kane preparing to round his net, and "I was actually on my way to meet him on the other side," Zibanejad said. "Then I see the poke from Bread, and the puck found me. That was nice."
It gave Panarin his 24th multi-point game this season and tied the score through 40 minutes, and "to have that opportunity to just win one period and leave with two points, it's huge," Zibanejad said. "We did a good job in the third."
Fast completed his first multi-goal game at 6:54. Off a Strome faceoff win, he drove the net as Jacob Trouba carried down the right wall, then when Trouba shot it, "Somehow I was alone in front," Fast said. "One, two, three whacks at it."
The third came as he was falling to one knee, but it popped over Dell (30 saves) and in before Brent Burns could bat it clear. It was Fast's third goal in the last two games and his 11th of the season, two fewer than his career high from two seasons ago.
"Any time he gets rewarded in that fashion you're happy for him, because he does a lot of the grunt work on that line," Quinn said of Fast. "And to get statistically rewarded is certainly a good thing for him and a great thing for us."
The great thing for the Rangers now is a rare two days in between games, leading up to their visit to the Coliseum. That begins a stretch of four games against opponents in the thick of the playoff race in the East, four games in which the Rangers will be looking for better starts than they had on Saturday. Or maybe just the same ending will suffice.
"We found a way tonight and now we turn the page," Zibanejad said. "We take the two points and we've just got to keep going."