The Rangers got 56-plus minutes of solid work in Boston and still walked away with the kind of opener that leaves a bruise.
For most of the night, New York and the Bruins were locked in a tight, low-event game at TD Garden, with Igor Shesterkin bailing out the Rangers while Boston generated the better looks early. The score stayed 0-0 all the way into the third period, and the Rangers briefly looked like the more dangerous team after the intermission, pressing Jeremy Swayman and trying to force the first mistake.
That breakthrough never came.
Instead, the Bruins finally solved Shesterkin with 3:46 left in regulation when Fraser Minten scored his first goal of the season off a Mason Lohrei assist. Boston followed that 52 seconds later with another, as JJ Peterka finished a sequence set up by Hampus Lindholm and Elias Lindholm. Then, with the goalie pulled, the Rangers couldn’t keep the puck in the offensive zone, and Mark Kastelic added the final dagger 23 seconds later on assists from Minten and Marat Khusnutdinov.
What stings for New York is that the collapse came after a night in which the Rangers actually outshot Boston 24-23. The problem was what happened at the end of those chances: nothing. Swayman stopped all 24 shots he faced and picked up the 19th shutout of his career.
It was the second straight opening night that ended with the Rangers being blanked, and that’s not the kind of trend this team wanted to carry over after spending the offseason trying to boost the offense. Last season, New York was shut out more than any other NHL team, with 10. One game into 2026-27, they already have another one on the board.
The Rangers had just one power play opportunity and couldn’t convert, even though that was supposed to be a strength again with Pavel Dorofeyev joining the lineup opposite Mika Zibanejad. That makes the lack of scoring feel even louder.
One game after a condensed training camp is hardly enough to trigger panic, but the concerns are obvious. New York leaned hard on Shesterkin and the defense, and for most of the night, that structure held. In the end, though, they came up a few minutes short of a result and still left Boston with nothing to show for a game they were in almost all the way through.
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Fraser Minten supplied the deciding goal, and the way Boston closed out the opener only added to the sense that the roster may already be finding some traction. Jeremy Swayman backed it up with a shutout against a Rangers team that had chances but could not solve him, while Igor Shesterkin was forced to handle repeated pressure at the other end. For a club looking to learn quickly what its new additions can bring, this was about as clean a first look as it could ask for. [Read more 🡒]