The next time the Rangers tell you they want to play five-on-five, show them a tape of this one and ask them to raise their right hands and testify to that once again and with a straight face. 

For this 4-3 victory over the previously 10-0-1 Panthers at the Garden on Monday was about as astonishing as it gets, with the Blueshirts outshot 35-7 and out-attempted 75-23 through 50:30 of five-on-five hockey on a night where Igor Shesterkin held back the tides of men with a scintillating 42-save performance while his team was outshot 45-18. 

“It was no fun watching that,” head coach Gerard Gallant said after the Blueshirts nearly frittered and panicked away the 4-0 lead they somehow carried into the third period on the strength of a power-play goal, a shorthanded goal and two four-on-four goals. “You win a game against an undefeated team [in regulation], a great team and you don’t feel good with that. 

“I’ll take the two points later but it’s not the way you’ve got to play hockey.” 

Much of the postgame analysis, such as it was coming from the coach and Mika Zibanejad, focused on the club’s follies while protecting the lead in the third period after having blown successive two-goal third-period leads in Vancouver and Edmonton last week before dropping both in overtime. 

“We’ve talked about being too passive and not sticking to our game plan and just playing with a lead,” Zibanejad said. “And after the two losses like that, I’m not going to sit here and lie and say that I didn’t have that in the back of my mind. 

“But you try and fight it off and work as hard as you can to close out the game. Again, we won. Let’s not forget that.” 

But maybe we can all agree to forget the third period in which the Panthers scored off the opening shift at 0:20 by barreling to the net and then got two more at 18:34 and 19:20 while buzzing the offensive zone and getting a chance to tie it before the game expired. 

“Shesty has been unreal. He’s been lights out,” said K’Andre Miller, who went coast-to-coast down the right side in toasting Mackenzie Weegar before driving to the net and going up top at four-on-four for a 3-0 lead at 12:48 of the second, 30 seconds before Ryan Strome made it 4-0. “We break down every once in a while but we all have faith in him that he’s going to have our back and make the big saves when we need it.” 

If Shesterkin had played like this last season in his first year as an NHL No. 1, David Quinn might still be behind the bench. But if the team had played like this last season, then no, he wouldn’t be. The Rangers have been outshot by an aggregate 189-108 over the last five games, or an average of 38-22. And these haven’t been shots from the perimeter. The Blueshirts are bleeding chances against. 

“We scored some pretty goals tonight but we’re still giving up way too much in the defensive zone,” said Gallant, whose team will get a needed breather before the next game Saturday in Columbus. 

Artemi Panarin had perhaps his most dynamic game of the year with the puck. Chris Kreider scored his ninth goal and sixth on the power play in picking up loose change for a 1-0 lead at 7:52 of the first before Adam Fox scored on a nifty backhand from the slot while shorthanded at 19:54 of the period. 

But even through the first period that featured scads of open ice at both ends, the Rangers were outshot 9-1 at five-on-five. Indeed, they were out-attempted 15-1 in the span between the two goals and went nearly 20 minutes without an even-strength shot on net. These lulls have constituted a pattern, though perhaps not to the extreme of this one. 

Barclay Goodrow moved from the right side of the unit with Kreider and Zibanejad to center Alexis Lafreniere and Julien Gauthier on the third line with Filip Chytil unavailable. The Rangers are saying Chytil is day-to-day with an upper-body injury suspected to be a concussion in the wake of his collision with Sammy Blais early in the first period on Saturday. Blais in turn moved up to right wing with Zibanejad. 

But line combinations are not the issue. The team’s five-on-five play is, even with this victory in which the Blueshirts had an xGF of 21 percent while the Panthers owned a 46-12 edge in scoring chances and a 19-6 advantage in high-danger chances, per Natural Stat Trick. 

Still, they won. Their 7-3-3 record may seem like an optical illusion, but then again there is a magician named Shesterkin in nets.