Henrik Lundqvist might have played his last game with the Rangers

Have we seen the last of Henrik Lundqvist in a Rangers uniform?

The face of the franchise for the last 15 years, Lundqvist had slipped to No. 3 on the team’s goaltending depth chart, behind a pair of 24-year-old Russians, Igor Shesterkin and Alexandar Georgiev. But Lundqvist battled hard during the NHL’s COVID-19 pandemic pause to rebuild his game, and give himself a chance to fight for playing time when the Rangers restarted the 2019-20 season. And an unexpected injury (or illness) to Shesterkin gave Lundqvist the opportunity to play in the first two games of the Rangers’ best-of-five play-in series against the Carolina Hurricanes.

The 38-year-old Swede played well, but not quite well enough for the Rangers to win either game. As a result, the Blueshirts entered Game 3 Tuesday night in Toronto facing elimination, with a presumably healthy Shesterkin starting in goal.

“Obviously, he’s ready to go, and [whoever] we put in the net, we think they give us the best chance to win,’’ Quinn said.

Whenever the Rangers are eliminated, whether it was Tuesday, or in Game 4 Thursday, Game 5 Saturday, or at some other point in this postseason, the clock will start on the question of what to do with Lundqvist, the team’s all-time leader in goaltending wins and playoff appearances.

Lundqvist is under contract for one more season, at a salary cap hit of $8.5 million. Georgiev, an undrafted player who the Rangers signed after a tryout in 2017, will be a restricted free agent with arbitration rights. The Rangers likely would sign him and then would either trade him to make room to keep Lundqvist, or keep him to share the net with Shesterkin. If they do that, then they probably have to buy out the last year of Lundqvist’s contract.

Lundqvist surely will be the next Rangers great to have his jersey number retired to the ceiling at Madison Square Garden. A seventh-round draft pick in 2000, his arrival in 2005, after the NHL lost the entire ’04-05 season to a lockout, helped the Rangers end a seven-year postseason drought and return to the playoffs for the first time since 1997. He won the Vezina Trophy, as the league’s top goaltender, in 2012, and was the most important player on the team that made it to the 2014 Stanley Cup finals and won the President’s Trophy in 2015.

But the window closed on that era of the Rangers in February, 2018, when the team announced it would be going into a rebuilding phase, and subsequently shipped out many beloved veteran players in exchange for draft picks and prospects. Offered the chance to be traded to a contender, Lundqvist chose to stay with the team through its rebuild.

Staying with the Rangers may have been the romantic thing to do, but in a salary cap league such as the NHL, there is no room for romance, or sentimentality. Despite everything Lundqvist has done for the organization over the years – he’s been a marvelous ambassador for the team off the ice, too, and is a nominee for the league’s King Clancy Award this season – carrying him on the roster as a backup would be dificult, especially now that the league has agreed, because of the hard financial realities caused by the coronavirus, to keep the salary cap flat at $81.5 million for the next two seasons.

Lundqvist remains a capable NHL goaltender, one who can still be great at times, and who maybe could even still be good enough to win a Stanley Cup with a deeper, more Cup-ready team. But at this point in their careers, it is evident that Shesterkin – 10-2, with a 2.52 goals-against average and .932 save percentage after getting called up from the minor leagues in January – is better than he is.

So has Henrik Lundqvist played his last game for the Rangers? It’s quite possible he has.

By Colin Stephenson

colin.stephenson@newsday.comColinSNewsday

Colin Stephenson covers the Rangers for Newsday. He has spent more than two decades covering the NHL and just about every sports team in the New York metropolitan area.