New Ranger Holden steady presence on ‘D’
Rangers coach Alain Vigneault might not have known exactly what he was getting when he was alerted just after June’s NHL draft in Buffalo that his team had traded a fourth-round pick for Colorado defenseman Nick Holden.
But then his phone rang, and Patrick Roy, then still the Avalanche coach, explained.
“It was funny, we were coming back from Buffalo, I got a call as I got off the plane in Ottawa from Patrick Roy saying to me, ‘You just got one of my better defenseman,’ ” Vigneault remembered after his team’s Tuesday practice in Tarrytown, another one in which Holden was on the right side of the top pair, matched with captain Ryan McDonagh, likely where he will start Wednesday night against the Bruins at the Garden.
“I talked to [Roy] about it at that time, ‘ How do you see him?’ ” Vigneault said. “He told us he could be anywhere from a fourth to a sixth defenseman on a good team, depending on where his game was. The way Patrick had de- scribed him to me is what I’ve seen — safe, dependable, and not very flashy. But he’s got a good stick. He’s not overly physical, but he gets in the way. So, he’s worked out real well for us.
“And I don’t know why Pat called me out of the blue.”
It wasn’t long after Roy abruptly resigned as the Avalanche coach in August that Vigneault found out what he was talking about. Once the 29-year-old Holden got to training camp, he wasn’t turning heads with any of his skills, but was garnering respect with his defensive stability.
In Colorado, the lefty-shooting Holden played mostly on the left side with the talented Tyson Barrie, necessitating defensive awareness on his part to cover for the at times overaggressive Barrie. With McDonagh, that of- fensive skill is still there, but Holden doesn’t have to worry about covering for the Rangers’ captain in his own end.
“The role I’m playing isn’t much different than what I was playing in Colorado,” Holden said. “The skill is there [with McDonagh], so I knew what to expect playing with a guy like that. It’s nothing that I haven’t played in my career, it’s just getting used to playing on right side consistently.”
Through the first six games of this season, Holden has averaged 20:51 of ice time per game, third most for a defenseman on the Rangers behind McDonagh (25:15) and Marc Staal (20:53). Holden got his opportunity to move up to play with McDonagh when righty Dan Girardi got hurt in a 3-2 loss in St. Louis on Oct. 15. After missing three games, Girardi returned for Sunday’s 3-2 win over the Coyotes, but he was somewhat eased back into the lineup on the third pair with rookie Brady Skjei.
It seems Vigneault’s preference would be to have Girardi on the top pair with McDonagh, but right now it’s hard to move Holden down when the team has won two in a row and is atop the early Metropolitan Division standings at 4-2-0.
“He’s a real talkative guy, which is great, you want to hear that communication on the ice,” McDonagh said of Holden. “Another guy that’s pretty mobile, especially backward skating.”
Of course, the Rangers are coming off a season when a strength of their team — defending — became a weakness. Although much of the talk has been about how fast and offensively explosive they have looked, the fact they are stout in their own end again is equally encouraging — and that is due in part to the steadiness of Holden.
“This team has been so good for so many years, so to be able to jump in and have an opportunity to play with McDonagh and play some big minutes is something I’m excited about,” Holden said. “When you come to a new team, you want to be able to contribute and help in any way possible. So to see me helping that way is awesome.”