USING HIS HEAD

Nash Smartly considers retirement after multiple career concussions

IT ISN’T like it was back in the day, when writers were part of a team’s traveling party, hung out at the local watering hole with players and their wives or girlfriends, and got to know the people we covered pretty well.

Now, we get snippets. Five minutes here and there in the room. Mass interviews. It is impossible to imagine players even entertaining the notion of socializing with members of the press. They live in their world, we live in ours. This is not a complaint, just a fact.

Even still, I can safely state that Rick Nash is one of the best guys I have been around in four decades of covering and working in the NHL; a genuine, caring individual.

It is for that reason that I was relieved to learn that No. 61, multiply concussed over the past six seasons, has deferred a decision on whether to continue his career while he tends to his health.

You will recall Nash, who will become a free agent at noon on Sunday, suffered another brain injury after being traded to Boston, on a Cedric Paquette blow to the head on March 17. He missed the remainder of the regular season, returned for the playoffs, and, predictably was ineffective while playing primarily on the perimeter.

Nash’s career was never the same after he came to the Rangers from Columbus over the summer of 2012. He was not the missing link. But it was never the same because he was concussed very early in the lockout-delayed 2012-13 season, when Milan Lucic gratuitously slammed Nash’s head into the glass in Boston while finishing a check. It was never the same after Nash took a headshot from San Jose’s Brad Stuart a week into 2013-14.

Except for this. When Nash returned the season following that agonizing 2014 playoff run to the final in which he almost impossibly scored a mere three goals on 83 shots in 25 games, he was revived. He was confident. We talked about the effect of his prior concussions and their impact on his life away from and on the ice. He talked about placing hockey — his job — in perspective with his family life.

And then, for the first four months of the year, he was as dynamic a player as he’d been at any time through his career. He carried the Presidents’ Trophy-bound Rangers through the winter, driving to the net, scoring almost at will, dangling and dazzling night after night after night. He had scored 36 goals in 56 games and was the Hart Trophy leader in the clubhouse.

And then, 14:35 into the first period in Buffalo on Feb. 20, 2015, he was roughed up upside the head in front of the net by Sabres defenseman Zach Bogosian. Though no concussion was diagnosed and Nash only missed one game thereafter, that was pretty much that for No. 61, even though he did score on a one-timer from the slot in the second period of that game in Buffalo. After getting 37 goals in 57 games, he finished with 42.

And though his Game 4 of the conference finals at Tampa Bay, in which he recorded two goals and added an assist, arguably represented the most imposing playoff performance of any Rangers skater of the byegone era, he and the team fell short. The remainder of his career on Broadway was in and out. The NHL is deficient in its approach to head shots. Everyone knows that. I have been writing for more than a decade — since Eric Lindros was a Ranger — that there should be no such thing as a legal hit to the head. Headhunters should be expelled from the league. But athletes, too, have responsibility to take care of themselves. The gray matter is no gray area. Nash may decide at some point during the season that he is prepared to resume his career. That is no sure thing. The sure thing is that a good guy, one of the best guys, was willing to — what’s the cliché? — put hockey into perspective. And when I learned, the news, I was relieved. ➤ So it’s going to be eight years for Drew Doughty after eight years for John Carlson and a presumptive eight years for Oliver Ekman-Larsson. It will be eight years for Erik

Karlsson if he is traded and signs an extension before hitting free agency next summer.

But the league, and according to no one but the league during Owners’ Lockout III in 2012-13, couldn’t survive all those fiveyear contracts. All the NHL had to do to outlaw front-loaded deals was apply a 50-percent rule as to variance within the contract — that is, no one season’s pay could be less than 50 percent of the highest year’s salary. So if a guy earned $8 mil- lion one year, he could not make less than $4 million in any year of the deal.

But no. So now it’s eight years or bust. And the league is managing to survive very, very well.

➤ Pending John Tavares’ decision, the two most accomplished players to become free agents relatively close to their prime were, 1) Scott Niedermayer and 2) Zach Parise. Both played for Lou Lamoriello. Niedermayer left to play with his brother, Rob, in Anaheim. Parise left to go home to Minnesota.

Zdeno Chara, though, is the most impactful free-agent signing in NHL history. Remember, following 2005-06, the Senators offered pending free agents Chara and Wade Redden hometown discounts. Redden accepted a two-year deal for $6.5 million per. Chara did not and thereafter signed for five years at $7.5 million per with the Bruins. Martin Brodeur, Martin St. Louis and Willie O’Ree were automatic Hall of Fame selectees. Gary Bettman, though perhaps controversial in light of his activities as Canceler in Chief and his stance on CTE — check out the estimable Kevin Dupont’s Sunday piece in the Boston Globe on that topic — his election is not offensive.

The induction of Bruins’ owner, “Mr. Jacobs,” a year ago, now that was offensive.