Rangers know score about Nash
LOS ANGELES— Chris Kreider raised his eyebrows, sharpish. He looked up at one of the reporters at his stall. He had a question of his own.
“So the question is,” Kreider said, “what can I do to help Rick Nash play better?”
The New York Rangers are down 1-0 in the Stanley Cup final, and the attention has naturally settled on the team’s highest-paid player. It’s been three whole games since Rick Nash scored a playoff goal, but he’s at three goals and 10 points in 21 playoff games so far. The questions are coming.
“Well, I think he’s going, first of all,” said Kreider, one of Nash’s linemates. “I think he played really well the other day, holding onto pucks, making plays. A couple bad bounces here and there as a group, but we think he’s going.
“Pucks aren’t always going to go in for you. No one scores every single game. That being said, you can have a really good game and not have a goal and an assist, a shot on goal. You can play really well, and be detail-oriented, and not show up in the stat sheet. You can also have a great game and have three goals and two assists.”
Nash is trending more towards the former than the latter, and in interviews he remains as studiously inscrutable as ever.
“The way I look at it — it’s so cliché but it’s the truth — you want to help the team any way you can to win games,” says Nash. “Am I supposed to score goals? Yeah, but we need everyone to score goals, myself included. “When you’re not scoring you have to help out other ways — penalty kill, defensively. It’s just the way it works when you’re on championship teams.” He allowed that he needs to get closer to the net, to establish more of a forecheck, to get better chances, but all that is just the things players say. Some trained observers have noticed that he seems to be tiring partway into shifts and into games; Nash is playing about three fewer minutes per game this year than he was last year with New York, in both the regular season and the playoffs. Part of it is just the expectations that come with what Nash has — his extraordinary combination of size and skill that have landed him on two gold medal-winning Olympic teams. “You say it like it’s a burden, like it’s a weight on his shoulders,” says Kreider. “He’s flying around. It’s not a burden. He doesn’t care. He knows when he’s playing well, and he’s playing well. That’s all there is to it. “You guys can say what you want, and fans can say what they want, but inside the room we know he’s leading us. He’s doing the important things that allow us to win games. If he wasn’t doing that, if he was just scoring goals, maybe you guys would say he was playing great. He’s playing really well.”