This is Rick Nash’s history, and he is well aware of what might be coming.
The Rangers’ star winger followed up his hat trick from Saturday night in Florida with another big goal in Monday night’s 3-0 win over the Predators at the Garden, the team’s 11th win in the past 12 games. Nash has been open about how streaky he is when it comes to scoring streaks — and their subsequent droughts — and after two goals in his first 17 games of the season, it’s now four goals in the past two games.
So that sound you hear? That might be the floodgates starting to creak open.
“I think after you score a few goals, you feel better with the puck,” Nash said on Monday night, his team getting Tuesday as an off day before Wednesday night’s marquee Garden match against the first-place Canadiens.
“I went a long stretch there where I was getting frustrated that I didn’t score.”
Nash has gone through these ruts before, and he’s learned how to try to not let it affect the other parts of his game. But if Nash hadn’t exploded in Florida, then his play midway through the second period against the Predators would have been a lot different. Instead, with the puck on his stick as his team rushed up ice on a 4-on-1 advantage, Nash held it up the left wing and ripped a shot over Pekka Rinne’s right shoulder for a 1-0 lead.
“You know, usually you’re looking for a pass,” Nash said about the play. “But with the way I’ve been struggling, I looked up, saw the wide-open blocker side — I think he was cheating a little glove [side] — so I couldn’t pass up on that shot.”
In the words of coach Alain Vigneault: “There’s a hole there, and only a goal scorer can pick that hole against an elite goaltender like that.”
It gave Nash six goals now in the first 19 games, having missed two games earlier this month after his back locked up on him in practice. The Rangers (16-3-2) just continue to win no matter what kind of shape their game is in and no matter if Nash is scoring or not, but they are certainly a different team when big No. 61 is playing with this type of confidence.
“I’m so happy for him because he’s been working so hard and doing so many good things,” said goalie Henrik Lundqvist, responsible for so many of those wins with his exemplary start to the season.
“But obviously as a goal scorer, you want to score goals. I already could tell [Monday] morning in practice, just the way he was shooting the puck and around the net — he’s hungry, and I’m just happy for him.”
There were big expectations for Nash when he came to New York in the summer of 2012, then-general manager Glen Sather dismantling his young team and shipping up-and-comers off to Columbus in the hopes that Nash could be the one missing piece to a championship puzzle.
In Nash’s first season, the lockout-shortened campaign of 2012-13, he had 21 goals in 44 games. Almost half of them came in two segments — one four-game stretch in early March when he scored five times, and one five-game stretch in early April when he scored five times. They were supplemented by two different five-plus-game goalless droughts.
The same happened in 2013-14, when he had 26 goals in 65 games. Then, the month of December and early January had him scoring three times in 16 games, including a seven-game goalless streak, followed directly by a run in January when he scored 11 goals in 11 games.
Last regular season, he was a first-half Hart Trophy contender and finished with 42 goals in 79 games. He had six goals in the first four games of the season, nine in the first nine games — and one goal in a 10-game stretch in March.
Of course, no conversation about Nash’s goal scoring can proceed without mention of his postseason performances. That is the time when his streaks go only one way, and it’s the route of disappointment. He had one goal in 12 postseason games in 2013, when John Tortorella’s Blueshirts flamed out in the second round against the Bruins. He then had just three in the 25-game run to the Stanley Cup final the next season, and five in 19 games last season which ended in the conference final.
Which is not to say that he wasn’t contributing, just that he wasn’t contributing in the way that the Rangers thought he would — by putting the puck in the net. The streaks come and go, and now Nash and the Rangers hope this one will sustain for a while as they strangely continue to try to find their game amid a bevy of victories.
“He deserves it, the way he’s been working and making so many good plays,” Lundqvist said. “Now goals are coming, and it’s good to see.”