What if Rick Nash won a Stanley Cup with the New York Rangers?
Rick Nash‘s impact in New York
Rick Nash immediately brought a bucketload of star power to the New York Rangers, and he instantly made the Blueshirts a better team after coming off a 30-goal season with the Columbus Blue Jackets the year before.
The Rangers were on the cusp of greatness having reached the Eastern Conference Final in 2011-12, and they saw Nash as the final piece of the puzzle when it came to charging across the finishing line and winning a championship.
And Nash didn’t disappoint when it came to his production in the regular season. He tallied 21 goals and 42 points in his first year for the Rangers despite that being the lockout-shortened 44-game 2012-13 season, going on to record a total of 252 points (145 goals, 107 assists) in 375 games.
Nash played a solid 200-foot game for the Rangers and he used his unique and deadly combination of speed and size, acceleration and power to excel, regularly crashing the net and acting as a physical net-front presence for his team.
He drove play in the offensive zone and had the power to conjure a magical moment out of nothing.
He was a key figure on the penalty kill due to his powerhouse style of play, and he put up totals of 124 blocked shots, 454 hits and 276 takeaways during his time with the Rangers. In other words, he was dominant in both zones and put his 6’4″ and 211 pound frame to good use.
However, the one major drawback of playing such a physical game was the brutal impact it had on Nash’s body, with the two-way forward failing to reach the 80-game plateau for the Rangers at all in six years in New York, let alone play a full 82-game regular season schedule.
That was one of the major criticisms of Nash’s time in New York along with his failure to really come up clutch in the postseason. The Rangers had two significant bites of the apple to win a Stanley Cup with Nash on the roster, in 2013-14 and 2014-15.
The Rangers were of course defeated in five games by the LA Kings in the 2014 Stanley Cup Final – sorry to bring that up again – while they were beaten by the Tampa Bay Lightning in the Eastern Conference Finals the following year.
During those two deep postseason runs, Nash totaled 24 points (eight goals, 16 assists) including just 10 points in 25 games the year the Blueshirts were all so close to getting their hands on the Stanley Cup.
That wasn’t what the Rangers were either expecting or hoping for when they took on his hefty $7,800,000 a year salary.
As a result, Nash’s legacy as a New York Ranger is tainted by the fact that he didn’t go on one of those super-human runs in the playoffs when he put his team on his back, and there were a notable lack of clutch plays from the wing in the postseason.
However, how would Rick Nash be viewed by Rangers fans if he did propel his team to immortality by winning the greatest prize in all of sports?
Let’s go back in time and see if we can change history…