This was in mid-November, when Team Canada general manager Steve Yzerman and his advisory board gathered in Toronto to review the selection process for the squad that would go to Sochi, a meeting captured by CBC for the half-hour inside-access program, “Defending Gold — The Making of Team Canada” that debuted on New Year’s Day and is currently available on CBC.ca.
Yzerman, the general manager of the Lightning, brings up Rick Nash, who had played in the 2006 and 2010 Games, winning gold in Vancouver four years ago, and who has been a fixture in international tournaments since the 2002 World Juniors.
“Is Nash the same player as he was in 2010?” Yzerman asks rhetorically.
“That’s the question,” Detroit GM Ken Holland interjects.
“I guess that’s debatable,” Yzerman continues. “But every event we’ve been to, he’s been the best player.”
Yzerman guesses it’s debatable. Holland says that’s the question. Boston GM Peter Chiarelli chimes in to say in five games he has seen Nash this season, “he’s been bad.”
Yet, Nash is going to Sochi, joining Roberto Luongo as the only players on Team Canada for three straight Olympiads. He is going to Sochi when wingers Marty St. Louis, Logan Couture, Claude Giroux and James Neal are not.
He is going to Sochi, quite frankly, because of what he has done in the past for Canada and not what he is doing in the present for the Rangers.
This is well and good for our friends up north. This is not so well and good for the folks in New York.
Because as the Blueshirts prepare to meet the defending Stanley Cup champion Blackhawks Wednesday night in Chicago, it is clear Nash most certainly must be the player he was in 2010 if the Rangers are going to be anything more than the middling 21-20-3 outfit they are at the moment.
Maybe this honor will provide a boost to Nash, who has been more assertive in the last two games, and who played one of his better games of the year in Monday’s 4-3 shootout defeat to the Blue Jackets in which he recorded two goals after having scored once in his previous 11 matches.
“I always try to worry about right now. I wasn’t worrying about the roster,” Nash told The Post following Tuesday’s practice in Westchester. “I knew I wasn’t off to the fastest start and I’d been injured, and I knew that could affect my chances but it’s nothing I focused on.
“Now that it’s done, though, the trust that Team Canada’s management has put in my game and the way they’ve stood behind me, it’s definitely on me to show that they made the right decision.”
It’s also definitely on Nash to show the Rangers made the right decision in breaking up the Blueblood core of the team in trading for him following the 2011-12 season in which the 109-point Black-and-Blueshirts — how dated is that reference? — captured the Atlantic title and advanced to the conference finals.
The Rangers don’t have enough depth to succeed with Nash as ordinary as he has been thus far, having scored nine goals with nine assists in 27 games, and without providing a consistent presence.
Yes, there was the concussion that sidelined him for 16 games this season, the second brain injury he sustained in eight months as a Ranger, but Nash played forceful hockey upon his return from injured reserve, getting five goals in his first nine games and displaying an edge before somehow falling off a cliff the last month.
From Dec. 7 against the Devils, the start of the Rangers’ nine-game homestand, until this past Monday against the Blue Jackets, Nash has been passive and ineffective, mostly on the perimeter.
I told him on Tuesday I thought he hadn’t been aggressive enough.
“You’re trying to say I’ve been spending too much time on the outside, and I have,” he said. “Sometimes in the big picture you think that you’re effective on the outside, but I have to get to the inside and I know that.
“I know what I need to do here.”
The Rangers need Nash to answer Yzerman’s and Holland’s question in the affirmative. They need No. 61 to be the player he was in 2010. If he can’t be that, or close to it, then it will be the Rangers who are on the outside.