COMMENTARY
No more crash and burn with Nash back in lineup
Thursday, January 12, 2006
BOB HUNTER
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This almost qualifies as a fairy tale. It is basically the story of a guy who drops a new engine in his ’87 Chevette, goes to bed and wakes up to find a new Ferrari in his garage.
It sounds ridiculous, but there are some real similarities to what’s happened to the Blue Jackets the past few weeks. The old Blue Jackets had the horsepower of a Chevette. Rick Nash is the new engine. And the new Blue Jackets? Well, they’re not quite a new Ferrari, but after the county fair demolition derby that people around here got used to watching, you’ll never convince anybody of that.
Whatever that thing is that’s now parked in the Nationwide Arena garage, it’s definitely no Chevette.
"I just kind of feel it coming around now," Nash said. "There’s been so many injuries and so many different line combinations . . . but it’s fun playing with Sergei (Fedorov) and it’s great playing with ‘Z’ (Nikolai Zherdev). It’s just taken time for us to click."
You know that stuff about how one guy shouldn’t make that much of a difference in a team game? Garbage. Since Nash returned 12 games ago, this group doesn’t look anything like those other guys.
Everybody got dreadfully tired of hearing that annoying "when Nash comes back . . . " tune when he missed 28 of the first 31 games. But it should be obvious to everyone now that it was more than just another lame excuse.
"You see him come back and he’s scoring every night for us," coach Gerard Gallant said. "He makes your whole team better because people have to pay attention to him and it gives other people more room on the ice."
Nash’s return didn’t just help the team, it made it a different team.
In the first 23 games, the Blue Jackets scored four goals once and never scored more. In 11 of those 23, they scored one or none. In the past 12 games — which coincidentally goes back to the game when Nash returned — they have been held to one goal once. The past nine games they have scored four or more four times.
The old Blue Jackets had to work their rears off to score a goal and rarely did. This team makes it look easy. "Goal scoring has gone up quite a bit since Nash came back," Gallant said, " . . . but other people are chipping in, too."
It’s almost insulting to call Fedorov and Zherdev "other people"; the line they share with Nash is starting to look scary good. Last night, Nash had a goal and two assists, Fedorov had a goal and two assists and Zherdev had a goal. On the team’s third goal, scored by Zherdev at 12:50 of the first period, they crisply moved the puck around on the power play as well as any group in the franchise’s young history.
The Blue Jackets have scored seven power-play goals in the past four games, another byproduct of Nash’s return. At one point early in the season, the success rate of the team’s power play was below 10 percent.
"The one thing we work on is the give-and-go, because he used to play sort of individually a lot," Fedorov said. "They used to see Nasher play one-on-one a lot and one-on-two, but now he dishes the puck off and our opponents don’t know what we’re trying to achieve. We’re getting better at finding each other in our offensive zone."
The 36-year-old Fedorov, who played all those years on some great Detroit Red Wings teams, obviously isn’t having any trouble enjoying this.
"It’s exciting," Fedorov said. "It really is."
It makes you stop and think.
Bob Hunter is a sports colum nist for The Dispatch
