MONTREAL — Because the Rangers won and because he wasn’t hurt, it was easier for Rick Nash to laugh about being speared in the groin by Canadiens defenseman Andrei Markov near the end of the 2-0 Game 1 victory in their first-round playoff series on Wednesday night at Bell Centre.
“It’s never fun taking one of those,” Nash said after Thursday’s practice, as his team prepared for Game 2 on Friday night. “Everyone knows how you get the feeling in your stomach afterwards, but it’s part of hockey.”
Markov was assessed a 10-minute misconduct, but there was no supplemental discipline coming down from the league on Thursday.
That didn’t seem to really bother Nash, either.
“It’s tough to say,” he said. “Everything happens so fast, it was at the end of the game. I don’t know if all four [officials] got a good angle, but obviously it’s on the replay a bunch. Everyone saw it. I have no opinion. That’s up to them. It’s up to the league. It’s up to the referees to make that decision.”
The one thing that shocked so many was that Markov did it right in front of the referees, who were standing near the goalmouth after a post-whistle scrum involving Mats Zuccarello and Brendan Gallagher. Asked if he ever had been speared right in front of an official, Nash was stumped.
“No, I don’t think right in front of the referee,” he said. “It’s definitely happened before, but yeah, it was strange.”
The 38-year-old Markov, an alternate captain who has spent his entire career with the Habs since they drafted him in 1998, isn’t known as a particularly dirty player. Yet sometimes in the heat of the moment, things happen. That’s something Nash understands.
“It’s playoff hockey, emotions are high,” Nash said. “You’re in a battle, you’re in a war, it’s tough, things happen in an instant.”
Of course, any time Nash comes up in the playoffs, his lackluster postseason production has to be brought up. It has been just one game this postseason, but his line with Jimmy Vesey and Mika Zibanejad was hardly a force Wednesday despite creating a few decent scoring chances. But Nash couldn’t name one chance he had that would be labeled “Grade A,” and that’s something he wants to fix.
“I need to get more, for sure,” Nash said. “You have to work that much harder when the playoffs come around to get your scoring chances and get your looks, as an individual and as a line and as a unit of five. So you have to be better to get more chances.”