Now this is a hat trick!
The Rangers, who rallied from a cold March into the NHL’s elite eight, might owe some of their recent good fortune to team owner Jim Dolan’s sense of style — in this case, his penchant for fedoras.
Back on March 21, Dolan, who also owns the Knicks, was in New Orleans playing with his band, JD and the Straight Shot, when he glided into a local haberdasher and spotted a fedora that scored his interest.
He knew the Rangers had been struggling at home — no wins in their previous six games at Madison Square Garden. And he was well aware of his team’s years-long tradition of plopping a black fedora on a game’s best player after a win. It’s called the Broadway Hat.
Spotting the beige incarnation — with a wider brim than the Broadway Hat and more structure in the top — he bought it. At some point, feathers of red, white and blue were added to mark the team’s colors.
Dolan sent it back to New York in hopes of changing the team’s fortunes.
“We were in a bit of a rut at home, and he wanted to change it up,” star goalie Henrik Lundqvist told The Post after Wednesday’s practice, a day after the Rangers won 4-1 over the Ottawa Senators to pull to within 2-1 in their series.
“It’s a nice hat — and it came in a nice box, too.”
The hat sat there for a while, until it was finally awarded to Mats Zuccarello on April 2 in a home win over the Flyers — and the Rangers have been skating well ever since.
Legend has it that the original Broadway Hat once belonged to a Swedish model — and that then-alternate captain Brad Richards bought it off her head for $100 in a club in Gothenburg when the team was overseas for a preseason game in 2011.
“Maybe,” smiling Swede Lundqvist said of that story.
After Game 3 Tuesday night, Mika Zibanejad was awarded the new hat.
Additional reporting by David K. Li