Right Winger Rick Nash is off to a fast start, with six goals and a game deciding goal in the shootout in his first five games. Could he finally be delivering the type of offense that the Rangers expected when they acquired him back in the summer of 2013?
Going back to last year, Nash played just three games before being side lined by a concussion. The injury seemingly held him back a bit, but he still took just twelve games to reach the six goal mark. In his first season on Broadway, it actually took him seventeen games to reach six goals.
If you go back to his final year with Columbus, it actually took him twenty two games to reach the six goal mark, though that wasn’t as bad as his rookie season, when it took him twenty six games to score his sixth goal of the season.
Prior to this season’s record mark of four games, his best start to the year was in 2007-08 when he scored six goals through the first eight games.
His four game goal scoring streak came to an end last night, two short of his career high of six games. He’s now had four plus goal scoring streaks on ten occasions in his career, including two stretches of five games back in the 2007-08 season.
It’s highly unlikely that Nash will be able to keep up this pace, after all we’re talking about just five games in an eighty two game season, but it’s certainly a promising start. His best scoring rate for a whole season is back in 2005-06, the year after the lockout. That year he scored 31 goals in 54 games, roughly four goals every seven games.
His best performance for the Rangers to date was his first year, when he recorded 21 goals in 44 games just under a goal every two games, that was his fourth best rate of his eleven seasons to date. Last year was his fourth worst, with a ratio of two goals every five games.
Providing he stays healthy, Nash would have to score at the following rates to achieve these goals:
10 goals – 1 goal every 19 games
15 goals – 1 goal every 8 games
20 goals – 1 goal every 6 games
25 goals – 1 goal every 4 games
30 goals – 1 goal every 3 games
35 goals – 4 goals every 11 games
40 goals – 4 goals every 9 games
45 goals – 1 goal every 2 games
50 goals – 4 goals every 7 games
55 goals – 7 goals every 11 games
Should be noted, that if he were to reach 55 goals, it would be a new Ranger record, surpassing Jaromir Jagr who scored 54 in the 2005-06 season.
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