Rick Nash ‘100 percent’ wants to be a GM in the NHL someday

Rick Nash’s phone beckons to him. He can’t wait to pick it up and start making calls. But he won’t. Not yet. The man has a code.

At 39, he’s preparing to embark on one of the most exciting journeys of his post-playing career. He’s been handed to the keys to Team Canada as first-time GM of their World Championship team for this spring. It’s almost time to construct his roster in hopes of helping his home nation defend its title. But there’s no way in hell Nash is dialling up all his prospective players with so much left to resolve in the NHL playoff races. The tournament is less than a month away, but he won’t contact anyone who isn’t mathematically eliminated from the postseason yet. The protracted race in the Eastern Conference, with so many teams still alive, makes his job difficult, he says.

That’s what makes the GM assignment for Worlds unique. You’re not dealing with a full deck of cards, and you don’t always know which cards you’ll have available until the last minute. On top of that, the first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs won’t end until less than a week before the Worlds begin, Nash explains, and he won’t be placing any calls to anyone still competing in Round 1. It would be bad juju.

“I just know how I would feel as a player if I had a GM of a World Championship call me when I’m in a Game 6 or 7, elimination game,” Nash said. “That would rub me the wrong way, so I feel like I come from a unique side where I can respect these guys and what they’re going through. A lot of these players are in their playoff push right now, and I can guarantee the last guy they want to hear from is a World Championship GM.”

It makes sense that Nash would be so sensitive to the feelings of a modern NHL player. He played 1,060 regular-season games and 89 playoff games in his 15-season career. He played for Canada at four World Championships, winning gold once, and three Winter Olympic Games, winning gold twice. He played NHL games as recently as 2018. He still wouldn’t be the oldest player in the league if he unretired today. So he has about as accurate a read on the player population as you can get from the management side of the sport.

Of course, there’s a reason Nash is still young enough to be an NHLer despite last playing six years ago, and it tugs at the heart strings. He largely delivered on the hype that surrounded him when the Columbus Blue Jackets picked him first overall in 2002, but his career ended early. He built a stellar resume, compiling 437 goals while playing in a low-scoring era and winning a Rocket Richard Trophy in 2003-04, and he played in the 2014 Stanley Cup Final as a New York Ranger. But no one would disagree that still had some good years left when post-concussion complications halted his playing days after the 2017-18 season.

Yet for Nash, that didn’t mean he walked away from the game grieving a loss, as some players justifiably have upon seeing their careers marred by injuries.

“I would say unfinished business, I would have loved to win a Stanley Cup, but I can say I played 16 years and 1,000 games, and hockey’s been very good to me,” he said. “It’s created this life for me that I’m very lucky to have, and it’s created a life for my three kids, too. I knew I was getting up there and in age and knew it was time to move on to the next chapter…I can spend time with my kids, and watching them grow up, there’s a lot of things I do now that I wouldn’t be able to do if I still played. So, retiring, it wasn’t something that stuck with me for a long time. I got over it pretty fast.”

The type of person who moves on from the end of a career as a pro athlete quickly: someone also already has a plan. And that’s what Nash was.

Roughly five years before his playing days ended, when he was still delivering peak prime years with the Rangers, he began dreaming about running a hockey team someday.

“I took an interest in how teams were built, especially once the cap came in, and you figure out that system,” Nash said. “Watching a lot of teams have success, myself being traded twice, I just always took an interest in that, and that’s how I figured out what I wanted to do post-career.”

Hey, reader: did that line from Nash immediately bring Steve Yzerman to mind? Apprenticing with NHL front office members later in his playing career so he could hit the ground running post-retirement and work his way toward becoming a GM? That’s exactly what Nash was thinking at the time. One of his first calls was to Yzerman, who was GM of the Tampa Bay Lightning at the time and had personally selected Nash for two Olympic teams. Nash went to work picking his brain. Nash pretty much sponged information from every hockey mind he previously played for, including Mark Hunter, his GM with the London Knights; Jeff Gorton, his GM with the New York Rangers; and Don Sweeney, his GM with the Boston Bruins. Beginning in 2019-20 came Nash’s two years as special assistant to Jarmo Kekalainen when he was GM of the Blue Jackets. Once Nash was officially part of an NHL front office, he was blown away by some of the things he learned.

“One of the biggest surprises was how much work these scouts put in,” he said. “A pro scout or an amateur scout, when you’re playing you don’t realize how much these guys travel, how much time they’re on the road and how big of a part they are to the organization. When you’re a player, you’re just so focused on the day-to-day stuff, like whether it’s a practice day or game day. Upstairs you see all the different pieces it takes to build the organization. Another thing was how long it takes some things to develop, whether it’s a contract with a UFA or RFA or even a trade. These things don’t happen overnight. It’s process, and players sometimes don’t understand that.”

Promoted to director of player development beginning in 2021-22, Nash has spent five seasons behind the curtain of an NHL organization now. He has re-established his roots with the team that drafted him. And that makes the 2023-24 campaign all the more punishing. Over the past two offseasons, the Blue Jackets won the 2022 free agent sweepstakes with Johnny Gaudreau; landed the No. 3 overall pick in the 2023 Draft and selected Adam Fantilli; made swashbuckling deals for blueliners Ivan Provorov and Damon Severson; and swung big on a risky coaching hire in Mike Babcock. Everything has blown up in the organization’s face. Gaudreau has been a bust as the lineup around him has constantly been at war with injuries. Babcock, embroiled in a controversy over looking at his players’ phones, didn’t even make it to Game 1 of the season before receiving his pink slip. Ownership finally had enough, and Nash’s mentor Kekalainen got the axe in February.

The franchise’s arrow was supposed to be pointing upward. What happened?

“I wish I had a clear answer for you,” Nash said. “There’s obviously been a few distractions. It’s hard watching it happen with an organization that I care so much about, that I feel I grew within as a player and now as a professional. But we have [president of hockey ops] John Davidson leading the way here, making decisions, and I truly feel like he’s a well-respected guy in the game and has [made] great moves along the way. It was obviously tough with Jarmo as he was the one that brought me in.”

As for how to fix what feels like a broken franchise: Nash believes it’s all about having the team’s young core grow together. That includes Fantilli, fellow centers Kent Johnson and Cole Sillinger and defenseman David Jiricek. Nash believes the organization has the right people on hand to mentor the kids. As a former No. 1 overall pick, he sees himself as uniquely qualified to guide a player like Fantilli who also jumped right to the NHL. And he has installed Derek Dorsett and Tommy Cross to work under him, two ex-players who had to fight their way to the NHL over a number of years and can be relatable role models for players on the farm club.

Nash has an answer seemingly for everything – in a way that comes across as genuine and sharp, not calculated. He has clearly already thought many of the Blue Jackets’ dilemmas through. Having absorbed wisdom from so many GMs, he carries himself like a man who wants to be one someday. And he leaves nothing to interpretation when asked if that’s his objective.

“Oh for sure, definitely my goal 100 percent is to rise the top of an NHL organization,” he said. “I’m putting my time in now. I’m trying to learn all the different aspects. When I was doing the special assistant [job], I did some pro scouting, I did some amateur scouting, did some NCAA free agency, CHL free agency. In my new position I’ve been doing development now for two and a half years, so it’s fun to grow within each position on the way up – so hopefully if I ever did get there someday I could understand the different positions inside the hockey ops. That’s my goal at the end of the day. I’m not in a huge rush to get there.”

For now, he has to stay in the present. That means focusing on Team Canada, which he says “only cares about one color” when it comes to the podium.

If he really wants that win, he knows whom he has to call, right? The kid has long been eliminated from the Stanley Cup playoffs. Punching in that Chicago area code won’t violate Nash’s rule.

So has he reached out to Mr. Bedard already?

“Connor’s going to be a special player for a long time in NHL, and not only in the NHL – he has an opportunity to be a huge part of, carry on his legacy with, Hockey Canada,” Nash said. “He’s starred at many different levels, including the World Juniors, so he’s definitely a player we will key in to have on Canada moving forward. Hopefully he can start his pro Hockey Canada career at the Worlds. He’s definitely going to be a player we’ll try to get.”

Perfectly worded: open about his interest in the player without confirming anything official just yet.

Somebody has already learned to speak like a GM.