'He's a different dude — and it's great': Rangers' Chris Kreider continues to evolve, and surprise, in his 10th season (2024)

Rick Nash remembers the first time he realized his young linemate and teammate was cut from a different cloth.

“We were on a three- or four-game losing streak,” Nash says. “We were in Ottawa. We were all sitting in the lobby of the hotel, waiting for a meeting. It was pretty quiet. Then you hear this piano playing — a really haunting piece.

“And it’s Chris, sitting there playing. It was amazing. Like a scene from a movie.”

Ask around the NHL and this is the type of story you’ll get about Chris Kreider — talented, respected, slightly mysterious.

As far back as 2013, now-retired goaltender Evgeni Nabokov sat in the locker room after a Rangers-Islanders game, musing in his animated way to no one in particular: “That No. 20, he speaks Russian?”

Asked how good Kreider’s Russian was, Nabokov put on a slightly impressed face. “Actually, not that bad.”

No one on the current Rangers team is anywhere close to playing as many games in a red, white and blue sweater as Kreider, who will crack 600 games as a Ranger sometime in the coming weeks (he’s at 593) and is leading more than ever before. At the rate he’s been scoring, off to the hottest start of his 10-year Rangers career, it also won’t be long before he gets his 200th goal for the team (he’s at 192, with 15 already this season).

He’s been here his entire professional life, bursting onto the scene in the 2012 playoffs and remaining a consistent contributor since, yet there has always been an air of the inscrutable around Kreider. There are times he’s left Rangers fans — and possibly one or two of his coaches — wanting more. But few know a whole lot about the most senior Ranger.

“I think he prefers it that way,” Nash says.

“He is who he is,” says Greg Brown, Kreider’s coach at Boston College and for three seasons with the Rangers. “He will definitely surprise you if you think he’s just a one-trick pony.”

Garnet Hathaway was just starting his second year at Phillips Andover, the tony prep school in Massachusetts when Kreider arrived. They were two of the best hockey players at the school, but there was more to their friendship than just being high-level teenagers.

“He introduced me to the idea that you could work that hard at doing something you loved,” Hathaway says. “That was in 2007, and I don’t think that’s changed for him one bit since. He was always an interesting guy to be around, but the thing that stuck out from the beginning was how dedicated he was to hockey — to the work you have to put in.”

Those Phillips teams were not exactly filled with superstars. Kreider became a known quantity, and colleges were heavily recruiting him all three years he spent there. The other two “name” players on the team were Hathaway, who has carved out a solid bottom-six forward career in Washington after going undrafted and playing four years at Brown, and Bobby Farnham, another grinder who went to Brown and had a penalty-minute-filled decade in the pros before retiring in 2020.

“We were not fun to play against,” Kreider says.

For Hathaway not only were the seeds of Kreider’s hockey habits already planted in high school, but so were his friend’s other interests. “He started Russian back then,” Hathaway says. “When he finds something that interests him, he really invests in it. It’s not just a hobby. He’ll read books. He’ll ask questions. I don’t think he started learning Russian just so he could tell his friends, ‘Hey, here’s three words I know.'”

And the lessons about their shared interest in hockey have stayed with Hathaway.

“At Phillips, you play a sport each trimester, so Chris played lacrosse in the spring,” Hathaway says. “He’d have a full lacrosse practice and then meet me in the gym to work out, and it was like he’d been doing nothing all day. We made it competitive. There were never excuses. And it was the best thing for me. I feel lucky that I got to be around him every day.”

The Rangers selected Kreider 19th overall in 2009, and he started at Boston College that fall. It was a powerhouse team loaded with talent and personalities. The late Jimmy Hayes was there, joined in Kreider’s sophom*ore year by his brother Kevin. Cam Atkinson was on that team. And a skinny little freshman named Johnny Gaudreau joined in 2011-12, the year Atkinson left for the NHL.

“Chris just did his job, put in the work and really kept to himself,” says Brown, a longtime assistant under Jerry York who recruited Kreider starting in his first year at Phillips. “He was never really the center of attention in that room. It would have been difficult to do even if he wanted to. We had a great mix of personalities.”

And Kreider produced. He had 15 goals as a freshman, including one in a lopsided 5-0 NCAA championship game victory over Wisconsin. He also played in the 2010 world juniors on the U.S.’s gold-medal winning squad, alongside future Rangers teammate Derek Stepan.

As a junior, Kreider led BC with 23 goals and the Eagles romped to another NCAA title. Within a week of the championship game, he was in a Rangers uniform, playing in the opening round of the playoffs against the Senators. And playing for John Tortorella.

“Torts and (assistant) Mike Sullivan were incredible for me,” Kreider says. “A lot of details about being a pro.”

The Tortorella-Kreider relationship was a bit fraught at times, especially the following, lockout-shortened season. Kreider spent the lockout part in Hartford and only played 23 of the Rangers’ 48 games, primarily in the name of development.

“I think there was a little too much made of there being a problem between me and Chris,” Tortorella says. “I think the media sometimes tried to get between us. I never felt anything bad about Chris. He cared. He marched to a different beat a little bit. Sometimes he was hard to read. I’d be sitting there talking to him that season and I felt like he was looking through me. Was he listening?

“But for me, one of the greatest experiences you can have as a coach is getting to know a player. Trying to figure out who the person is. He was a bit awkward, kind of silent back then. And I see him now, the way he plays and the way he talks about the game — he’s matured so, so much. And I love watching him play.”

Once Kreider established himself as a Ranger in 2013-14, then-coach Alain Vigneault had him playing primarily with Nash and Stepan. The lessons about play away from the puck that didn’t always seem to sink in when Tortorella preached them started to take hold a bit more, especially as the Rangers embarked on a four-year run of success that the organization hadn’t seen in decades.

“The main thing I learned from Nash and Step was about creating offense,” Kreider says. “Nash always used to say to me that it’s hard to generate offense when a team is in its defensive-zone structure. You’ve got to take the puck away from people to really consistently create offense.”

“He was always so easy to play with,” Nash says. “You could play your game a touch slower with Chris on your line. I’m sure for a guy like Mika (Zibanejad), who likes to slow the game down, Chris is a perfect linemate. You have someone who you know is going to get you pucks back. Me and Step loved it.”

Kreider’s numbers haven’t changed much over all the different coaches — he’s now on his fourth — and the different levels of success the Rangers have had over his previous nine seasons.

He’s never scored more than 28 goals or fewer than 16. Never more than 53 points, nor less than 30, which came in last season’s 56-game schedule. He has all the raw tools to be a volume scorer but has never quite gotten there.

“My feeling on that is you have to sacrifice to do what Chris does,” Tortorella says. “You go in the corner every time and dig pucks out. You go to the net and take a pounding. He could be a player that stays on the outside and picks his spots. Maybe he’d have 30 or 40 goals every year. But that’s not who Chris is. It’s almost like he’d feel he was cheating himself or his teammates by not doing what he does.”

“He’s taking the goalie’s eyes away while everyone else is putting up points,” Nash says. “To have someone like that on your team is pretty valuable.”

True to that selfless style, Kreider is almost allergic to talking about himself. Ask him for a few people who have influenced him during his decade as a Ranger, though, and he worries he’ll leave someone out.

“The equipment staff, the medical staff, all the support staff here over the years who help get us all ready to play that nobody really sees,” he says. “This organization has treated me so incredibly well, and those people behind the scenes, they’ve seen me grow up in a lot of ways. It’s no exaggeration to say they’re family now.”

Kreider’s leadership skills have gotten better over the years. He’s 30 now, not 20, and he understands the role he fills on the current team — one populated by some very young players and a few veterans who aren’t terribly outspoken. It’s more in how he conducts himself.

The Rangers, like many teams, did a video for the league’s Hockey Fights Cancer initiative. Kreider put a name only people closely associated with the team know on his “I fight for” card: Acacio Marques, the team’s equipment manager of the past 25 years, who was recently diagnosed with lung cancer. It was a small gesture but one that went a long way to those who know Marques.

This season, Kreider’s stats are also making people take notice. He’s third in the league in goals and second in power-play goals. This looks like the year he could finally break through to the elite level of goal-scoring wingers.

And he takes zero credit — for instance, citing getting to “play with some incredible players” after he scored twice against the Islanders last week.

Gerard Gallant sees a veteran who has ramped up his game for a very clear reason. “He’s tired of missing the playoffs,” Gallant says. “He’s doing everything for us.”

When he talks about his evolution over 10 years as a Ranger, Kreider again barely mentions himself.

“I came in when (Brad) Richards was here,” Kreider says. “(Marc) Staal, (Dan) Girardi, Hank (Lundqvist), (Ryan) Callahan. I try to emulate half the stuff I learned from them. Marty (St. Louis) came in when I was first getting started, and even now, I lean on him for a lot.

“I’m lucky. It makes the game fun, makes the game exciting with the more you learn. You understand there’s so much more to learn. To come to the rink every day and know there’s something else to help you unlock this game, that’s what makes it so incredibly fun for me.”

It’s a strange thing: Kreider is eager to learn and grow as a player and a person, but the core hasn’t changed much since he was a kid. Those around him see consistency and growth at the same time, if that makes sense.

It’s all part of the mystery.

“He’s a different dude — and it’s great! It’s really great!” Tortorella says. “So many people in our game are afraid to be themselves. It’s something I love about Chris. He’s never been afraid to be himself. And look where it’s gotten him.”

(Photo: Jared Silber / NHLI via Getty Images)