Rangers’ Jacob Trouba thriving after ‘stressful’ start to season

I’m old enough to remember when the Rangers were off to a lousy start because Jacob Trouba had been at least an equally lousy choice to become captain.

Or is that a misinterpretation of the narrative?

“Oh, well I can tell you that the first two months were pretty stressful,” Trouba told The Post following the team’s prep work Wednesday for a Garden confrontation Thursday against the Big Bad Bruins. “It was mentally draining.”

The Rangers were not playing well. Trouba was hurting with a right-hand issue that had prevented him from practicing for weeks. He was not playing well at all. That may even be an understatement.

“I’m not going to use the injury as an excuse, but it’s hard to lead when you’re not 100 percent and it’s very hard to lead when you’re not close to your best,” Trouba said. “All that weighed on me. It got in my head. I was second-guessing everything I did. The fact that the team was having a tough time made it even more difficult.”

The Rangers were 11-10-5 after having been taken to the woodshed by Chicago, the worst team in the league, on Dec. 3. Things were in danger of splitting into a million pieces. Trouba fired his helmet, screamed, “Wake the f–k up!” to the bench in an emotional cry for help while on his way off the ice following his second fight of the night, in the second period.

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The third period wasn’t all that much better. And two nights later, the Blueshirts nevertheless played aimlessly and poorly for the first two periods of their next game at the Garden. They trailed the Blues before striking for three goals in the third to win the match and stave off the conflagration that might have come with another loss.

Jacob Trouba AP

Suddenly, the Rangers became a good team again with a good captain.

Or is that a misinterpretation of the latest narrative?

“Not only in hockey, but in all the sports I follow, people are pretty quick to judge,” Mika Zibanejad said when the subject came around following practice Wednesday. “But we knew in here the kind of person and leader that Jacob is because he is the same person who did the job last year before he got the ‘C.’

“He’s just being himself. There’s nothing fake about him. Everything you see is genuine. He leads by example. If he was having a tough time earlier with his play, he never showed it by the way he acted in the room.

Jacob Trouba and the Rangers turned around their season after a loss to the Blackhawks on Dec. 3. Getty Images

“We respect him and respond to him.”

That Dec. 5 victory over the Blues triggered the 14-3-2 run the Rangers will carry into their Thursday confrontation with the NHL’s best team. It’s a challenge that the Blueshirts should covet after fighting their way out of the darkness in which they were enveloped for most of the first eight weeks of the season.

In those days, though, there was no panic. Trouba kept his head while all about him were losing theirs and blaming him, and yes, that’s a line paraphrased from Rudyard Kipling. It was not just the captain, however. It was the leadership group featuring alternate captains Zibanejad, Chris Kreider, Artemi Panarin and Barclay Goodrow that also kept it in perspective.

“I’ve said this before, but we talked early in the leadership group how we were going to face expectations and adversity that we had not encountered last year and we needed to be able to cope with that,” Trouba said. ”I don’t think we were necessarily terrible as a team, but it was a tough stretch.

“But we were able to stay positive. We looked at it, and I looked at it, with the perspective that every team goes through a tough stretch and we had ours early. I think if we were going through that now, we’d be in deep s–t.

“I think we’ve done a really good job as a team going through that and coming out of it on the other side. We stuck together. I’m proud of the way we responded.”

Trouba’s play has been on an upswing as well after he had been dropped to the third pair for a handful of games coinciding with the Chicago-St. Louis experience in early December. He is healthy and has added his trademark physical element when needed.

Yes, there is still the occasional hiccup, and head coach Gerard Gallant may want to increase third-pair righty Braden Schneider’s responsibility and minutes. That would have an impact on Trouba. But the captain’s five-on-five plus-minus rating is even over this 19-game run (15 for, 15 against) after it stood at minus-10 (15 for, 25 against) through the first first 26 contests, per NaturalStatTrick.

“We know who Jacob is and what he does for us,” Zibanejad said. “We always knew.”