Nashville has rebounded from the brink, become a contender in the Central Division

Scott Burnside
Scott Burnside
Nashville has rebounded from the brink, become a contender in the Central Division

Nashville Predators head coach John Hynes recalls it all coming to a head just before a long road trip last March.

The meandering Nashville Predators were at home against Florida, their Central Division foe in last season’s revamped COVID-19 alignment, in the Preds’ last game before an eight-game road trip.

It didn’t go well.

The Panthers trounced Nashville 6-2. It was the Predators’ third straight loss and left their record at 10-14-0.

Before boarding their charter to Dallas, where they were to play the Stars the next night, the team gathered and watched clips from that night’s game.

“Here’s (Aleksander) Barkov, here’s (Jonathan) Huberdeau, here’s what we’re talking about doing,” Hynes said in recalling the sometimes-contentious conversation in the team’s video room. “And here’s us.

“Where is the disconnect? Why are these players working and competing at this level and why are we not?”

Hynes recalled that the team “had it out a bit” during the video session and then hit the road, where starting the next night in Dallas, the Predators slowly started to play with more bite, cohesiveness and consistency.

It would be a turning point in a season that had the Predators teetering on the brink, with GM David Poile trying to figure out if he needed to unload players at the trade deadline for a serious reboot or stand pat and see if there were signs of meaningful progress in the weeks leading up to the trade deadline.

The Predators didn’t sell at the deadline and they surged to the playoffs, pushing talented Carolina to six games in an entertaining first-round matchup.

The Predators are a fascinating test case.

After years of being a hard scrabble, lower budget team that flirted at one point with relocation but slowly built a loyal fan base in Nashville, the Predators became something of league darlings after hosting a wildly successful All-Star weekend in 2016 and advancing to their first-ever Stanley Cup Final in 2017.

But instead of heralding a kind of golden age of hockey in Tennessee, the Predators have regressed.

Poile acknowledged that the 2017 trip to the final — a series won in six games by Pittsburgh — represents the pinnacle of the team’s successes.

“We just haven’t been able to get back up there,” Poile said.

There was a coaching change and then COVID.

“Nothing has been normal or as how we’d have liked it to have been for almost two years,” Poile said.

While the team hasn’t entered what most would call a wholesale rebuild, Poile points out there has been significant change at almost every position.

Pekka Rinne retired at the end of last season after giving way to Juuse Saros as the starter. In fact Rinne’s No. 35 jersey will be retired on Feb. 24, the first player in team history to receive the honor.

Ryan Ellis was dealt to Philadelphia in the offseason, following the June 2019 trade of P.K. Subban to New Jersey.

Viktor Arvidsson was traded to Los Angeles last summer.

“So it’s a different team and it’s a different coach and we play a different way,” Poile said. “Clearly in my mind we’ve taken a step or maybe several steps backwards to hopefully take several steps forward here.”

Hynes is blunt in the assessment of the team leading up to the midpoint of last season, both internally and externally.

“The Nashville Predators had become easy to play against and lacked an identity, lacked the mental and physical toughness,” Hynes said. “They could get pushed out of games, didn’t have a lot of resiliency the last few years.

“And I felt like with David’s support and the coaches’ support and some of the leadership we had in the room and some of the veteran players that we did have that. You could see them; they wanted to get to an identity that was going to give us an opportunity to be proud of who we are as a team, who we are as an organization, and most importantly how are we going to win.”

So far, so good, for one of the league’s surprising teams.

At the holiday break the Nashville Predators, considered by most a bubble team when it came to the playoffs, were on a league-best (tied with Pittsburgh) seven-game winning streak. They were second in the competitive Central Division, only one point back of first-place Minnesota. They boasted one of the top road records in the NHL at 10-5-1.

When the team reconvened for training camp at the start of this season – the first real training camp since Hynes took over as head coach for Peter Laviolette in the first week of January 2020 – the players who were anxious to replicate the style of play that had marked the second half of last season.

The players told the coaching staff they knew they couldn’t assume there would be a natural carry-over from last season to this season.

“We understand we’ve got to build it, but we know what it is,” Hynes said. “We know what we have to get to. Now we have to put the work in to get there. And that was coming from the players.”

Chris Mason was a netminder during those hard-working blue collar days under the team’s first coach, Barry Trotz, and he watched the team’s decline and resurgence as a color analyst on the team’s television broadcasts.

“I’ve really admired about what John Hynes did with this team when he became head coach,” Mason said. “He was very open about what he wanted this team’s identity to be and how he wanted them to play and how everyone is expected play to that standard.”

The fact Hynes was willing to reduce roles and/or reduce ice time for highly paid skilled players like Matt Duchene and Ryan Johansen if they weren’t playing up to that standard was a “pretty big statement,” Mason added.

“A lot of guys (coaches) won’t do that,. Some guys, (players) get exemptions.”

The distance between idea and implementation, especially when it comes to something as ethereal as culture or identity, can be vast.

“You can’t just flip a switch and you’re automatically what you are what you say you are,” Mason said.

Over time, though, you can see that players now trust the process, trust that what is being laid out to them will lead to success in terms of wins and losses.

“Over the course of time, the way that he’s held guys accountable,” Mason said.

Mattias Ekholm, who appeared at or near the top of most media outlets’ trade deadline lists, wasn’t traded and was a key part of the team’s turnaround defensively.

The Predators have also benefitted from play of youngsters who were brought up from the American Hockey League like Tanner Jeannot and Yakov Trenin, the latter of whom was a Preds’ prospect who started last season in the KHL.

Trenin’s emergence has helped reinforce the concept that the Predators are a team that’s much more difficult to play against. The fact the team protected defenseman Alexandre Carrier, 25, in the Expansion Draft, where Seattle selected Calle Jarnkrok, was another nod to the team’s new identity.

“You could just see this grow,” Mason said.

A couple of years ago, when the heavier teams — Dallas, St. Louis, Boston — showed up, the Predators were overmatched.

“They couldn’t compete in that department,” Mason said. “They just couldn’t hang.

“Now, I see the exact opposite. Teams can’t hang with the Predators when the game gets physical.”

In some ways, it’s a throwback to how the Predators were defined before the glitz and the glam of the team’s success under Laviolette.

“That’s just what this team does or used to do and I think they kind of got away from that,” Mason said.

In the Hollywood movie, that post-loss video session is what turns the tide, but the reality is that things like culture and identity are built painstakingly; they are built an inch at a time, a shift at a time.

So, yes, that road trip was important. As was the last half of the season and the playoff series against Carolina. It was during that series that we saw glimpses of top players Johansen and Duchene at their best. But it needed to carry over to this season for the team to again have a shot at the playoffs.

Duchene and Johansen have been lightning rods for criticism, given their lack of production juxtaposed against their monster cap hits — the two combine for $16 million in salary and cap hit per season. Neither have no-move clauses and both were exposed in the Expansion Draft last summer. The fact both had underachieved was a significant factor in Seattle taking a pass on both skilled forwards.

But at training camp, Hynes, the coaching staff, Poile and the management team had frank discussions with Duchene, Johansen and Filip Forsberg, the latter of whom has also come in for some criticism in recent years, about their roles with the team.

“We had one on one meetings with them,” Hynes said. “What do they need? How can we help them be more successful?

“We all have the same goal. They want to be really good players, have successful seasons, have our team have success and we want the same.”

The open and honest discussions focused on the expectations of how those skilled players were going to conduct themselves on and off the ice. It also focused on how they were expected to drive play, drive the team’s new identity and earn the minutes they expected to play — and should play — given their status and salaries.

“So when you’re getting more minutes than other players at times, that it’s earned, and that’s how you become a real team,” Hynes said. “And in turn they expressed some things they felt they needed from me or they needed form the team.

“And I think what we did was we said: ‘okay we’re going to hold up our end of the bargain you hold up your end of the bargain.’”

So far that has happened.

Hynes said he’s never seen those three players work as hard as they did in training camp this year and that has spilled over to the regular season.

Duchene and Forsberg, who missed time with injury early in the season, are tied for the team lead with 13 goals apiece. Johansen is third on the team with 24 points, after recording only 22 in 48 games in 2020-21.

“You could see right away that these guys were motivated, they respected the culture, they wanted to be drivers of the culture,” Hynes said. “And that’s why they’re having success this year; because there’s a compete level and a drive and a consistency. There’s a consistency level with them, whether they’re scoring or not scoring, that they’re maximizing their ability.

“And that’s what they needed to do and that’s what our team and organization needed from them. They’re a big, big reason why our team has had success and they’re going to be a big, big reason why our team needs to continues to have success.”

Mason also saw a different attitude from that core of veteran forwards from the start of training camp.

“I just feel like they really rally around being I guess underdogs and this is now the type of team where they work for each other,” Mason said. “It’s a fun team to watch.”

Here’s the thing about culture and identity. When they are ill-defined or simply don’t exist within the locker room, it’s hard to win consistently. It means coaches and management are running around trying to fix many things at the same time.

But when you have an identity and a culture that is meaningful, when things start to go sideways, it’s a lot easier to focus on the specific mistakes. That, in turn, keeps teams from going completely off the rails.

“You’re not just plugging hole,” Hynes said. “You’re saying, what part of our identity is lacking in this area? Is it our skating? Our physical play? Is it our D-zone coverage or is it our offensive zone play? You can really pinpoint.

“Because the group and the culture and the identity, that’s on page, you’re just maintaining it and continuing to grow it. But you’re not trying to find it.”

Nothing has been won here, but the signs are certainly a lot more positive than they were a year ago.

There is still the issue of what to do with Forsberg, who is in the final year of his contract and will command premium dollars on the open market — if he gets there.

“I think I know he’d like to be here, I know we’d like to have him,” Poile said.

But with Duchene and Johansen eating up so much cap space, is there room dollar-wise and term-wise to keep the sniper?

“At some point it’s going to have to ramp up, I understand that,” Poile said. “I don’t have a crystal ball on how that’s going to play out. There’s so many scenarios.”

The Predators’ place in the standings, of course, plays a significant role in how that unfolds. Right now, that means a focus on the postseason.

In a few weeks, the Predators will host their first-ever outdoor game, hosting Tampa Bay at Nissan Stadium, home of the NFL’s Titans. League officials are bullish on ticket sales and it stands as another feather in the organizational cap.

The fact it will take place in the midst of a playoff race that many observers felt the Predators would not be a party to, well, that simply adds another chapter to the Smashville lore, no?

“It’s a special game in the middle of a season where you’re driving for the playoffs,” Hynes said. “As opposed to it being a highlight of a season. It brings a different feel to the game.”

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