Roman Josi’s dream career is missing one thing. But is that about to change?

Credit: Apr 9, 2024; Nashville, Tennessee, USA; Nashville Predators defenseman Roman Josi (59) makes faces as he skates past the kids of defenseman Ryan McDonagh (not pictured) before the game against the Winnipeg Jets at Bridgestone Arena. Mandatory Credit: Christopher Hanewinckel-USA TODAY Sports

The calls back home to Switzerland are still frequent. But they’re different.

Roman Josi has always leaned on his parents for advice. He’s an elite athlete with two elite athletes for parents, so they had plenty to offer him over the years. His mom, Doris, was a Swiss national team swimmer. She’s the feisty one who hated to lose and taught him about work ethic. His father, Peter, was a competitive soccer player. He brought the calm energy and unflappability under pressure. Josi sees himself as a cross between the two. They’ve both helped him become the global hockey star he is today.

But, he explains, the conversations today are less and less about sports. Josi is 34, a father of two, and mainly just wants to pick his parents’ brains about how to survive the early years of parenthood. Whenever he gets a break from his busy schedule as the Nashville Predators’ captain and star No. 1 defenseman, he tries to be as present of a parent as possible in the late spring and summer months. So he needs all the advice he can get.

It’s all a reminder of how quickly life has flown by for someone who feels like, just yesterday, he was a young boy with much more modest dreams. When Josi was an adolescent growing up in Bern, he aspired to succeed in his home city. To play for SC Bern in the Swiss National League was to achieve the pinnacle of the sport in that country. The NHL wasn’t even a thought yet at that age.

“No, I was thinking, ‘I want to play for Bern for sure,’ because that’s how I grew up,” Josi told Daily Faceoff in a sitdown last week in Las Vegas, hours before the 2024 NHL Awards show at the Fontainebleau hotel. “I was watching those games, and that was always my big dream, and the NHL was so far away for us. There was obviously [Martin] Gerber, goalies, like [David] Aebischer made it. There were some players that went over but only stayed for a little bit. [Rito] von Arx, Michel Riesen, they all went over but came back and didn’t stay too long. So it was always really far away, and we couldn’t really watch any games live because it was in the middle of the night.”

It was Mark Streit who really changed Josi’s thinking. The puck-moving defenseman broke into the NHL with the Montreal Canadiens in 2005-06, when Josi was 15 years old, and embarked on a productive 786-game career spanning 12 seasons. Streit made Josi believe he could do it. Streit retired in 2018 as the NHL’s all-time leader in scoring among Swiss players with 434 points. Josi never could’ve imagined that, six years later, he’d be 243 points ahead of the next-closest Swiss player for the all-time lead.

He didn’t know he’d grow up to become Switzerland’s greatest all-time hockey export, but he did begin to understand his potential when he started getting attention at international tournaments. He competed for his nation at the Under-18 Worlds and Under-20 World Juniors at just 17 years old. Josi’s roving style has earned him a reputation of a fourth forward on the ice and, as you might have guessed, it was molded by him playing forward until he was 13 or 14. But he credits his growth as one of the best offensive defensemen of his generation to the way the Predators developed him after picking him 38^th overall in Round 2 of the 2008 NHL Draft.

“I was always an offensive minded D-man and that’s always been part of my game, and then I got lucky in Nashville,” he said. “I got an offensive role right away. I was playing on the power of play. So you just develop those skills even more and try to get better and better.”

Josi busted out for 13 goals and 40 points in his third NHL season, and you can count on one hand how many other defensemen have come close in offensive input in the decade since.

Josi’s ranks among NHL blueliners since 2013-14:

Goals	Points	Shots	Points/game
2nd	2nd	2nd	5th

He’s a three-time First-Team All-Star, a Norris Trophy winner and two-time runner-up. He and his wife, model Ellie Ottaway, are ingratiated into the Nashville community, known for their charity work in a variety of organizations. They’re gone “country” enough that he isn’t even full Swiss when he goes home, according his friends and family who rib him.

“At the Worlds, because I was doing interviews in Swiss, they were telling me I have an English accent when I speak Swiss,” he said with a smile. “Maybe I’m wrong, but I think it’s when I talk about hockey. Because I’m so used to talking about hockey and answering questions in English, so sometimes you try to translate English sentences in Swiss and it doesn’t really work that way. But I feel like when I talk to my family, to my buddies, I don’t think I have an accent. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think I do and I kind of hope I don’t, because I don’t want to lose that.”

It feels like Josi has everything he could want in a hockey career, especially given its humble beginnings back in Bern. And, despite his bashfulness when the Hockey Hall of Fame is tabled as a discussion topic, there’s a strong argument to made that he could retire today and be inducted given his individual accomplishments. But we all know what’s missing: a Stanley Cup. He only got a whiff of it once, when Nashville reached the Final in 2016-17 on a surprise run as a bottom seed and lost to the Pittsburgh Penguins in six games. Josi has participated in 10 playoff runs in his career, escaping the first round three times and the second round just once. The Predators have been a Murky Middle team for so much of his career, always competitive yet never so bad that they can build around superstar-grade talents via lottery picks.

But that started to change when former longtime Preds coach Barry Trotz returned to Music City last year and took over for retiring David Poile as GM. Trotz immediately behaved boldly, casting out top-six forwards Ryan Johansen and Matt Duchene via trade and buyout, respectively. Trotz threw down coin in free agency to bring Ryan O’Reilly, Luke Schenn and Gustav Nyquist in. Trotz changed the culture in an instant. And it turns out that was just a warmup. After Nashville rallied from a playoff miss in 2022-23 to make the playoffs in 2023-24, Trotz went full cowboy earlier this week when free agency opened July 1. Forwards Steven Stamkos and Jonathan Marchessault and defenseman Brady Skjei are now Preds, chewing up $20.5 million in combined cap space. Nashville is suddenly quite serious about contending for a Stanley Cup – perhaps more than it has ever been during an offseason – thanks to Trotz.

“He’s definitely a huge presence for sure,” Josi said four days before Nashville’s flurry of signings. “Just the success he had as a coach too, and he knows what he wants. He has a clear vision. You can hear that when you talk to him too in the [media]. He’s just a great, great hockey man and he’s a great person, too. The GM always sets the culture and obviously they’re not around as much as coaches, but they’re still the boss, right? He’s done an amazing job with that as a coach, and he’s been great as a GM as well. I just like the way he wants to win right now. You know he’ll do anything for that, and it’s pretty cool as a player to know that.”

There’s an argument to be made that everything Trotz has done this week in particular is for Josi. Trotz is his perhaps Josi’s greatest champion. When Trotz spoke to Daily Faceoff this past spring, he concluded the interview by making a pitch for why Josi deserved the Norris Trophy and how he was the player most responsible for getting them back into the playoffs.

Josi is defying the aging curve at 34, sure, but he’s old enough that he could hit a wall one of these years. It won’t be long before the calls with his parents will consist only of parenting talk. There won’t be any hockey left to discuss once he’s retired. But not yet. And it appears the Predators as a franchise are doing everything in their power to take a big swing while their captain remains at the peak of his powers.

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Roman Josi’s dream career is missing one thing. But is that about to change?

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