Understanding what’s wrong with the Nashville Predators

Credit: © Sergei Belski

It’s safe to say that the Nashville Predators haven’t gotten off to the start they wanted to this season.

Coming off a surprise season that saw them make the playoffs and put up a fight against the Vancouver Canucks in the first round of the playoffs, the Predators made a big splash in free agency, signing three of the top names in Steven Stamkos, Jonathan Marchessault and Brady Skjei, with many championing Nashville as the winners of the offseason. On top of that, they locked up their elite goaltender in Juuse Saros to an eight-year, $61.92 million extension beyond next season, basically going all in on being a contender again.

However, the start has been anything but contender-worthy. Through 20 games this season, Nashville has a 6-11-3 record and are second-last in the league in points and points percentage. Things are such a mess right now, they took a penalty in Wednesday’s game against the Seattle Kraken for starting the wrong lineup.

So what has gone wrong for the Predators through the first quarter of the season? Let’s dive in.

The free agent signings haven’t clicked yet

Everyone repeat after me: you can’t build a team through free agency! It’s a common philosophy across most major sports, but some teams continue to be fooled by it. After all, it is viewed as a quick fix for any team to get a player without the years spent drafting and developing them or the assets spent on them in a trade. All it costs is money that you have available to spend! What could go wrong?

As we see time and time again, a lot can go wrong. Sure, it is a quick fix for a team in need of a certain element, but more often than not, you’re forking over money equivalent to the best option in the league when you’re just getting the best option available, and very rarely are you getting the best years of the player you’re bringing in.

And that’s the big problem for the Predators: a lot of the players they expected to be their best this season were acquired through free agency. Yes, they do have a main core of Filip Forsberg, Roman Josi and Juuse Saros that Nashville either drafted or acquired via trade as a prospect, but their secondary tier consists primarily of free agent signings. Skjei has the second-highest average ice time among defensemen after Josi, and Stamkos and Marchessault are third and fourth among forwards. The Predators expect a lot from their new toys.

And yet, not only are the new signings eating up a lot of the minutes, but they aren’t doing an effective job of it. According to Evolving Hockey, Stamkos and Marchessault are providing a negative impact so far in their Predators careers with respective goals above replacements of -1.2 and -3.4, the latter being the worst on the team. And it’s not just that the two forwards are bad defensively, their offensive GARs also currently sit at -2.2 and -2 and are the third and fourth-worst on the team. At the very least, Skjei has a positive impact of 0.4 GAR and has the best offensive GAR on the team with 3.1, but he also has the worst defensive GAR on the team with -3.3, more than the double the next worst Pred.

If you want to go back another year, Ryan O’Reilly and Luke Schenn, the Predators’ biggest signings in 2023, haven’t been much better. O’Reilly hasn’t been terrible, but has found himself with a middling 0 GAR so far this season, while Schenn has the second-worst GAR among Nashville blueliners with -1.8. The only exception of the past two years has been Gustav Nyquist, who’s had okay production with nine points in 20 games, but is second only to Forsberg in GAR with 1.4 this year.

It’s still early, but the Predators are becoming a textbook example of why spending in free agency should not be Plan A for turning a team into a contender. They’ve spent $30.935 million combined on these six players, which is more than a third of this season’s salary cap, and they’re getting a grand total of -4.6 goals above replacement out of it, which is already close to a negative win (or loss) above replacement.

Underwhelming center depth

If there’s one thing the Predators have lacked throughout their entire franchise history, it’s a true No. 1 center. In terms of points per game, the most productive center in their franchise history was Jason Arnott on the back nine of his career. Next up on that list is a tie between their current No. 1 center in O’Reilly (who is also on the back nine of his career), and the recently bought-out Matt Duchene.

It’s an issue that’s plagued the Predators for a long time, and while they’ve done their absolute best to work around it, it’s still held them back from being an elite team. Even the biggest weakness of the team that went to the Stanley Cup Final in 2017 was their center depth (although the extent of that problem in the final two rounds was more due to injuries to Ryan Johansen and Mike Fischer than the actual depth).

I’ve already mentioned the minimal impact that O’Reilly has provided this season for the Predators even with 11 points in 20 games, and that’s with him playing in the role of their first-line center. Beyond that, the centers that round out their top nine are Tomas Novak and Colton Sissons, and neither player brings a full impact that you’d want out of your forwards. Novak has the highest GAR among their centers (0.8), but he also has just four points in 14 games, while Sissons has been terrible at both aspects with only two points in 19 games and a -3 GAR.

Center is considered one of the most important positions in hockey, and the best teams always have one or two that can help dictate how you match up against another team. The Predators were fortunate that they had O’Reilly and Novak step up their games last year in terms of production (69 and 45 points) and their overall impact (16.2 and 13.8 GAR), and the team probably hoped that they would see something similar to that this season and instead focused on their wing and defensive depth. But they just haven’t gotten the same returns from them this year, and it’s certainly impacted the team’s play this season.

This team is old

I’ve already addressed the issues with the Predators’ free agent signings and their center depth, but there’s another underlying problem that stems from those two issues: the age of the team. Between all the players that I’ve mentioned as part of the problem (their free agent signings and their centers), only one player falls under the age of 30, and that’s Novak at the age of 27, which is still considered to be around the time in a player’s career where they stagnate and reach their peak.

If you take a quick look at the Predators’ top-nine forward group and top-four defense corps (based on average time on ice), there’s a very common trend: they’re quite old. In that group, only four players are under the age of 30, and only one is under the age of 27: Luke Evangelista at 22. That’s nine of Nashville’s 13 most-used played players that are either at the end of or past their primes, and 12 of them that are more or less done developing and are what they are.

That problem becomes even worse when you look at the performance of that group. Out of those 13 most-used players, only six of them have a positive GAR, along with only four of the nine players who are 30 or older. When not even half of your main minute-munchers are providing a positive impact, including the veteran core that you’ve invested a lot into putting together, there’s probably something wrong.

Meanwhile, you look at their younger players, and almost all of them are performing well. Evangelista has done well in their top nine, and beyond that, Zachary L’Heureux (1.3 GAR), Philip Tomasino (0.3) and Marc Del Gaizo (0.1) have all had positive impacts in their lineup, especially L’Heureux, who ranks first on the team in GAR per 60 minutes. The only exception has been Juuso Parssinen, who’s struggled a bit more this season with a -1.6 GAR.

But even if the Predators gave all of their young players the most minutes, it still wouldn’t be enough. They’ve made their bed with this group of older players in hopes that it would turn a team stuck in the murky middle into a Cup contender, and it’s only gotten them more stuck in the middle.

Even if you want to look at their goaltending, they committed to this group by extending Saros and trading Yaroslav Askarov. That decision in a vacuum has no issues, especially since Saros is a top 5-10 goalie in the league right now, but if you look at it with all of the other choices, and it becomes part of a more troubling trend.

They’ve just flat out played worse than last year

When the Predators first got out to their slow start, it was easy to convince yourself that they were just dealing with some bad luck. It’s possible that a lot of their offensive options are in a dry spell, or maybe Saros is off to his annual slow start. But no, luck isn’t the only thing in play here.

The Predators are dealing with a bit of bad luck offensively, as they have the worst 5v5 shooting percentage in the league. But even if they were scoring at a reasonable rate to the chances that they’re generating, it still wouldn’t be good enough.

Nashville currently sits in 22nd in the league in 5v5 expected goals for per 60 with 2.37, a far cry from last season where they were third in the league with 2.94. They’re still about the same in terms of 5v5 expected goals against (20th with 2.57 this year vs. 13th with 2.55 last season), but the lack of offensive generation is a huge hit to this team, especially considering it was what made them so successful last year. They were likely hoping that their offseason additions would improve it, but it has only made it worse so far.

This isn’t completely irreversible. It is still quite possible that the struggles are due to the new additions still trying to find their groove, and maybe we’ll see an improvement in their play when they do. But based on what they’re showing us so far, it’s hard to have complete faith in this team turning things around.

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