No matter what happens, the Predators are going to be fun this season.
If there’s a deeper strategy to Nashville Predators general manager Barry Trotz’s 2024 free agency plan than “just sign all the marquee players,” it’s “age be darned.”
A year after signing pricey veterans like Ryan O’Reilly, Gustav Nyquist and Luke Schenn, Trotz doubled down on the “old” guys on Monday by a historic haul of franchise talents like Steven Stamkos, Jonathan Marchessault and Brady Skjei on multi-year contracts.
Stamkos is an all-time NHL talent, having won two Stanley Cups with the Tampa Bay Lightning. Marchessault is coming off a career year in goals and won the Conn Smythe Trophy after his former Vegas Golden Knights took home the 2023 Stanley Cup. Skjei is finishing a five-season stint with a Carolina Hurricanes team that regularly contended for a Cup run.
2024 NHL free agency winners (Predators) and losers (Golden Knights) from Day 1
The youngest of those players is Skjei at 30. Stamkos is 34, and Marchessault is 33. The franchise faces for Nashville ahead of Monday’s windfall were O’Reilly, Roman Josi (34), Filip Forsberg (29) and Juuse Saros (29).
It’s hard to fathom the Predators would be in this position after an aggressive fire sale at the 2023 NHL trade deadline, one that jettisoned a franchise pillar in Mattias Ekholm and useful talents like Tanner Jeannot, Nino Niederreiter, Mikael Granlund and Luke Kunin.
That talent purge was former general manager David Poile’s final chance to reshape the roster for a possible rebuild, one that would clear the path for young prospects to enter the system and take their lumps on a team that looked nowhere near Stanley Cup contention. Forsberg, Josi and Saros continued to play at a high level, but a youth movement felt destined for Smashville.
Well, Trotz must’ve felt that any youth influx was all for naught without reliable elder statesmen, and he’s taken colossal measures to entrench the Predators in a fiercely win-now position.
To be blunt, you don’t go out and sign great players on the back nines of their career like Stamkos and Marchessault in particular without clear aspirations to bring home Lord Stanley’s Cup. These are not moves you make lightly, neither is cutting a player like Matt Duchene outright last offseason that allowed him to sign with a division rival in the Dallas Stars.
Trotz, the former Predators coach-turned-general manager, clearly wants to construct a team in his image, one filled with quality veterans with extensive Stanley Cup experience to finally bring Nashville over the hump for a championship in short order. Rather than strip down the sheets and remake the bed, Trotz is banking on a bunch of new pillows making this a comfortable place to sleep.
It’s not that the Predators don’t have enticing young talent at their disposal. Luke Evangelista is a star in the making at forward, netting 16 goals and 23 assists in his first full-time NHL season. Tommy Novak provides roughly the same impact, as he’s coming off a nice 18-goal, 27-assist season for Nashville.
The team has turned Jeremy Lauzon from a so-so defensive prospect to one of the most reliable hitters in the league, and Alexandre Carrier has developed to be a very quality depth defenseman for the organization. Dante Fabbro is still working through his highs and lows on defense, but there’s untapped potential there, too.
Also consider the promising young players in the Smashville pipeline, who include winger Philip Tomasino, defenseman Spencer Stastney, center Juuso Pärssinen, winger Zachary L’Heureux, winger Joakim Kemell, defenseman Ryan Ufko and winger Fedor Svechkov, just to name a few. These guys may all be at least somewhat close to full-time NHL reps, with Tomasino, Pärssinen and Stastney already earning some limited playing experience.
Trotz’s gamble is two-fold. He’s trying to maximize the older star power of his existing roster with even more older star power while laying the groundwork for a winning culture under coach Andrew Brunette for young players to enter once it’s their time in the NHL.
For establishing a consistent winner, that’s not a bad strategy at all for any professional sports team with a farm system. For immediate investment into winning the Stanley Cup right now, have the Predators done enough to contend with the best teams in the NHL?
Rather than banking everything on an Connor McDavid/Auston Matthews/Sam Reinhart/Nathan McKinnon-type generational talent, the team is hoping it can score in bunches with proven veterans and overwhelm their opponents with elite goaltending and gobs of stingy experience. That may well help Nashville make a deep playoff push in the seasons to come, but it’s not guaranteed to work out as well as hoped.
Also consider that elite goaltending prospect Yaroslav Askarov could be traded at any minute since the team has Saros in his prime (with a new deal), and that could net Nashville an equally talented prospect or a ready-now veteran.
No matter what, this approach is still a gamble for Nashville, as Trotz is depending on the veterans to push hard against Father Time while hoping the pipeline prospects can fill in the gaps in the next couple of seasons where need be.
Monday’s free agency windfall puts the Predators firmly in the conversation for the most interesting and fun teams in the NHL going into this coming season. Adding a generational talent like Stamkos will do that by itself.
Will the hodgepodge of older stars and tantalizing youth spark Smashville to its first Stanley Cup, or has Trotz overplayed his hand on adding so many older players on the downward slope to a team that really needed to start over and further embrace its younger players?
The only safe prediction is that this is going to be incredibly fun to watch play out.
