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The Nashville Predators will once again rely on a core of veterans to help guide their new talent this season.
The names of experienced leaders, however, have changed since the end of the 2022-23 season.
In the signing center Ryan O’Reilly (four years), defenseman Luke Schenn (three years) and beyond Gustav Nyquist (two years) during free agency, the Predators added players who participated in a combined 188 Stanley Cup Playoff games and won a combined three Stanley Cup championships.
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Nashville also opted to move on from two longtime top-six forwards, trading away Ryan Johansen to the Colorado Avalanche and buy the last three seasons of Matt Duchenecontract of.
“I want to change the culture a little bit,” said Barry Trotz, who took over as Predators general manager on July 1 following the retirement of David Poile. “It’s not that the culture isn’t good, it just needs a little tweak. I’m looking for serial winners. I want to allow a path for our young people to develop and be surrounded by those kinds of people and have placeholders in place so we can allow that skill, speed, all the things that we drafted, mature and get to a place where we have a good run at it for a long time.”
In O’Reilly, the Predators acquired a top-line center, a 14-year NHL veteran with 702 points (256 goals, 446 assists) in 991 regular season games. He won the Conn Smythe Trophy voted as the playoff MVP in 2019, when he helped the St. Louis Blues to win the Cup, and became the captain of St. Louis for three seasons (2020-23), so the 32-year-old’s leadership qualities carry a lot of weight with Nashville.
“He reminds me of a Joe Pavelski-type guy, a guy who keeps creating,” Trotz said. “People follow him and everyone around him is better. That’s really, for me, for our young people, for our culture, that’s critical. That’s a critical piece for us.”
Schenn, 33, helped the Tampa Bay Lightning win back-to-back Stanley Cup championships in 2020 and 2021. A physical player with more than 200 hits in eight of his 15 seasons, Schenn (6- foot-2, 225 pounds) can be paired with the captain Roman Jose.
“I don’t like it sometimes when Roman has a lot of hits,” Trotz said. “Lucas will make sure the big hits don’t come often.”
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Nyquist, who has scored more than 20 goals four times in his 11-year career, should help bolster a forward group that has also been depleted. Nino Niederreiter, Mikael Granlund and Tanner Jeannotall of which were traded leading up to last season’s NHL Trade Deadline.
Andrew Brunette was hired as coach, replacing John Hynes after Nashville failed to reach the playoffs for the first time in nine seasons. Brunette was 51-18-6 as the interim coach of the Florida Panthers in 2021-22.
In Brunette’s stint with the Panthers, they finished the season first in goals (337) and had a power-play success rate of 24.4 percent, tied for fourth in the NHL.
“I wouldn’t say I’m an offensive coach,” Brunette said. “I think my philosophy of how I look at the game is that I want to dominate the puck, and I want to have it as much as I can. really offensive, more, if you have it, keep it, and if you don’t have it, return it as soon as possible.”
The Predators goalies, Juice Saros and Kevin Lankinen, they should continue to compete even if the offense is hard to come by. Saros had a .919 save percentage in 63 starts last season and finished fourth in voting for the Vezina Trophy, given to the NHL’s best goalie.
Josi, the 2019-20 Norris Trophy winner, should continue to contribute at both ends of the ice. The defenseman will help him with the power-play specialist Tyson Barryacquired last season when the Predators traded a defenseman Mattias Ekholm to the Edmonton Oilers. Schenn and fellow veteran Ryan McDonagh will play important minutes.
Up front, the Predators will look for continued improvement in several forwards, incl Cody Glass, Tommy Novak, Juuso Parssinen , Luke Evangelista and Philip Tomasino.
Evangelista, 21, has 15 points (seven goals, eight assists) in 24 games following his promotion from Milwaukee in the American Hockey League last season. He was selected in the second round (No. 42) of the 2020 NHL Draft.
Trotz wants those talents to be surrounded by the right veterans this season.
“You don’t want all your children to come [to the NHL level] once,” Trotz said. “You need two or three kids, [then] two or three children, [then] two or three children. You need players to help them through that and then hopefully when different guys’ contracts expire, you can put another piece in place.