The Nashville Predators had just announced the retirement of GM Barry Trotz when I wrote the Central Division Notebook in March. The search for a new GM is still ongoing and the eventual successful candidate will have plenty of work to do when they arrive in Nashville. They managed a five game win streak in late March but, overall, their stretch drive did not dispel the notion that the team has a lot of work in front of them to reach contender status.
The Barry Trotz era was a ride. Just one year after taking the reigns, Trotz led the Predators through one of the loudest summers in recent memory as they signed Steven Stamkos, Jonathan Marchessault and Brady Skjei to UFA deals in an effort to supercharge their roster. Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20 and that bold offseason now looks like the start of the end for Trotz as GM in Nashville.
The Predators are locked in for a couple more seasons with a significant cohort that is well past it’s prime by NHL standards. We can add homegrown players Roman Josi, Filip Forsberg and Juuse Saros to the aforementioned summer of ’24 acquisitions and there is suddenly a large group on the downhill side of their careers.
The good news for the Predators is that they didn’t empty their prospect pipeline in addition to spending all their cap space on aging stars. They have a few young players like Matthew Wood who have navigated their way onto the Preds’ NHL roster. There isn’t much in the middle though. The Predators prime cohort, particularly their forward group, is nearly as barren as the Blackhawks. That leaves little to work with in terms of valuable trade chips outside of the veterans.
The Predators pipeline is in relatively good shape. With such a large gap between cohorts on the NHL roster, they really need to pick a lane. The wise one would be building around their young players and using the veterans as trade bait to consolidate additional assets into the emerging cohort.
