Barry Trotz's general managing reign of error in Nashville

Pretty much everything he has touched over the past two-and-a-half years has failed.

Maybe it is because I had a front-row seat for it and saw first-hand how bad it was, but I am not sure there has been a worse general manager hire in the NHL over the past 10 years than Ron Hextall’s time with the Pittsburgh Penguins. It was bad. Horrifically bad. So bad that it almost made you wonder if he was a saboteur sent in by the Philadelphia Flyers to cause havoc on their arch-rival from within.

I know that is not what happened, but holy shit if you were going to do something like that Hextall’s tenure is exactly what it might have looked like.

It was that bad.

The Barry Trotz experience in Nashville might be getting close to that level of bad.

Trotz’s reputation and resume as a head coach in the NHL is as strong as you can get.

He won a Stanley Cup with the Washington Capitals, a couple of Presidents’ Trophies, took the New York Islanders to two Eastern Conference Finals and spent 15 years helping build the Nashville Predators from the ground up as their first ever coach. It is a great career. He could probably step behind a bench right now and make a difference for a lot teams.

He is an objectively outstanding coach.

That success has not translated to the general manager’s office.

Prior to the start of the 2023-24 season, the Predators decided to bring Trotz back in a different role, and asked him to literally build their roster as the team’s second-ever general manager, replacing David Poile. He did not really do much to put his stamp on the team in year one, but following a mediocre start through the first 54 games of the season the Predators went on a late-season heater that saw them go 16-0-2 over an 18-game stretch, with strong underlying numbers, to put them into the playoffs.

They ended up losing in the first round, but there at least seemed to be something to build on.

That set the stage for Trotz to really put his fingerprints on the roster in the summer of 2024, and it was at that point that everything started to go wrong.

Basically every major move Trotz has made over the past year-plus has been a cataclysmic mess that has backfired spectacularly. It has left the Predators as one of the worst teams in the league for the second year in a row with no real easy path on how to get back on track.

Let’s talk about it.