Better luck next year: Busting the Nashville Predators out of the NHL's middle ground

They keep hitting the same ceiling, but this team looked a little different this time around.

Welcome back to Better Luck Next Year, a series that will focus on each team as they get eliminated from Stanley Cup Playoff contention and the Stanley Cup Playoffs. What went wrong, why it went wrong, what (if anything) went right, and what is next. We continue today with the next team to be officially eliminated from Stanley Cup Playoff contention: The Nashville Predators.

The 2023-24 Nashville Predators ended up in pretty much the same place they have over the past five or six years.

They finished in the 92-100 point range, they were a fringe playoff team, and they were dispatched in the first round by a team with a better record and a better chance at winning it all (says the guy that actually picked the Predators in this series). What was different about this particular season is the manner in which they achieved that result.

In recent seasons they would stick around in the playoff race or drag themselves into a spot thanks largely to starting goalie Juuse Saros playing at an elite level and putting the team on his back to carry it across the regular season finish line. There might have been some shooting percentage luck at play offensively, but typically this has been a pretty ordinary team that has needed goaltending and the percentages to fall their way just to have a chance to sneak into the playoffs where it would be early round cannon fodder for a contender.

But this Predators team was a little different, and all of it was kind of a surprise given where they were a little more than a year ago.

Rewind back to the 2022-23 trade deadline — and even the early stages of this past offseason — and this looked like a team that was on the verge of a pretty hefty tear down and rebuild. They had a new general manager coming in for the first time in franchise history with Barry Trotz replacing David Poile, with the new guy (Trotz) talking about wanting to swing for the fences in the draft and going for players with high upside. He didn’t want them drafting depth players. He wanted them drafting stars. While that might seem like a common sense approach, there are a lot of teams where teams pick guys and talk about their ceiling being a third-line forward or depth defenseman. Trotz didn’t want that. He wanted stars.

They were also in the process of shedding major salary and collecting a boatload of draft picks. Ryan Johansen, Mikael Granlund and Nino Niederreiter were all traded, Matt Duchene was bought out, and Saros had been consistently mentioned in trade rumors.

It seemed like the very early stages of a major re-tooling.

But instead of keeping an eye on the long-game, the Predators kept Saros and went into the offseason and signed veterans like Ryan O’Reilly and Gustav Nyquist to multi-year deals.

And it mostly worked.

Let’s talk about it.