Early season NHL overreactions and observations: When is it time to worry about Nashville?

The Nashville Predators are off to a shocking start, the New Jersey Devils

We are through the first two weeks of the 2024-25 NHL season, so let’s overreact and make some early season observations.

The 32 Teams, 32 Players series will continue on Tuesday. For now, let’s talk about the league as a whole.

The Nashville Predators are off to one of the worst starts of the salary cap era

We have to start with the Nashville Predators here because, holy crap, this is not a good start.

Entering the week they are the only team in the NHL that does not have at least a point in the standings, losing each of their first five games in regulation.

Yes, I loved this team coming into the season and thought they not only had a chance to be one of the top teams in the Western Conference, but also a potential Stanley Cup contender. They were already a really good playoff team with really strong underlying numbers during the 2023-24 season, and then added the biggest thing they were lacking over the offseason — finishers.

Guys with a proven track record of putting the puck in the net. Often.

Steven Stamkos and Jonathan Marchessault were both 40-goal scorers a year ago, and while they are both already into their 30s (and in Stamkos’ case his mid-30s) I still felt like they had some high quality hockey left in them. At least for a few years.

So far? Nothing has gone right.

Starting goalie Juuse Saros has been awful with an .875 save percentage in his first four starts, the offense has only scored 10 goals in five games, and they are averaging just 2.18 expected goals per 60 minutes of 5-on-5 play, the second-worst mark in the league ahead of only the Columbus Blue Jackets. The puck is not going in the net for them and everything is going in the net against them.

I am torn between “it’s still early,” and “maybe I overrated this team.”

Even if I did have expectations that were too high, this team shouldn’t be THIS bad, and I still don’t expect it to be this bad. Saros is too good of a goalie to have a save percentage that bad, and while they do need to do a better job of generating chances, Stamkos and Marchessault are not going to keep scoring on just 5 percent of their shots on goal. There is some percentage regression to happen here that can pretty rapidly turn things around.

But that turnaround is going to have to happen very, very soon. While it is still early, it also gets late early in the NHL.

Since the 2005-06 season there have only been 24 teams that have started a season with zero wins in their first five games. Only four of those teams had a worse goal-differential than Nashville’s minus-13 through those games.

Out of those 24 teams, only one of them went on to make the playoffs that season — the 2008-09 Philadelphia Flyers. That Flyers team at least had two points through those games due to overtime losses. The Predators do not even have that.

The Predators are only the fifth team since 2005-06 to have zero points through five games, joining a list that includes only the 2015-16 Columbus Blue Jackets, the 2007-08 Atlanta Thrashers, the 2021-22 Montreal Canadiens, and the 2022-23 San Jose Sharks. All four of those teams went on to be among the worst teams in the league in those respective seasons.

Nashville is not going to be that team. Just looking at the roster should tell you that. This is not a rebuilding team, or a tanking team, or even a bad team. I think it’s a team that has been to this point a little unlikely and fighting through some bad goaltending. But at some point it is going to have to shit or get off the pot and start winning some hockey games.

Some other big stories around the NHL so far? New Jersey’s fast start, Utah looks FUN and Colorado has some major goaltending concerns.

Let’s talk about it.