The Nashville Predators have won the offseason, but will that translate to winning the season?

The Nashville Predators made four of the biggest moves of the offseason and, on paper, look to be a bonafide Stanley Cup contender.

The rapid transition of the Nashville Predators has really been something to behold over the past couple of years.

Toward the end of David Poile’s run as general manager it just looked like a team that had just gotten … stale. Boring. Mediocre. Whatever buzzword you want to use to describe an average team going nowhere, they were it.

Sure, they were still reaching the 90-point mark with regularity and consistently making the postseason, but they had some bad contracts, an aging roster that lacked game-breakers, and it started to reach a point where they needed every single thing to go their way just to get to the fringes of playoff contention in the Western Conference.

They either needed starting goalie Juuse Saros to stand on his head and be a game-stealer every night, rely on some big spikes in shooting percentage to drive their offense, or a combination of both.

Even when both of those things happened they were still only topping out as a Wild Card team and first-round fodder for one of the Western Conference’s true Stanley Cup contenders.

They were one of those teams stuck in the league’s mushy, mediocre middle.

Not quite bad enough to completely tear it down and rebuild. Not quite good enough to be a serious contender.

Those types of teams generally do one of two things — they either extend the mediocrity for another few years, or they eventually give in and start a long-term, full-scale rebuild that involves finishing in the bottom-five of the standings for a couple of years and hoping for NHL Draft lottery luck.

When the transition from Poile to Barry Trotz started to take place, the Predators sort of looked like a team preparing to do the latter. They shed a ton of salary in rapid fashion, they stockpiled long-term assets and draft picks, and it looked like they might be on the threshold of starting one of those longer-term rebuilds.

And then that didn’t happen.

They seem to have found the right head coach in Andrew Brunette, they made a couple of big offseason splashes before the 2023-24 season to sign veteran forwards Gustav Nyquist and Ryan O’Reilly to multi-year deals, and then they actually showed some serious improvement on the ice.

The record only improved seven points. They still lost in the first round. But the overall process behind what they did and the way they played was not only significantly different, it was also significantly better.

Then this offseason they made four of the biggest moves in the NHL.

• Just when the trade rumors around Saros started to reach their boiling point, they re-signed him to an eight-year contract extension to remain the Predators’ starting goalie.

• They signed Steven Stamkos, one of the top goal scorers of this generation, to a multi-year deal.

• They added Jonathan Marchessault on a multi-year deal of his own, bringing in two of the top-17 goal-scorers from the 2023-24 season and two players that eclipsed the 40-goal mark. Keep in mind that in the entire existence of the Predators organization they have only ever had three 40-goal seasons (by just two different players — Filip Forsberg and Matt Duchene), all of which have come within the past three seasons. They signed two in a matter of hours.

• They added to their defense by signing Brady Skjei to a seven-year deal, giving them another solid top-four option on defense to go with Roman Josi.

Overall, they have been one of the biggest winners on paper this offseason.

Now let’s talk about how that could translate over to the regular season.