Nashville Predators: Five Players With Most Value to Long-Term Future
By Chad Minton
Juuse Saros
The best is yet to come from Juuse Saros, and we’ve already seen some pretty great things from him. We can only speculate how the time will be split up between Saros and Pekka Rinne. The primary starting role still belongs to Rinne, but Saros is obviously the future. The Predators have always had solid goaltending, and Saros might have the best talent of all of them.
A new deal had to be made this offseason to ensure Saros would be around for at least the next few years. There was never much concern that the deal wouldn’t get done. However, the three-year, $4.5 million deal is a bargain for the organization. Now it’s just a matter of when Saros moves ahead of Rinne on the depth chart.
It’s a comforting position to be in knowing you have a 23-year-old goaltender that has the skill level to be just as good as Rinne has been, maybe even better. If the Predators didn’t have stability behind Rinne, they would find themselves in a precarious position to stay among the NHL’s best teams. I expect Saros to set a career-high in starts this season and move ahead of Rinne as the team’s primary goaltender. He is the future, and possibly the most important piece to this current Predators team winning a Stanley Cup anytime soon.