Andrew Brunette should rein back the line shuffling for Nashville Predators so early

There are two schools of thought to addressing early season struggles in an 82-game regular season, and for Nashville Predators Head Coach Andrew Brunette his philosophy seems to be to keep shuffling things until something sticks.

The Predators are off to an utterly repulsive start to the 2024-25 campaign after entering the season with so much hype and media cheerleading. Of course there is plenty of time to turn things around and live up to that hype, but historically speaking the record books aren't kind to teams that start 0-4-0.

The Avalanche, another equally surprising team that has started 0-4-0, have their own set of problems to join the Predators. Both teams were trendy picks to maybe win the Central Division over the Dallas Stars, and certainly the consensus picks to finish in the top-3 of the division.

Furthermore, it's fair to say both the Avalanche and Predators have realistic Stanley Cup aspirations. No team that's has started 0-4-0 in NHL history has ever won the Stanley Cup, per SportsNet:

Don't lie to yourself, the Predators have realistic expectations to win a Stanley Cup

I can promise you that if you ask any of the leaders on the Predators roster, like Captain Roman Josi or Filip Forsberg, what the goal is this season it's to win the Stanley Cup. Nothing less will be considered a success. At least I would hope that would be their truthful answer.

The more based and rational fan might argue that just making it past the first round would be a success and a stepping stone to progress, but I also don't think General Manager Barry Trotz would agree with that sentiment. Otherwise he just wasted a whole lot of money in free agency. Truth is he expects a deep playoff run and push for the Stanley Cup in 2025 as well.

When the Predators were 0-3-0, I gave three reasons why and one of them was the newcomers were still getting comfortable. Stamkos has yet to register a point, while Marchessault had to wait until the fourth game to get his first goal.

This is why the 0-4-0 start is ringing alarm bells. Not because they can't overcome it, but because this team is built to go deep after heavy spending in free agency. This isn't some run of the mill season the Predators were heading into.

Back to Brunette and how he has handled the rocky start to 2024-25. I'm in no way turning on Brunette and saying he's suddenly the wrong guy for the job as head coach because that would be a knee jerk reaction, even though there are plenty of fans already getting close to jumping off that ledge. I'm not anywhere close to there yet, but I do think he needs to chill out on the line changes.

Brunette has yet to find a line combination he likes among his forwards. Even during the course of games he has been changing things up, almost in desperation mode to find something that works.

The season opened with the predicted line combos of the top line from last season staying together, and the second line consisting of Tommy Novak at center with the two free agent veteran pickups Jonathan Marchessault and Steven Stamkos on that line.

They should be showing more trust in Novak to handle the 2C role with Stamkos and Marchessault. I haven't seen anything egregious from him to warrant yanking him out of that role. He did get back to the 2C role against the Oilers, but again there were changes within the game.

Brunette needs to trust his line combos for more than a couple games

I'm just very skeptical of how Brunette is changing things so early and often. It makes you wonder if players are having enough time to gel and if this is just prolonging the chemistry build up, which we expected would be the case.

We've even seen Cole Smith get second line duties and even Marchessault in a bottom-six role. I'm just not crazy about shaking things up that significantly so early in the season. What kind of message does that send to the locker room? That we're already abandoning the original plan, or that we simply just don't have a plan and still figuring it out? Just not great for the psyche the way I read it.

Now the pushback of my argument is that Brunette should figure it out now while there's still plenty of time left in the season to overcome the hole you're already digging in the standings. Again, I would push back that you're just delaying the need to build chemistry by moving guys all over the lineup every game, and within the game itself.

It's also not as if the Predators offense hasn't generated a lot of offensive chances, because they have. The Edmonton loss was actually their worst offensive output of the four losses with only a 2.1 Expected Goals according to MoneyPuck.

Quite frankly, the Predators were fortunate to keep the score within one goal up until the dying moment of third period when they gave up an empty netter to seal their fate of 0-4-0.

The first two games the Predators had plenty of offense and ran into two hot goalies. Stamkos hit a post late in the season opener to push the game to overtime against the Stars. I just think Brunette should've kept at it with his line combination throughout the first four games, with the exception of switching out your healthy scratches between Juuso Parssinen and Philip Tomasino.

Even more so, the top-six needs to be committed to for a least the first 10 games. Especially if they're doing a lot of encouraging things on offense and just missing. The players echoed that after the first two losses in particular that they were doing a lot of good things.

We'll see if Brunette comes up with another completely different lineup combination for the rematch with the Red Wings, a team that shut them out 2-0 in Detroit but got outshot by the Predators 42-22.

My preference is that you go back to your original top-six of Filip Forsberg, Ryan O'Reilly, Gus Nyquist, Stamkos, Novak and Marchessault. Only a matter of time before Stamkos and Marchessault start seeing those pucks go in, and Marchessault did just get his first goal as a member of the Predators.

Give the guys a chance to build on their chemistry and get cooking while it's still early with time to offset the ugly start. If they can find their groove, this team has the talent to go on a lengthy winning streak of their own and erase this bad start. But you have to find a lineup to commit to for longer than one game.