Barry Trotz is driving the Nashville Predators into 2025 in a baffling manner

You might still make it to your destination unscathed, but right now General Manager Barry Trotz seems to be driving the Nashville Predators in a reckless way that is hard to make sense of.

The strategy of Trotz was pretty clear before the season started; empty out the bank account to sign superstar players in free agency and make a push for the Stanley Cup as soon as 2025. Fast forward to current times just a couple days from the new year, and Trotz's original plan has unraveled.

Now to be completely fair, almost everyone around the league and fans alike were applauding Trotz's aggressive approach to free agency. He had the money to spend, and he build a roster on paper that looked like it could be a sneaky Stanley Cup pick, or at least a team that could make serious noise in the Stanley Cup Playoffs.

Not only are the Predators not a Stanley Cup contender, they're not even a playoff contender and instead in a back-and-forth battle to stay out of last place in the entire NHL.

Trotz's blueprint for what's next for the Nashville Predators is very unclear

Instead of moving on from aging veterans and bottom-six guys who are never going to be anything more than that, Trotz is shipping away young talent. The most recent young player to be traded by Trotz is Juuso Parssinen, which honestly we all saw coming for weeks beforehand after Parssinen kept getting the healthy scratch status.

Trotz has also traded just in the past six months the likes of Yaroslav Askarov, Cody Glass, Philip Tomasino and Alexandre Carrier. Through all of those trades, Trotz hasn't gotten any impact players in return and instead gotten projects at best and more draft picks.

This isn't including the goalie trade of Scott Wedgewood to the Colorado Avalanche for Justus Annunen. That trade actually looks really good on paper and is already giving us promising returns.

Losing Dante Fabbro on waivers was also a bad look, even if the trade offers weren't that great. He is now playing a big role for the Columbus Blue Jackets and has eight points in 21 games.

So what is Trotz trying to accomplish now? It's really hard for me to even begin to make sense of it. My initial thought is Trotz is trying to keep the band together, and while 2024-25 is likely a lost cause in terms of making the playoffs, there is hope that this team can run it back for 2025-26 and avoid any kind of long rebuild.

If Trotz was fully committed to rebuilding and doing it the right way with young talent, then it wouldn't be Parssinen, Tomasino, Carrier, Askarov and Glass you would be trading. It would be healthy scratching guys like Michael McCarron, Cole Smith and finding trade partners for Gustav Nyquist, Colton Sissons and even Ryan O'Reilly.

Now many times the moves that a general manager makes can't be accurately graded until years down the road, and that is true for Trotz right now. So while I'm completely flabbergasted by Trotz's team building approach, I also have to remind myself that none of this will matter if the Predators run it back in 2025-26 and make an epic run with many of these same veterans that don't seem to be going anywhere.

Steven Stamkos, Jonathan Marchessault, Brady Skjei, Roman Josi and Filip Forsberg are your veteran core that don't seem to be going anywhere for the foreseeable future.

Then you have your younger tier that hopefully Trotz doesn't mess with. In that I would include Luke Evangelista, Tommy Novak, Zachary L'Heureux, Adam Wilsby and Nick Blankenburg.

How will Trotz approach the 2025 trade deadline?

Could those aforementioned core players, both old and young, run it back in 2025-26 and perform much better than they are in 2024-25? Absolutely so, with the addition of some key pieces here and there. First and foremost, you have to move some veterans that still hold value so this team can get faster and have more of a long-term future outlook.

How Trotz handled the 2025 trade deadline should give us a much more clear window into what his long-term plan is. If he trades guys like Nyquist, Sissons or McCarron, it will tell us that he's looking at 2025-26 as a true rebuild season with younger talent. If he retains the same veterans past the deadline, then it will tell me he wants to try to run it back with mostly the same roster in 2025-26.

The Predators have very few pending free agents for the 2025 offseason. In fact, only Nyquist is an unrestricted free agent, while Evangelista and Wilsby are restricted free agents. So it's not a situation where Trotz has to desperately move on from upcoming free agents, except for Nyquist.

As of now, I have trouble making sense of what Trotz is trying to pull off. I've seen comments from fans on social media like "Trotz is playing GM mode in NHL 2024" and "Trotz is in way over his head". That type of sentiment, and it also stems from Trotz showing unwavering loyalty to Head Coach Andrew Brunette.

Let me first be very clear before I make this statement; a general manager should never fire a head coach, or make any roster move, just to appease the fans. However, if Trotz did fire Brunette today, his popularity would undoubtedly get a boost because fans would at least see that this abject failure is unacceptable in the eyes of Trotz.

Right now, there just doesn't seem to be a clear vision and instead it's like Trotz is driving blindfolded.

Trotz was wildly popular just a few months ago, but his popularity has tanked since then. Yeah, fielding a last place that keeps finding new ways to blow games will do that. It's the nature of the beast as the head of a front office.