Revisiting the biggest offseason acquisitions in Nashville Predators History
By Chad Minton
Nick Bonino signed in July 2017 to 4 years
Let's start off a little small on the impact scale and remember when the Predators signed trusted and well-respected veteran Nick Bonino, fresh off his Stanley Cup win with the Pittsburgh Penguins over the Nashville Predators earlier that year.
Bonino is your prototypical "do a little bit of everything" type of player. A meat and potatoes player, if you will. The Predators were in an interesting spot during the 2017 offseason after going on that magical run to the Stanley Cup Final, which frankly caught everyone off guard including the most diehard fans.
Looking back on this addition now, I'm kind of nuetral on it. Bonino wasn't a bad pickup by any stretch of the imagination, playing three seasons with Nashville after getting a pretty sizeable pay increase from $1.9 million per year with Pittsburgh to $4.1 million per year with Nashville.
Bonino would put up back-to-back seasons of 35 points and have a really strong plus/minus rating of a combine plus-44 in his last two seasons with Nashville before being traded to Minnesota in return for Luke Kunin.
Now at age 35, Bonino's peak years started to regress just before Nashville dealt him to Minnesota, so all in all it was a quality pickup for the brief three years they had him.