The Nashville Predators were eliminated from playoff contention for the second-straight season Tuesday. What started out as another down year that slowly witnessed revival quickly turned south as the season neared a close.
People have taken note to the tragic collapse including the league's top player agents. A recent article from The Athletic asked 22 agents a series of multiple questions. One of the questions was: "What is the worst-run franchise in the NHL?" Two voted that the Preds organization deserves a spot on the list, tied for third most in the poll.
The organization has been through 27 years of existence, 16 of those included playoff hockey. Its eight consecutive appearances are one of the longest of 2010s' hockey. However, its recent history has overiden the gold-old days of Smashville. A team drowned in heavy contracts, poor asset management and heavy loyalty, the future doesn't look bright and it begins to make sense why some believe that.
Management wasn't afraid to spend some ( a lot of) money
One of the biggest flaws with the organization is management's tendency to hand the bag to literally anyone.
The first move Barry Trotz ever made as the Preds General Manager was signing Gustav Nyquist to a two-year, $6.37 million deal ($3.185 million average-annual-value). Nyquist, a middle-six winger, found a way to become Nashville's second-best winger and score 75 points, the highest he's ever put up. I applaud Trotz for making a sneakily good move like this.
In that same free agency class, Trotz brought in Ryan O'Reilly on a four-year, $18 million contract ($4.5 million per year). It has arguably been one of the league's best contracts for a hot minute. A consistent 50-point scorer has established himself as a top player on the team day in and day out. With 73 points this year, he's first in team points and third in scoring with 23 goals. With an intriguing start to his GM career, things looked like they might be better for Nashville. Oh, how well that aged.
They made the postseason in his first year but failed in his remaining two. His second season was arguably the Preds worst season in franchise history. Trotz signed a handful of big free agents, but it only helped the team reach third-worst in the league.
Steven Stamkos, 8x4; Brady Skjei, 7x7; and Jonathan Marchessault, 5.5x5 is where it all went wrong. Three names, over $108 million spent in one day. One season of slight success is what prompted Trotz to go all out. Rather than focusing on the prospects in the system, he instead focused on reeling in veterans in the hopes his team could be better.
While guys like Stamkos and Skjei have revived themselves this year, it hasn't lead to any of the success that was promised in ink. Due to poor team performance and the inability to ship off any of the long-term contracts, Trotz was forced to trade away younger pieces like Tommy Novak, Philip Tomasino, and Juuso Parssinen. This leads me into the next reason.
We did a pretty bad job managing assets...a pretty bad job
When Trotz joined Nashville, he promised to make the team younger and less reliant on veterans, basically a retool. Even though we did see a rise of young talent here and there, a lot of that was mishandled. He brought in more veterans in places where the youth should go. This especially applies to the defense where deals to Nicolas Hague, Brady Skjei and Nick Perbix have limited playing time of Ryan Ufko, Tanner Molendyk, and at one point Nick Blankenburg.
So to recap, we failed to accomplish the rebuild. Immediately after that, he signed veterans to long-term deals. On top of that, trading away Novak and Co. wasn't the best plan. Those guys brought promise to this club, and we didn't even get a good return from them.
He waited on trading veterans which in turn, lowered their trade value. It also didn't help that he put loyalty on these players knowing that half the league was interested in them. O'Reilly doesn't have a no-movement-clause, yet Trotz acted like he did. When the league called, Trotz put the phone down and it eventually resulted in O'Reilly not wanting to leave.
The way Trotz built this team isn't actually building anything at all. It's like building a house but you tear down a wall because you built it wrong just to rebuild wrong again. Nashville is on path to become a team like Detroit or Seattle where you're stuck in an evergrowing state of middle ground. Not good enough to compete, but not bad enough to tank.
We've had the time to sell players and rack of assets, but it just seems like we're going all in every year and not getting any result. Only one can hope that with a new GM in the arena that there'll be big changes coming up.
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