Honky Tonk Season in Nashville

The Predators have been in what some might say, a precarious situation all season.

Losing their first 3 games to start the season, Predators GM remained confident and felt the off-season rust was just wearing off. Was he right? He thought so, as the Preds proceeded to win the next 8 games straight to catapult their way to #1 in the league with a 8-3-0 record. Everything was hitting early season expectations by the GM, who expected to duke it out for the president trophy throughout the season.

But then, the Preds went on to drop their next 5 games and quickly fell down the standings with an 8-8-0 record. That is when the roller-coaster, see-saw of a season started to reveal itself as what Eric Wolf describes as a ‘honky-tonk’ of a season in Nashville. “I can’t make any freaking sense of this season” a frustrated Wolf exclaimed at reporters. “We win games in bunches and lose games in bunches. Just take a look at sifting through our game by game record. It makes no sense.”

During the last off-season, The Predators brought in Ivan Provorov to stabilize the blueline, and depth forwards such as Blake Coleman and Tyler Pitlick to provide the bottom 6 with some more jam and defensive consistency. “On paper, I truly felt, at the start of the season, we were the best roster assembled in Predators history to date.” However, hockey can be a fickle game. Players have up years and down years, pucks bounce any way direction they want sometimes, luck can be a factor. “All I can really explain it is, it’s just a down year for us. We haven’t had the chemistry this year. I had higher expectations, and felt we were ready for the next step.” Wolf said.

As it stands, the Predators still claw at 8^th place in the western conference, barely hanging onto the last playoff spot in the west, which further puts the Preds GM at a further stalemate. With a season ending injury to its captain Sidney Crosby, it further ties Wolfs hands in hoping to compete or do any damage in the playoffs this year. “We’re a bubble team right now, without our captain for the rest of the year. There’s an expansion draft looming. My hands are tied. Any player we look at in the market to help this team will just be an asset exposed this summer. We have found ourselves in a stalemate with this season.” Wolf tried explaining to media. “We just got to be confident with the group of guys we have, the group that has been fighting all year.”

With the season ailing and a playoff run looking less likely, Nashville shipped out depth forwards Blake Coleman and Matt Calvert in an attempt to put themselves in a better situation for next season, bringing in young guns Pierre-Oliver Joseph, Ross Colton, and pesky veteran Austin Watson in deals with the Rangers and Avalanche. “These moves, by design, was to set ourselves up better with the expansion and to provide the franchise with some youth that we hope can take over permanent roles with the team next year.” At any rate, one can get the sense the Predators are going to ride out the remainder of the 2020-2021 season and re-tool in the off-season. “Admittedly, this season hasn’t gone as how we envisioned. But at the end of the day, we’re still a team being led by Connor McDavid, and we still sit in a playoff spot. We’ll see what happens.”