Nashville Predators assistants divide up the duties like any coaching staff, some more enjoyable than others. Dan Hinote has perhaps the best: putting together the highlights of the team’s best hits from each game, a sure way to break up the monotony of a film session, especially if your team gives you enough material.
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It’s a job that wouldn’t have had much reason to exist for the past few years. Did the 2018-19 Predators deliver any slobber knockers in their first-round playoff loss to the Dallas Stars, or did they just absorb them? They were mauled. Now it’s like this team is a football offensive line, picking through the best “pancakes” from the previous game to commend. And it’s more than chortling and back slapping in that room.
“We talk about certain players on other teams that don’t particularly like to get into that physical contact, over and over,” said Colton Sissons, center of the brawniest line in recent Predators memory, which is at the center of this revived season. “We’re definitely aware each night of which guys we want to target and make sure it’s not a fun night for them. Dan shows it on the clips. We see how hitting like that wears on teams, makes it so they start turning pucks over a little bit more, getting rid of the puck a little earlier than they would normally.”
When you play a team that likes to do the same things — a team like, say, the Dallas Stars — it can get messy. And this is what we had Saturday night in the game of the year, the first non-playoff May game in Bridgestone Arena history, the winner to seize control of the race for the fourth and final playoff spot in the 2021 version of the Central Division. Playing this game must have been like trying to see through fog, a fog of body blows. It was a test of who could break away from delivering a hit or bracing for one long enough to make a decisive hockey play.
That play finally came in overtime, after 63 minutes and 32 seconds of scoreless hockey, Preds defenseman Mattias Ekholm reaching out to intercept a puck destined to create a problem for Nashville near its blue line, skating it all the way behind Anton Khudobin and deftly leaving it in front for Erik Haula. Haula buried it. A crowd of about 5,700, or 33 percent of capacity, was loud enough in celebration to make Haula wonder afterward if it was really just 33 percent in the building. A playoff kind of win launched a playoff-win kind of celebration.
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“Really special for us,” Juuse Saros said after stopping 27 shots for this third shutout of the season and 14th of his career, and “special” is a good word for what has happened with this franchise over the past six weeks, and it’s obviously important that this team not confuse “special” with “complete” because a three-point lead over Dallas with four games to play — five for Dallas — is going to require more work.
Also, even if the Preds get enough done in two games against Columbus and two against Carolina, this franchise has done enough in the past several years to keep a race for fourth place in perspective. There’s no banner for that, at least I sure hope not. The idea here, as reflected in various salaries on the roster and dictated by recent history, is to have a Stanley Cup contender. Nashville has not matched up with the top of this one-pandemic-year-only Central, so if a first-round exit follows as the hockey world will expect, GM David Poile will be back to trying to figure out how to reconfigure this roster to get quickly back near the top. Or that he has to entertain some level of foundational change and rebuild.
But you know what? So what? That’s for later. It’s OK right now to appreciate this team and the life it has brought this city since sitting at 11-16-1 on March 14, 10 points out of a playoff spot and bracing for Poile to tear it apart with a massive move. Ekholm, the guy who set up the game winner, who was angrily wiping blood off his face on the bench earlier in the game, who brings it every night, was certain to be on his way to Toronto as St. Patrick’s Day approached. Maybe Philly. Maybe it would be him and someone else. Maybe a bunch of them.
“I think our organization knows the personalities of our hockey club and the character we have in that room, and I think they’ve always seen that and noticed that,” Preds center Ryan Johansen, then and now a guy with an uncertain long-term future, told The Athletic. “But when you’re losing like that? Losing like we were? Changes have to happen. That’s pro sports. If it’s not getting fixed, you fix it. It was damn near a breaking point, I’m sure.”
It’s OK, too, to give credit to these players and coach John Hynes for bringing it back from that imagined brink. Nashville is 17-6-1 since then. And there was no moment that turned it all around, for as much as a writer would love for that to be the case. There was a memorable meeting of the forwards with Hynes to talk about defensive responsibility, a session not nearly as fun as Hinote’s headbanger highlights. There were a lot of injuries, and a lot of young players eagerly filling in, and conversations with Hynes and some of the veterans about how that eagerness and energy would be the expectation when they returned to the lineup. There were moments of outward frustration, such as when Bally Sports sideline reporter Kara Hammer asked Johansen about the team’s mindset during a second-intermission interview on March 11 at Carolina with the Preds down 4-0 and Johansen snapped: “Go score five goals.”
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“I felt so bad for Kara,” Johansen said of an exchange that went viral. “I was just in a bad moment, and she knows me well enough to know it was just a heat of the moment, joking kind of thing. But we live and die through this game.”
Johansen went viral again after an exchange exactly one month later. This after a 3-2 shootout win over Dallas on April 11 at Bridgestone, which featured a Yakov Trenin trucking of Dallas defenseman Jamie Oleksiak that stands as the Hinote highlight of the year. After the win, NHL.com’s Robby Stanley asking Johansen, “How much different the vibe is” with the team compared with a month earlier?
“We’re vibin’, Robby,” Johansen said with a Jeff Spicoli, “Dude, where’d you get this jacket?!” kind of flare, and soon enough, “We’re vibin’” T-shirts and rally towels at Bridgestone were under production. A source would neither confirm nor deny that a “We’re vibin’” banner is being planned. In all seriousness, teams tend to beat things like this into the ground, as amplified by social media, but this was organically created fun. And there’s a lot more of that around this team.
Take “The Herd Line,” as coined by Hammer. She took the “Colt” out of Sisson’s first name, the “Yak” out of Trenin’s first name and noted that Mathieu Olivier is known as the “Biloxi Bull” because he was born in Biloxi, Miss. When Olivier got hurt, Tanner Jeannot stepped right into his place and kept up the obliterating of opponents. He also fits the “Herd” nickname because he’s from Oxbow, Saskatchewan. You can’t make this stuff up. And you can’t overstate what this line has meant to the Preds — Hynes has a less fun but more powerful nickname for it, the “Identity Line.”
They set the tone. Everyone else falls into that style of play. Tough, physical, unyielding and responsible. It’s not always pretty. But the relentless forecheck that line establishes has created plenty of scoring chances as well. Trenin and Jeannot are “thundering animals,” Sissons said, but notes that they also have skill and feel for the game. And Sissons, he of the hat trick to advance the Preds to the Stanley Cup Final in 2017, is up about 10 pounds to 208 and is hitting opponents like never before. That line, the young guys and how they’ve played, the veterans following suit, the vibe, it’s all gotten the Preds here. Hynes, too.
“He stuck with it and kept the group together, and he’s a guy who expects us all to play a certain way, whether 10 years in the league or brand new,” Sissons said of Hynes, who is in his first full season as coach after replacing the fired Peter Laviolette last season. “That’s big. We had a decision to make early on in the season, whether we were gonna rally together and turn this thing around or just let this get ugly and be a miserable year of hockey for us.”
Johansen said Hynes kept the demeanor calm even when things were snowballing the wrong way, never getting to the point where the Preds were punitively “getting on a line and skating up and down the ice.”
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“It was always about teaching,” Johansen said. “Showing us little things in our structure. Preaching that stuff. And it was one of those things where, once we all bought in and committed to it as a team, we realized he was right. And it turned into winning hockey.”
At some point, we should probably mention the biggest reason for all of this. That would be Saros. He’s been ridiculously good. He’s 14-5-1 with a .945 save percentage and 1.83 goals against in his past 20 games. He’s the obvious key to the Preds finishing this playoff run and then having any hope to threaten their first-round opponent.
This seemed like a typical goalie hot streak after a week. And then another. And another. But now, it’s OK to wonder if this is what Saros is becoming and if we’re watching him establish himself as the long-term successor to Pekka Rinne.
It’s OK to wonder if the emergence of players such as Eeli Tolvanen and Luke Kunin and Alexandre Carrier and Trenin means this team isn’t as far away from being really good again as it seemed back in March. It’s OK to be excited about watching the Preds try to finish this run off, then take aim at heavily favored Carolina or Tampa Bay or Florida. Hynes said after Saturday’s win that he liked the calmness he sensed from his team entering the third period, which Nashville dominated before finding a way to win. That’s the kind of thing that gets a team ready for the pressure of the playoffs.
For the first time since Dallas battered and eliminated the Preds in the first round in 2019, it doesn’t feel absolutely certain that things are trending in the wrong direction for this team. Here’s one thing that is certain: Hinote is going to be busy with the footage from Saturday’s game.
(Photo of Mattias Ekholm and Eric Haula: John Russell / NHLI via Getty Images)
