Juuse Saros (James Guillory / USA TODAY Sports) The rest of the roster doesn’t look close to good enough. While it’s likely true that Nashville has one of the league’s best goalies to lean on, that’s rarely ever the safest bet and being a playoff team requires much more. It was a berth built upon goaltending alone, an extremely volatile solution to team-building that is prone to year-over-year regression. The biggest issue though is the reason the Predators even made it to the playoffs last year in the first place. The rest of the division got stronger while the Predators did the opposite. It signalled that the team is going in a new direction, but there’s also the fact that every other team in the Central improved on top of that. The team is on a downwards trajectory and it doesn’t help that they moved out both Ryan Ellis and Viktor Arvidsson this summer, two staples of the previous core. It won’t get much worse than that because Arizona exists, but it’s tough to envision the Predators climbing up the standings this season. Nashville has a legitimate chance to make the playoffs, but the team is still projected to finish seventh in the division, a spot it lands in 30 percent of the time. The Predators may find themselves in the league’s bottom third of teams. It’s the lowest chance this team has had in a long while as the Predators have been a playoff mainstay over the last seven seasons, only technically missing once in that time frame due to a pandemic-altered season. Nashville enters the 2021-22 season with a roughly one-in-four shot at the postseason. Nashville made some big trades this summer with eyes towards the future, and the end result is a team that is projected to finish outside the playoff picture. Repeating that feat may be difficult this season as the team begins to shift priorities.
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