Poile, Hynes Embracing Competition Among Preds, Excited for Team Reset

As far as David Poile is concerned, today was a game day for his players.
Sure, there wasn't an actual opponent waiting on the other side of the ice at Bridgestone Arena on Monday morning as the Predators laced up their skates for the first time at training camp, but Nashville's general manager is well aware his club doesn't have any time to waste.
The 2020-21, 56-game regular season begins on Jan. 14, leaving just 10 days for the Preds to prepare for a campaign that must see them finish at least fourth in the eight-team Central Division to qualify for the playoffs.
As Poile said Sunday afternoon, easing into camp won't be an option for his players, and
expectations remain high for a group that says they still have something to prove
.

"It's not a situation where we're having a long training camp and you can play your way into the season," Poile said on Day One of Predators Training Camp presented by Vanderbilt Health. "Basically, you've got to start making your mark [today] so that coaches [take notice] so that you can be put into places that you actually have a chance to make our hockey team. If anything, I'm looking forward to this in terms of maybe being one of the more intense and, I guess there's no other way to say it, better training camps that I've ever attended, just because of the urgency and the briefness of a 10-day training camp."
"We talked with our players [and told them] every day is going to matter," Preds Head Coach John Hynes said. "We need to make sure that our meetings and our practices are really focused, we have a high execution level and we need to get up and running quickly. We have a really good format for our camp on how we're going to practice, have some intrasquad exhibition games and make sure that we're physically and mentally prepared to go for game one."

Poile, Hynes and the rest of the Predators management team have the task of evaluating the 40 participants at camp and determining who will make the 23-man roster ahead of Opening Night, as well as which players - four to six of them - will slot onto the team's taxi squad for the upcoming season.
"We had a team meeting where we basically talked to the players about being open-minded with our decisions and realizing that this is going to be a unique season," Poile said. "Fifty-six games, a lot of back-to-back games, a lot of three games in four nights, four in six; it's sort of setting up that it looks like you would need a bigger roster to be successful this year. We're looking for patience and open-mindedness. How we start isn't necessarily how we're going to finish in terms of where our roster is going to be."
No matter who finds themselves on the respective lists early next week, each of the participants are learning what to expect right from the start. Hynes stated Sunday he asked individual players to come up with some of the cultural values the Predators want to have as an organization. As the group looks to establish an identity and become a much tougher team to play against, the bench boss is also emphasizing the need for his players to do more than just have those ideals in their heads.
"Now, it's time to execute the words, it's time to not have a say-and-do gap," Hynes said. "Say we're going to do this, but then we don't do it; we want to take the gap out of what we've said we want to be. And now we're able to get going to work at it.
"[Once we start playing games], every situation is going to give us an opportunity, particularly early here, to forge an identity and how we want to do things. We're going to have a lot of reps right away and [we'll see] how do we handle success? How do we handle a failure? All those types of things are going to really hit right away."

Poile revealed he's also been using an expression around the rink over the last few days: "Play with no regrets." Looking back at last season, the GM knows just about every player, as well as the team as a whole, could have been better.
The Predators also have no doubt they're capable of securing a spot in the postseason once more, and Poile believes there were some things that could have been done differently during the last go around. Now, it's all about a fresh start and simply improving day by day.
"Everything that we can do better, it's controllable," Poile said. "We have a core of top players that can play better, and they're going to have to - as I heard John Hynes say - they're going to have to drive our team. And then we've got some other guys that we brought in that are just hard-working guys that I think will make a difference in how we play… [How we play on the ice is still] unknown right now, but as far as competing to be a team to make the playoffs? Absolutely."
Plenty of those answers will come soon enough, and as Poile described earlier, this could be one of the better camps in franchise history. And this reset, as Nashville's general manager calls it, might just take the Preds back to where they ultimately want to be.
"We're moving on to the 2021 version of the Nashville Predators, and we're hopeful that we made the right changes," Poile said. "We're hopeful that this reset gets us back to be one of the hardest-working teams in the League, gets us to be very competitive, gets us to be a hard team to play against, gets us into winning on a more consistent basis, gets us to be a playoff team, gets us to be a team that has a chance to compete for the Stanley Cup - it's a lot of hopes and wishes and thoughts, but it's all gone into that process of all the changes that we made this this offseason. That's why I'm thankful and grateful that we have a chance to play this year to start with, and I'm really excited to see exactly what we have."