Although Opening Night didn’t go Nashville's way on home ice with a 3-1 loss to Minnesota on Thursday, the Predators are officially into the new season.
There’s always plenty of buildup to the opener, and rightfully so, but now the daily grind of a fresh campaign with a game almost every other day has truly begun. To that end, the Preds spent Friday on the ice preparing for another divisional rival - the Dallas Stars - to come to town Saturday night.
It wasn’t all bad for the Predators against the Wild - they certainly had their moments and brought plenty of effort and urgency most of the night - but they also know they’ve got to find more ways to sustain time in the opposition’s end while not putting themselves in an early hole.
“We got into penalty trouble, and it’s kind of rinse and repeat from last year, where we kill the momentum of the game,” Preds forward Steven Stamkos said following Friday’s practice. “The [penalty kill] guys get out there and they’ve got to burn some energy, and some guys don't get out and it ruins the flow. Then, we kind of got behind the eight ball and chasing after that, and then we were just a little sloppy with the puck, I thought.
“We have to play a certain way to be successful as a group, and I thought there were just some turnovers that led to some odd-man rushes and then extended time spent in the D-zone. It wasn't a ton of it, but it was just, you score one goal, you’ve got to play tighter. You have to find ways to generate some more offensive zone pressure.”
The Preds did make one roster move on Friday morning by assigning defenseman Ryan Ufko to AHL Milwaukee after the young blueliner spent Thursday night paired with Preds Captain Roman Josi.
However, as Andrew Brunette explained Friday, the reasoning for the move was quite simple.
“I thought his play tapered a little bit,” Nashville’s head coach said of Ufko. “We were hoping for a little better effort last night from him, and he got overwhelmed a little bit in that hockey game. We’ve got some things to figure out on the backend, and we don't really want him sitting out. We want him playing. He's an important part of our team and our organization going forward here, but we need him back to playing with a lot of, I guess you could say, swagger and and kind of getting up to speed a little bit. So, I think go play big minutes and do his thing down there, and we'll see him again at some point.”
With Ufko now off the roster, another defenseman - Ilya Lyubushkin, Jack Ahcan or William Trudeau - will likely need to step in for Ufko on Saturday night against Dallas, and the chance to impress is there for the taking.
“We’re looking for somebody to really grab a job here,” Brunette said of the defense corps. “I think there's a lot of moving parts, and there'll be some guys with an opportunity tomorrow. Hopefully they step up and don't let us take them out of the lineup.”
No matter who dresses for the Preds against the Stars, the group is looking forward to the next challenge and a chance to get into the win column for the first time on the young season.
As Brunette said of game No. 1, the loss wasn’t for a lack of effort - the Preds were just “hoping for things to happen instead of making things happen.”
“I want to see a similar start [to Opening Night],” Stamkos said. "We brought the energy. Let’s stay a little more disciplined in the first and give ourselves a chance to not be behind the eight ball right away and chasing the game. I think that was where we got in trouble last year is when we're not playing with the lead and we're not playing tied. As much as you want to tell yourself to stay patient when you're chasing a game, that’s when breakdowns happen because you're forcing things… We don't want to have to get into that type of game. So, let's try to play with the lead or keep it close early and not chase it.”
