There is perhaps no position more stressful in the NHL than that of a head coach, but even Andrew Brunette managed to find some relaxation over the last 10 days.
“I probably had four good sleeps,” Nashville’s bench boss said with a laugh following Wednesday’s practice. “I’ll take them.”
Brunette and his team - as well as the League’s other 31 Clubs - enjoyed a week-and-a-half hiatus thanks to the Olympic Winter Games Milano Cortina 2026 and the subsequent break that came along.
And while the Predators representatives in the Olympics - players Roman Josi, Juuse Saros, Filip Forsberg and Erik Haula, plus Head Athletic Trainer Kevin Morley - either remain in Milan or are in the process of heading back to Nashville, the rest of the Preds were back at Centennial Sportsplex on Wednesday morning to begin a week of practices ahead of the resumption of the regular season.
Only 25 games remain in Nashville’s 2025-26 campaign, and just five contests are left until the NHL Trade Deadline arrives on March 6. What happens in regard to potential player movement between now and then is out of the hands of those in the Predators locker room, but those same individuals are very much in control of what occurs on the ice.
“The mindset can't change from what it was before the break,” Preds forward Steven Stamkos said. “We played well for a two-and-a-half month stretch there that allowed us to be in the mix. Now, you have to make a push, and we don't have the luxury of easing our way out of the break. That's the unfortunate part. You’ve got to pick up right where you left off. That’ll be the challenge for us, and we’ve got to make sure we're up for it.”
That’s exactly what the Predators are hoping to get out of the week before the games begin again - finding that swagger that had them competing for a playoff spot every night.
After a sluggish start, the Preds morphed into one of the NHL’s hottest teams with their “win the week” motto coming to fruition more often than not.
When the season resumes next week, they’ll find themselves four points out of a Wild Card spot in the Western Conference with Utah, Los Angeles, Anaheim and San Jose as the other hopefuls currently making up the logjam. Before the end of the season, Nashville will play each of those teams at least once with plenty of opportunities to earn a four-point swing.
The schedule won’t get any easier either, just as it was in the first part of the season. With the Olympic break, coupled with a trip to Sweden for the Preds back in November, the compacted slate of games certainly provided plenty of wear and tear on the body.
From that perspective, some time off was certainly appreciated.
“Getting that recovery from the body - it was just so much hockey,” Preds center Ryan O’Reilly said. “When you're in it, you're not thinking about it, but you can just feel the first couple days after, just how drained you were. You can just feel that the body in general could use a little reset. And that's the main thing… We’ve got enough [practice] days where we don’t have to rush ourselves early here. We can kind of ease back into the intensity we need to have. But I want to come back with jump. I want to be at my best, and I think we’re all going to have to be at our best if we want to get in the playoffs.”
The Preds entered the break with losses in six of nine overall, and while three of those defeats still afforded a point in the standings, the group knows they can be better, too. That’s the focus of this week for Brunette and his staff with a rare, in-season opportunity to reinforce and retool on a daily basis.
“We’re working on some of the things that we’ve got to tighten up here a little bit,” Brunette said. “In the last stretch of games, there were some things that I wasn't crazy about, so it's a great opportunity to reset some of those things. [Having been] through these as a player, it usually takes a little while to get back in the fold. For us, with the urgency in our group right now, we’ve got to make sure we're back to where we were here by Thursday next week.”
That Thursday will see Connor Bedard and the Chicago Blackhawks pay a visit to Bridgestone Arena before the Preds then face Dallas, Detroit, Columbus and Boston - five games in just eight days. Nashville will then play 15 games over 31 days in the month of March, including three pairs of back-to-backs, all of them of the home-and-road variety.
Josi, Forsberg, Haula and Saros will rejoin their teammates soon enough as well, and a full complement of players will be back together again with one goal in mind - to ensure their heroic push over the past two-plus months to get back into contention wasn’t all for naught.
Relaxation into rejuvenation is a very real thing for this group, and they’re hoping to channel that in the right way. And while sleep is about to be at a premium once again, the Preds won’t mind if the tradeoff is less counting sheep and more stacking points.
“It’s what we’ve talked about - we don't have the liberty of easing our way back into games right now,” Preds winger Luke Evangelista said. “We need to pick up where we left off and get running right out of the gate with where we are in the standings and whatnot. It’s exciting. I mean, this is what we want. We want to play competitive games at this time of the year. This is all we kind of asked for at the start of the year. We’re in a great spot, and it's an exciting time of the year. We’ve just got to use this week to ramp up and make sure that we come out of the gate hot and pick up right where we left off.”
