1. Can they avoid another slow start to the season?<\/p>\n
After making the Stanley Cup Playoffs for nine of 10 seasons, Nashville has missed each of the past two after it was unable to overcome slow starts. In 2024-25, the Predators began with five straight losses and were 8-17-6 halfway through December and ended the season with 30 wins, the fewest they had in a full season since 2002-03 (27).<\/p>\n
Last season, the Predators were 8-13-4 entering December, and even with a good second half of the season, finished 38-34-10, four points behind the Los Angeles Kings for the second wild card from the Western Conference. Getting off to a fast start will be key in ending their playoff drought.<\/p>\n
“I know one of the things in talking with our leadership group at the end of the year when I first got there was, they felt their start last year hurt them,” said Predators general manager Chris MacFarland, who was hired June 2. “They had to do some chasing and did a really admirable job to get into the playoff hunt, and I think that’ll obviously be something hopefully that we focus on. I mean, there are no easy games, as you know, and our division is a bear, and the conference is good. We’re going to have to be ready right from the start.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"1. Can they avoid another slow start to the season? After making the Stanley Cup Playoffs for nine…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":815278,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[385,99],"class_list":["post-815277","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/815277","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=815277"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/815277\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/815278"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=815277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=815277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=815277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}