Photo: Frederick Breedon

There was a time when it was all so innocent.

Back on April 11 and 13, 2004, it didn’t matter that the Nashville Predators had lost the first two games of their playoff series with the Detroit Red Wings. It meant nothing that the fledgling franchise had little (if any) chance to win the best-of-seven series against a team less than two years removed from its most recent Stanley Cup championship. Who cared that player for player, there was no comparison between the rosters in terms of talent, experience and reputation?

The Predators were in the playoffs after six seasons of evolution. That alone was cause for celebration.

“It was amazing,” says Greg Johnson, captain of the 2003-04 team and an original Predator. “We lost two close games in Detroit. We came home and there was a buzz. To this day, that was the loudest arena I’ve ever been in — that first home playoff game. … I never won a Stanley Cup, but that was special for me, being here from Day One.”

With each passing season, “Day One” moves further and further into the past. As it does, perceptions and perspectives change.

So do the expectations. It’s no longer good enough just to make the playoffs. Nashville delivered its best postseason run to date last year, and followed that with a blockbuster offseason trade that brought charismatic star P.K. Subban to Music City in exchange for captain Shea Weber, the rock upon which the team’s attitude on and off the ice was built.

Hockey observers across North America took notice. The Predators made virtually every list of preseason Cup contenders. At the start of the offseason, odds on Nashville winning the Stanley Cup in 2017 were 18-to-1. Following the Subban trade they were 16-1. Only a handful of teams were considered better bets.

Now it is March. The league’s trade deadline was Wednesday afternoon, which means the current roster is the one with which Nashville will launch its next run at the Cup a little more than a month from now (provided the team remains among the Western Conference’s top eight, that is).

Predators fans are, unfailingly, an optimistic bunch. They want to believe the best of their team, which means they believe the best is still to come for this bunch. But should they? Should anyone think these Nashville Predators are legitimate Stanley Cup contenders, or are they just another team good enough to make the playoffs that then will need a big break or two to do something really special?

Here are some things to consider.

Photo: Southcomm

The Man in Charge

There is no gentle way to say this: The facts are as harsh as they are undeniable, and they give no indication that David Poile is capable of putting together a Stanley Cup champion.

From 1982 until 1997, Poile was general manager of the Washington Capitals. The Predators hired him a short time later, and he remains the only person ever to oversee their hockey operations. He is the only general manager in NHL history with more than 1,000 games and 500 wins with two different franchises. He is also a three-time finalist for NHL General Manager of the Year and has a well-earned reputation as a thoughtful and reasoned voice on league-wide matters. That’s the good news.

In more than three decades as an executive, the man whose birthday is on Valentine’s Day has always ended up brokenhearted, as have the fans of his teams. Poile never has put together a roster that made it to the Stanley Cup finals, let alone gotten his name etched on one of the most recognizable trophies in all of sports. In fact, only one of his teams even made it beyond the second round of the postseason — and that one, the 1989-90 Washington Capitals, was swept in the conference finals, outscored 15-6.

The one season Poile did not have a team on the ice (he spent the 1997-98 campaign building an operation in preparation for Nashville’s inaugural season), Washington finally made it to the Cup finals. Had Poile’s efforts finally paid off, or was it a fresh set of eyes and a few key roster moves by his replacement that made a difference? No one can say for sure, but there are 33 seasons in which his influence on a roster is obvious.

On top of all the work Poile has done in the NHL, he was also general manager of the 2014 U.S. Olympic hockey team, a task that carried sizable expectations following a silver medal performance in 2010. That bunch narrowly missed out on a medal, finishing fourth.

To be fair, Poile didn’t always work for men who had the wherewithal of many of their peers. Former Washington owner Abe Pollin had a well-established reputation as a penny-pincher, and Predators founder Craig Leipold constantly struggled against the financial constraints of having a team in a nontraditional hockey market. Add to that the fact that the current Predators lineup was assembled in a manner atypical of the draft-heavy player-development model Poile followed for most of his career. The Subban deal followed other notable transactions in which homegrown talent such as Weber, Seth Jones and Patric Hornqvist were shipped off for the likes of James Neal, Ryan Johansen and Filip Forsberg.

If an accepted definition of insanity is to continue to do the same thing and expect different results, Poile’s fresh approach means it is not so crazy to think Nashville can win it all.

Photo: Frederick Breedon

Goal-Oriented

The common thread among the recent trades is a desire to improve the Predators’ offensive ability — and it has paid off.

Forsberg has led the team in goals and points each of the past two seasons, with Neal second. Johansen is likely the most gifted playmaking center ever to wear a Nashville uniform, and the Predators are on pace for one of the highest-scoring seasons in franchise history. There are scoreboards at sporting events for a reason, after all.

While there are now more Predators capable of producing points than at any time in franchise history, trying to figure out who is going to do so on a game-to-game basis this season has been, at times, maddening. Forsberg had eight goals and two assists in four games last week (he was named the NHL’s First Star of the Week) and became the first NHL player in more than seven years with hat tricks in back-to-back games. He is the same player who had one goal in the first 18 games. Neal and others have had similar swings in production.

Says Poile, “I say this all the time: ‘If you can just give us your A game as many games as possible,’ but we’ve had a lot of guys that have gone into long, long slumps this year without any production. That’s hard to consistently win when your offense is sputtering or certain guys aren’t scoring.

“It’s no different than your car,” he says. “If you have an eight-cylinder car and one or more of your cylinders go down, your car doesn’t go very fast.”

Filip ForsbergThe inconsistency shows up in the standings. If you break the season down into seven-game segments (Wednesday’s contest at Buffalo was No. 63, so there have been exactly nine), Nashville has won just five, and never more than two in a row. The playoffs, of course, consist of best-of-seven series, and a team must win four straight in order to hoist the Cup.

In the Predators’ case, they’re also likely going to have to win on the road — a daunting proposition for a team that has the worst road record among Western Conference teams currently in possession of a playoff spot. Their struggles have relegated them to a battle for third place in the Central Division and/or one of the two Western Conference wild card spots. That makes it unlikely they will have home-ice advantage in any playoff series.

By early February, oddsmakers saw Nashville as a 25-1 pick to win it all.

Maybe the law of averages means the time is coming when everybody will play well at the same time. Or maybe if it hasn’t happened by now, it never will.

Photo: Frederick Breedon

Too Good to Be Good

The enhanced overall skill of the roster is notable for more than just the fact that it is a departure from what was the long-established norm.

It has been 11 years since NHL owners locked out players and wiped out an entire season. When business resumed in 2005-06, some new rules were implemented and others were emphasized, to open up the game and create more opportunity for the most skilled players to showcase their abilities. Those efforts were largely successful, and the resulting creativity and overall entertainment value remain.

All but one of the teams that have won the Stanley Cup since then included at least one player selected first or second overall in the draft. A number of them had two taken in the top five. For example, the reigning champions, the Pittsburgh Penguins (they also won in 2009), got Sidney Crosby first overall in 2005, a year after they got Evegni Malkin with the second pick. Chicago has won three Cups (2010, 2013 and 2015) with lineups that featured Patrick Kane (first overall, 2007) and Jonathan Toews (third overall, 2006). Los Angeles won a pair with 2008’s second-overall choice Drew Doughty.

That run kicked off with Carolina, coached at the time by current Nashville boss Peter Laviolette. His team then included Eric Staal (second overall, 2003) and Andrew Ladd (fourth overall, 2004).

To be in position to select those types of players, a team has to be among the league’s worst for a season or more. Nashville simply never has been that bad. Poile, who has produced 23 playoff teams in his 33 seasons as a general manager (that’s 69.9 percent), selected Jones fourth overall in 2013 but otherwise has had only one other top 10 pick with Nashville (Colin Wilson was seventh overall in 2008) since the first postseason appearance.

When the Predators began play in 1998, they kicked off the latest round of NHL expansion, which included four teams. Their nine playoff appearances are the most of the bunch and nearly as many as the other three combined (11). Go back to the previous round of expansion (San Jose, Tampa Bay and Florida from 1991-93) and only one of those teams — the Sharks — has made more playoff appearances than Nashville.

“Chicago — with all due respect — was a bad, bad team for a lot of years,” Poile says. “For being really bad, they have franchise players like Toews and Kane. … That is a route to do it. Edmonton and Toronto have been very poor, and now they have the two best young players in the league in Connor McDavid and Auston Matthews. They’re already competitive, and they’re teams that certainly are going to be top teams very shortly.

“But we were better than they were, and we’ve gotten a lot of enjoyment out of winning hockey games, making the playoffs, playing the playoff rounds,” he continues. “We just have to do it a different way.”

Nashville’s expansion era ended more than a decade ago when it earned its first postseason berth. There have been eight more playoff appearances since that first series with Detroit, which the Red Wings won in six games. There have been some dramatic victories and heartbreaking defeats. Players like Jerred Smithson and Nick Spaling emerged as unlikely heroes. Others, such as Wilson and Joel Ward, built their professional reputations on their postseason performances.

Things have changed. The innocence is lost, but Predators fans still want to believe it can happen eventually — and there is reason to do so, for those who are so inclined.

“It’s amazing where it is now,” former Predators captain Johnson says. “The players are so much better than we ever were. But to make the playoffs and to build some expectations — I’d love to see them go to a conference final or a Stanley Cup final.”

Those are the only things no one has seen the Predators do. And as with all things unseen, they require faith.

Email editor@nashvillescene.com

Photo: Frederick Breedon