All four remaining teams in the NHL playoffs got the better of Nashville during the regular season

So maybe the NHL playoffs are not such a shock after all.

Much attention has been paid to the fact that all four of the division winners, including the defending champion Washington Capitals, were eliminated in the first round. It is no secret that the Carolina Hurricanes, the eighth seed in the East, are still playing. Everyone is also well aware that another of the remaining teams, the St. Louis Blues, was one of the NHL’s worst for the first 10 weeks or so of the regular season. Words such as unpredictable, crazy, wild, crapshoot and the like have been put to great use to describe what played out in the first two rounds.

Not so fast.

With the conference finals now underway (the East started Thursday and the West begins Saturday), a common thread has been revealed that suggests anyone could have seen this coming … if they only knew where to look.

Simply put: All anyone had to do was pay attention the Nashville Predators. The four remaining teams — the Blues, Hurricanes, San Jose Sharks and Boston Bruins — all got the better of the Predators during the regular season.

Coincidence? Probably not.

Remember that Nashville won the Presidents’ Trophy as the team with the NHL’s best regular-season record in 2017-18. That, of course, followed the appearance in the 2017 Stanley Cup Final.

In the minds of general managers around the league, all of that made Nashville the team to beat in 2018-19 and most did what they could to adjust their rosters accordingly.

The Predators, of course, largely stood pat with their lineup, a decision that was flawed from the start. Rather than try to stay a step ahead of the rest of the NHL, General Manager David Poile allowed everyone else to take dead aim in its attempt to get to climb over, speed past or jump beyond his group.

Not every team overtook the Predators, who still managed to get to 100 points and to win the Central Division for a second consecutive year. But the four still in the hunt for the Stanley Cup clearly did.

Nashville was a combined 3-8-1 against those franchises during the regular season. The total score of those 12 games was 45-33 in the opponents’ favor and only San Jose (12-12) did not have a cumulative edge in goals. All four scored five goals or more in at least one of their Preds matchups, no small feat for the teams from the East given that the NHL schedule provides each team just two games against franchises from the other conference.

Carolina and San Jose were two of the three teams that averaged at least four goals per game against the Predators. St. Louis was not far off at 3.4 per contest, which was the seventh-highest average against them.

In terms of Nashville’s goals per game, no opponent was more daunting than Boston. The Bruins allowed three goals in the two meetings, an average of 1.50, which made them one of two (Winnipeg was the other) to hold the Predators to fewer than two goals per game.

Carolina was the only team against which Nashville did not earn at least one point in the standings. San Jose was one of four in the Western Conference that held the Predators to two points.

You get the picture.

By the time the playoffs started, all of them had put Nashville squarely in the rearview mirrors. Now they have their sights set on the sport’s biggest prize.

If only the rest of us had known where to look we would have seen this final four coming.