(Hello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend’s events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it.)

The way things have gone for the Predators lately, it’s like great things just keep dropping on their laps.

The Montreal Canadiens, so desperate to become harder to play against, gave them an elite defenseman for an older, slightly less expensive, worse counterpart. Half the young players on the roster broke out in one way or another last season. They went to the Stanley Cup Final and, if not for a few key injuries and maybe a bad game or two in net, might have done a lot better.

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The good news was that, even with the series loss, most agreed: This was a team set up for the present and future. Almost everyone of any importance on the roster was not only under the age of 30 but comfortably so. Almost everyone of any importance was signed fairly long-term and pretty cheap. And some of those very important players were still on the come-up in their careers, having not yet reached the age at which NHLers peak.

What, for example, does Filip Forsberg look like four years from now, when he’s still only 26? What of newly re-signed Viktor Arvidsson, still just 24? Or Calle Jarnkrok, who’s only 25? Or 21-year-old Kevin Fiala? Or 24-year-old Ryan Johansen?

The D-corps is older, sure, but not appreciably so. Average age of what will probably be their top-six next season: 28 years old almost on the button. Not exactly young but still close enough to the primes of their careers that it basically doesn’t matter, especially because these are hardly average NHLers; barring a trade for a little more pop up front, their No. 5 defenseman (Alexei Emelin) played 21-plus minutes a game last season for a different team. They got him basically for nothing, a third-round pick.

That was a vital pickup because anyone who watched the Cup Final saw how little Peter Laviolette trusted his third pair against what the Penguins were putting over the boards. Say what you want about Emelin’s performance the past few years, but if he’s your No. 5 you’re in pretty good shape. That’s probably also the case if he’s your clear No. 4.

Still, David Poile might still have some misgivings about his offense headed into next season.

He lost James Neal, who scored 23 goals in 70 games last season, for nothing in the expansion draft. Mike Fisher might retire. He replaced those players, seemingly, with Scott Hartnell and Nick Bonino. Not bad, obviously, and the combined price of $5.1 million against the cap obviously beats what Poile paid last year for the players they ostensibly replace ($9.4 million). And that goes without mentioning Fisher, who would need to be re-signed, is 37 and would probably be pretty inexpensive.

But what’s amazing about Poile, and has been for a while, is his ability to lock in players when they’re very young at prices not exactly commensurate with either what they’ve done or where they’ve headed.

The vast majority of this team’s best players is locked up for at least the next three seasons, and almost all of them are on value contracts Poile dove at when he had the opportunity.

That’s seven guys he locked up right around their primes for long-term deals at AAVs even the biggest detractors would have to acknowledge deliver tremendous value.

The Arvidsson deal, signed this weekend, is probably the latest in the line, with the acknowledgement that seven years is a long time and he’s unlikely to shoot 12.6 percent again this coming season, even if he is just 24. All the underlying numbers say this is kid a big-time player, and that’s true regardless of whether you’re suspicious he’s a perennial 30-goal guy (because almost no one is a perennial 30-goal guy). And the fact that he costs just $4.25 million against the cap, well, that gives him an AAV on par with Brian Gionta and Justin Abdelkader. That’s value, plain and simple, especially because Arvidsson is now locked up into his early 30s.