NHL rumblings: No panic in Predators, no easy fixes for Maple Leafs and more

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Barry Trotz held firm earlier this season when people were calling for him to make a coaching change.

For many general managers, the allure of the coaching-change bump can be hard to resist when the walls seem to be closing in around them.

Trotz, one of the winningest head coaches in NHL history, resisted and backed Andrew Brunette.

His team has since responded, now winning seven of their past 10 games.

“Sometimes people focus in on wins and losses and not necessarily the process,” Trotz told The Athletic on Monday. “Fortunately, I can see the process downstairs here — how the coaches are working with the players, how the players are responding to the coaches. I just felt that the players were not giving up on the coaches, and the coaches weren’t giving up on the players. They actually were coming together.”

Added Trotz, who’s fifth all-time in NHL history with 914 coaching wins: “I’ve been on the coaching side a long time and probably have a lot more patience than most general managers for that, I guess.”

After weekend home wins over the Toronto Maple Leafs and New York Rangers, setting up a very difficult road test against the Minnesota Wild on Tuesday night before the holiday break, the Predators seem to be coming together as a team.

“We’re playing more consistent. That’s the biggest thing,” Trotz said. “The thing we struggled with at the start of the year was consistency. We moved a lot of players out last year and brought a few in. It just takes time sometimes, and we’re starting to have a more consistent identity.”

The perfect scenario for the Predators is that in the here and now, they remain competitive within shouting distance of the wild-card race — but in the bigger picture, Trotz won’t deviate from the plan to continue to integrate more youth in his lineup over time as the roster transitions.

Which means that while the temperature has gone down around the team, my sense is the Preds GM is still open to listening on veterans like Steven Stamkos and Jonathan Marchessault (both of whom have full no-movement clauses) as we get closer to the March 6 trade deadline.

“The guys are playing well right now as a team. Let’s see where it goes,” Trotz said. “We’re going to go about our business, and we’ll see how it plays out in the next two months here.”

After a tough start to the season, the Predators have won seven of 10 and are in the wild-card mix. (Henrik Montgomery / Getty Images)

Kings lose Bergevin

The knee-jerk reaction to Marc Bergevin leaving the Kings’ front office for a job with the Sabres is that it makes sense because it was former GM Rob Blake who brought him to L.A. as a senior adviser.

However, the reality is that current Kings GM Ken Holland has relied on Bergevin quite a bit since taking over last offseason. The two of them have history, and Holland was happy to have a former NHL GM on his staff to bounce ideas off of.

While losing Bergevin to the Buffalo Sabres over the weekend, where he joins new GM Jarmo Kekalainen, wasn’t nothing, Holland also wasn’t going to stand in the way of it.

“I’ve known Berg since he was a Red Wings player in the ’90s,” Holland told The Athletic on Monday. “Obviously, I got to know him really good when he was a manager in Montreal and I was the manager in Detroit. I wouldn’t want to hold anybody back if they feel there was a better opportunity out there.

“He called me the other day and said he was getting the associate general manager title in Buffalo and had made the decision he was going to go join Jarmo. I’m thankful for the short time we had together here. I enjoyed my time with him. He’s a good hockey man. Maybe down the road he’s back in the saddle somewhere as a general manager. But in the meantime, he’s gone to where he feels there’s a better opportunity for him, so good for Berg.”

Bergevin was runner-up to Mathieu Darche for the New York Islanders GM job last May and also interviewed for the Toronto Maple Leafs and Pittsburgh Penguins GM jobs in the summer of 2023. Odds are he will land another GM gig at some point. While he’s joined a close pal in Kekalainen in Buffalo in a bigger role than what he had with L.A., and I would also say that Bergevin going to Buffalo shows that he believes the Sabres have a true opportunity with Kekalainen at the helm to make some noise.

As for the Kings, Holland doesn’t foresee replacing Bergevin at this juncture. He brought in Tyler Wright as director of player personnel last summer.

“We’ll miss Berg, but some people here internally will take on some of what he was doing,” Holland said.

And finally, on the Leafs

In mid-October at a Board of Governors meeting in New York, I caught up with Keith Pelley.

The intent of my short interview with the president and CEO of Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment was rather simple: He had taken on a more day-to-day approach with the hockey team last May after the firing of team president Brendan Shanahan and had begun working more closely with GM Brad Treliving and head coach Craig Berube, and I wanted to know what he had learned now that he had a closer look under the hood.

“Brad is meticulous in his decision-making process and his analysis, and Chief is one of the most straightforward, strong-willed, passionate hockey guys you can meet,” Pelley said at the time.

He appeared to have truly enjoyed getting to know both.

There was also a realization of where the team was after years of contending.

“You know the age of this team,” Pelley said. “It’s go time. And I think we have two leaders in Brad and Chief to hopefully take us to the promised land.”

The “go time” time comment has been brought up more than a few times by the boys on TSN’s Overdrive, to be sure. It hasn’t aged well.

But in Pelley’s defense, what else is he going to say in that moment? That he no longer believes in the team? Having traded away their first-round picks in ’26 and ’27 going for it last season, of course it was go time. It can’t be rebuild time just yet.

All of which brings us to the here and now. I didn’t see the Leafs as the same level of contender coming into this season after losing Mitch Marner and not replacing him. But I definitely had them in the playoffs. I thought, as constructed, they might be a better playoff team than a regular-season team.

I certainly didn’t see them near the bottom of the Eastern Conference standings at Christmas.

The injuries have been real, particularly the impact of not having Chris Tanev, but every team has injuries.

Treliving has one more year on his deal after this season. Pelley has had time to get to know him better now. This was always, win or lose, going to be a season in which Pelley had to decide whether a change was needed next summer at that key leadership position.

But I think, regardless of where Pelley decides to go on that front, one cannot look at the 2025-26 season in a vacuum.

For me, there are two critical moments in the Auston Matthews era that crippled this Leafs team:

1. Losing to Montreal in the first round in 2021 after being up 3-1 in the series. The Leafs resisted big changes in the aftermath of that unforgivable collapse when perhaps the red flags with that core were impossible to ignore. The impact to the psyche of the top players from that loss still lingers today, in my mind.

2. After a second-round loss to Florida in 2023 in which the Leafs were no-shows, Marner’s full no-move kicked in July 1. Should Toronto had moved him before then? Considering how it all played out with Marner after that, including his saying “No” (which was his right) to a trade to the Carolina Hurricanes before the deadline last season, well, yes, the Leafs should have moved him before July 1, 2023. Easy to say now, I get it. But the circumstances were that a GM change had just been made and you can hardly blame Treliving for not wanting to trade his second-best player four weeks after taking over. That call should have come from Shanahan.

And finally, there’s also the plain reality of the salary-cap system and a time limit on how long a team can take swings at it. It’s been a decade of the Leafs being a perennial contender. Before this season, I thought they would be playoff-bound at least for two more years. And that may still be the case. They’re not out of it yet.

But they’re in one. The fanbase is a mix of angry and, more alarming, apathetic.

And there are no easy fixes, no matter what path is chosen.

This news was originally published on this post .

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