The NHL wants defensemen. The Nashville Predators and GM David Poile have defensemen - quite a lot of them, actually. Quite a lot of talented defensemen, actually. And while offensive deficiencies and inconsistencies continue to plague head coach Peter Laviolette's group, Poile says Preds fans shouldn't expect him to pull from his stable of blueliners in order to land, say, a No. 1 center, even as the rest of the league circles the trade wagons.
"I have no interest in touching my defense, but if there was going to a trade here - I'm just being very bottom-line with you - whenever I talk to a team and I'm asking about forwards, they're asking about one of our defensemen," Poile told Adam Vingan of The Tennessean this week. "You can fill in the blanks. I think we've got all good defensemen, so people aren't shy about asking."
The Chicago Blackhawks and Pittsburgh Penguins pulled off the seemingly impossible earlier this week when they swapped defensemen Trevor Daley and Rob Scuderi, the first trade of any significance - see; the first trade to involve NHL players - thus far this NHL season. It could be a deal that pushes the usually robust NHL trade market into gear, or it could be an outlier in a strange season wherein league personnel men are fearful of doing any deal that's not almost exactly dollar in, dollar out, as well as a fit on term.
Poile echoed those sentiments while speaking with Vingan, though he added that it hasn't stopped him from trying.
"It's not from desire," Poile said. "If I could make a trade now to maybe change our team a little bit, I would be open to that. But you need to have a partner and you need to have this match in so many ways. It's just not like it used to be that you could just make a trade for the sake of doing something because things have to match up. Dollars have to match up, years and contracts have to match up. Maybe even your age has to match up, maybe even position. It's really a different thing."
For Poile and Laviolette, the desire to get a deal done is likely heightened by the fact that they're currently 15-10-6 and in fifth-place in the powerful Central. They're only two points back of the Blackhawks and Wild despite a recent 4-7-3 run, but the lack of a true No. 1 center has become a glaring issue on most nights, exacerbated most recently by the fact that Mike Fisher, the team's de facto lead pivot, will miss the next three games with a lower body injury.
In Fisher's place, Calle Jarnkrok has bumped up to the top line. In 30 games this season, Jarnkrok has five goals and four assists, following a 2015 postseason in which he sparked the Preds offense (though it didn't amount to much). He's a player who is still developing his game, though he has proven a good fit in Laviolette's system. Mike Ribeiro is, much like Fisher, a strong two-way center, though he lacks the offensive spark at this point of his career to be rightly considered a No. 1.
30 games into the 2015-16 season, the Preds now sit 16th in the NHL in scoring, managing 2.55 goals per game. As Vingan notes, if you take away two seven-goal games from last month, they'd drop to 28th. Even so, an average of 2.55 goals isn't bad, but it's likely not Cup-worthy either.
"Consistency, I think, is not there. I think in general, we need more from our forwards," Ribeiro said, per Vingan. "I think a lot of (the offense) comes from the (defense). I think our forwards have to bear down a little bit more and try to find ways to score goals. It seems lately that if the back end doesn't score, then it's hard for us to win.
A strong and deep Preds defense, led by captain Shea Weber, may be good enough to get the team to a playoff berth, but another early postseason exit wouldn't really be all that surprising, especially considering the Western Conference field is likely to be littered with teams that may not be able to score at will like the Dallas Stars, but can consistently create offense, like the Blackhawks, Blues and Kings. And it's not usually a good sign when that defense, which is so deep that promising youngsters like Ryan Ellis and Mattias Ekholm comprise the bottom-pairing, is the source of most - if not all - of the team's offense.
In short, Poile, reluctant though he may be, may find himself with no choice but to pull from his deep pool of defenders in order to add the kind of player that could upgrade the entire Predator's offense. It will hurt watching a young player with a bright blueline future walk out the door, and Poile would certainly look the fool were he to make a trade and a guy like Weber suffer another injury and the depth of that defensive corps was suddenly tested, but really, what would hurt worse - the loss of a talented young defenseman or another Predators season ending without a postseason series victory?
