Kukla's Korner Hockey

Kukla's Korner Hockey

Video- Season Preview For The Nashville Predators

08/17/2019 at 6:59am EDT

from Robby Stanley at NHL.com

The Nashville Predators hope bolstering their forwards will be enough to win the Central Division for a third consecutive season and make a deep run in the Stanley Cup Playoffs.

The Predators signed center Matt Duchene to a seven-year, $56 million contract (average annual value $8 million) on July 1. In order to clear space under the NHL salary cap and sign Duchene, Nashville traded defenseman P.K. Subban to the New Jersey Devils on June 22.

"Let's call it like it is: If we don't make the Subban trade and get rid of his money ($9 million AAV), it's going to be much more difficult to get into the Duchene sweepstakes, if you will," Predators general manager David Poile said. "Maybe we could have, and we'd be over the [salary cap] today and we'd being having a player or players that we'd have to move. That really, I guess you would say, took the pressure off in terms of doing this.

"So Subban for Duchene sounds like a reasonable way to say it. The good news is with [defenseman Dante Fabbro] coming in, that we feel like maybe he can't replace [Subban] right away but he certainly has the potential of being a top-four defenseman. With [Roman Josi, Mattias Ekholm and Ryan Ellis] there as our top three, I think we still have a really good defense."

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Watch the season preview on the Preds below.

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Paul Kukla founded Kukla’s Korner in 2005 and the site has since become the must-read site on the ‘net for all the latest happenings around the NHL.

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