On March 30, the Vancouver Canucks clinched a spot in the 2024 Stanley Cup Playoffs and will compete for the Stanley Cup for the first time since the 2020 bubble and the first time with fans since the 2014-15 season when they lost in six games to the young gun Calgary Flames. But this season has served differently for Vancouver as the team has had a miraculous turnaround under new head coach Rick Toochet and won the Pacific Division and will face off against the Nashville Predators at home on Sunday at 7 p.m. PT.
Who Are the 2023-24 Nashville Predators?
The new-look Predators have had one of the most interesting seasons of the decade so far. They looked like a non-playoff team for the first half of the season until the now famous “U2gate” sparked their season and re-invigorated the team. After general manager Barry Trotz cancelled the team trip to go to the Las Vegas Sphere to see the band U2 in the middle of February after a 9-2 home loss to the Dallas Stars, they then went a miraculous 16-0-2 in their next 18 games and willed themselves back into the playoff picture.
Nashville has a very balanced attack and has seen point productions from a resurgent Ryan O’Reilly who has produced 69 points in 82 games while centring its top line with wingers Filip Forsberg and Gustav Nyquist. Forsberg has come back this season after an injury that kept him out of the lineup for the last half of the 2022-23 season and has scored over a point per game with 94 points in 82 games while Nyquist has also re-ignited his career this season with 75 points in 81 games. The Predators are also getting incredible production from captain Roman Josi who has scored 85 points in 82 games. But outside of those four players, the point production drops drastically with Tommy Novak being the fifth-highest-scoring player on the roster with 45 points.
Predators Are Weak on Defence
Nashville is a very good hockey team but with Vancouver’s current roster construction and depth at forward, the club should be heavily favoured to win this series and advance to the second round. Up front, the Predators have excellent players like the ones I previously mentioned along with new additions to their team like Jason Zucker and rookie Luke Evangelista. But on the back end, the club is incredibly sparse. Outside of Roman Josi, Nashville’s defensive core is not all that impressive.
The team has seen growth from Jeremy Lauzon this season and Ryan McDonough is an effective player in the playoffs as is Luke Schenn. But those two players do not have the speed that they once did and with Vancouver’s constant waves of offence coming at that Nashville defensive core, the Canucks will have a sizeable advantage in that ongoing battle. With the Canucks’ offence as effective as it has been all season, and with their defence also being a threat offensively with players like Quinn Hughes and Filip Hronek, Vancouver will give Nashville major trouble all series long.
Juuse Saros
The Canucks may have the edge on offence, but we have all seen crazy goaltending performances in the playoffs. For example, Vancouver got a miraculous performance from Thatcher Demko in the 2020 bubble to force a Game 7 against Vegas in the Western Conference Semi-Finals. Juuse Saros is capable of one of those performances. He was the backbone of the Predators this season and can steal games in the playoffs when his team needs him to. He stole two games back in the 2021 Playoffs against the Carolina Hurricanes. With Nashville taking on a young and inexperienced Vancouver team, there is a chance that Saros could win this series on his own.
This playoff series will be a good test for the Canucks but this should be a series that they win. The team looks better than Nashville in most categories on paper. But they don’t play the games on paper, they play them on the ice.
