The Nashville Predators were a great story this season. They weren't expected to do much coming in but everybody knows that they have talent to a certain level.
With Andrew Brunette coming in as the head coach, they knew they were getting one of the good young guys to come in for that job.
They have a great top-line center in Ryan O'Rielly which is a start. They have a Norris caliber goalie in Roman Josi.
They have a (despite a slightly down year) Vezina candidate in Juuse Saros. Those are usually three very good things to build around.
Unfortunately, they met their match this year when they took on the Vancouver Canucks in the first round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs.
Vancouver won the series in six games. These are the three biggest reasons that the Nashville Predators won't be winning the Stanley Cup this year:
The Nashville Predators didn't get enough scoring in this series
Filip Forsberg, who was their MVP amongst forwards this season, had six points in the six playoff games. Two of them were goals and four of them were assists.
He was also the only Predators player that had two or more goals. The team only scored 12 goals total and two of them were from him and he impacted six of them. There were ten other players with one goal. The rest of the roster had zero.
The next leading scorer on the team was Gustav Nyquist who had four points (1-3--4). That isn't good enough when you're trying to beat a stingy yet high-flying Canucks team.
Nashville didn't defend terribly in this series, but they couldn't score enough. This is something that Nashville must think about heading into the off-season.