THE CANADIAN PRESS/AP/MARK HUMPHREY
Nashville Predators fans cheer during a game against the Pittsburgh Penguins in Nashville. It's hard to believe the passionate fanbase of this Tennessee team nearly lost their beloved franchise only 11 years ago.
NASHVILLE — It says something about the remarkable star power of this Nashville Predators team that country music superstar Carrie Underwood will barely be the most famous woman in the luxury boxes at Bridgestone Arena when the Predators open their second-round series against the Winnipeg Jets Friday night.
Downhill skier Lindsey Vonn — four-time Olympian, gold medallist and Tiger Woods’ ex — is reportedly now dating Preds defenceman P.K. Subban. After Vonn was spotted in Denver last week taking in a Preds-Avalanche game, everyone here is wondering whether she will be in the house again this weekend — joining Underwood, who is Nashville forward Mike Fisher’s wife — when the two best teams in the NHL during the regular season face off.
WAYNE CUDDINGTON / OTTAWA CITIZEN FILES
Carrie Underwood takes in the action at a Nashville Predators game.
You know you’ve got something special going for you when two of the most accomplished and recognizable women from the world of sport and music are dropping by to take in a hockey game.
Yet for all the attention this Nashville team is attracting off the ice, defenceman Ryan Ellis was lamenting Thursday the Predators still fly under the radar when it comes to some of the remarkable things they’ve been doing on the ice the last couple seasons, including a runner-up finish to the Pittsburgh Penguins in last year’s Stanley Cup final.
"I think everybody probably on this team is underappreciated outside of this market," Ellis said here Thursday after an up tempo practice at the team’s practice facility.
"You know, the only attention we really get is when we go far in the playoffs."
If that complaint sounds familiar, it should — it’s almost word for word what Jets captain Blake Wheeler was talking about last month when he lamented how "everything goes under the radar when you’re playing in Winnipeg."
All of which is to say that while this Central Division rivalry has quickly become one of the most bitter in the NHL, these two franchises actually have a lot more in common than simply a burgeoning mutual hatred.
And that begins with the redemption tale that hockey represents to both cities.
You already know the Winnipeg story by heart: beloved hockey team falls on hard times; team moves to the desert; team returns 15 years later; everyone lives happily ever after, more or less.
But what you might not remember is how close Nashville came barely a decade ago to losing their hockey team, too.
Back in 2007, Blackberry billionaire Jim Balsillie made a $220 million offer to buy a Predators franchise that at that time was losing big money in a community that is second to none in terms of entertainment options, which run the gamut from world class music to an NFL team to huge college sports programs.
Balsillie’s plan at the time was to move the Predators to Hamilton and he even set up a website under the name "Hamilton Predators" and solicited 14,000 deposits of $500 each for season tickets.
AP PHOTO/MARK HUMPHREY, FILE
Nashville Predators defenseman P.K. Subban is one several players that the Predators were able to acquire through a trade adding to Preds' GM, David Poile's reputation as the king of the NHL trade table.
Fans, community leaders and local sponsors in Nashville rallied to rescue the Predators and Balsillie ultimately went away. But the Preds' problems just got worse when it turned out one of the part-owners of the franchise — William "Boots" Del Biaggio — was a con artist who’d obtained fraudulent loans to buy his share of the club.
Del Biaggio ultimately went to prison and the Preds continued to be a league laughingstock, providing yet another embarrassing example for critics of NHL commissioner Gary Bettman to point to as evidence of Bettman’s failed experiment to bring hockey to the U.S. south.
But instead of going the way of the Atlanta Thrashers — who were purchased in 2011 and moved to Winnipeg — or the Arizona Coyotes — who are forever rumoured to be moving — the Predators cleaned up their act and are now a shining example, alongside Tampa Bay and Dallas, that hockey really can work in the Deep South.
People here will tell you the turning point came in 2010, when a new management group took over the operation of the franchise and finally gave the club some stability.
Ever since, the Predators have been a model NHL franchise. I mean that literally — the wildly successful expansion Vegas Golden Knights modelled much of their game-day experience in their inaugural season on the remarkable scene the Predators create at Bridgestone Arena.
That scene includes a quirky tradition that sees a derelict car painted up in the colours of the Predators opponent every game day during the playoffs outside Bridgestone Arena smashed to bits with a sledgehammer by Preds fans, who can earn a swing in exchange for a contribution to the team’s charity.
(The Predators towed an old airplane in for fans to beat up on for this series. A few Jets fans pointed out on social media that the single-propeller plane the Preds are using cannot even remotely be considered a jet. That’s not the point, of course. The point is to smash it up real good.)
MIKE MCINTYRE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS
As a way to engage their fanbase at home games, the Predators paint up vehicles in the opposing team's colours and allow fans to smash them with a hammer before their games. Here, a plane is painted with the Jets' colours and logo and awaits demolition.
All the smashing outside Preds games is in keeping with an entire Predators branding campaign down here called ‘Smashville,’ which is basically marketing hockey to a population with very little experience in the sport in terms they can understand, which is to say NASCAR.
You like speed and crashes? Never mind the racetrack, come on out to the hockey game.
It’s all been a monstrous success — ESPN last year named the Preds "the best franchise in sports," citing the value for money fans receive by supporting a team that is consistently competitive and yet charges only modest ticket prices, while delivering a level of customer service second to none
(Got a question about who the pre-game entertainment will be at Bridgestone Arena or whether the pretzels are fried in peanut oil? The Preds guarantee you will receive a personal reply to those questions or any other — and it might even come from the club’s chairman.)
And yet for all the success this franchise has had off the ice — they’ve played to over 100 per cent capacity in each of the last two seasons, after years of being unable to give away tickets — winning over a population with no history in hockey didn’t really begin in earnest until the team started winning on the ice.
And for that, virtually everyone here gives almost all the credit to David Poile, who was hired as the franchise’s first GM in 1997 and has been in the job ever since, through thick and thin.
With a stable ownership group to work with, Poile has rebuilt the Predators from scratch into a roster that is presently the envy of every team in the NHL not named Winnipeg.
AP PHOTO/MARK HUMPHREY, FILE
Nashville Predators general manager David Poile won the award for NHL general manager of the year in 2017 after his team went all the way to the Stanley Cup final, losing to the champion Pittsburgh Penguins in 6 games.
Much of Nashville’s nucleus — Ryan Johansen, Subban, Filip Forsberg and, most recently, Kyle Turris — were acquired via trade in a league in which no one really trades much anymore.
If Jets GM Kevin Cheveldayoff is the undisputed king at the draft table, it is Poile who is king at the trade table.
Last year, Poile was named the NHL’s GM of the year as the architect of a remarkable Predators run to the Stanley Cup final. Earlier this season, he became the all-time winningest GM in NHL history.
And now, the only accomplishment remaining, for Poile and this city of hockey neophytes, is a Stanley Cup.
But they’ve got the Jets, a team looking to complete its own redemption story, standing in their way in a series some people in hockey are calling the Stanley Cup Final before the Stanley Cup Final.
Hard to believe, isn’t it? Just a few years ago, one city didn’t even have an NHL team and the other was in real danger of losing theirs.
And yet here we are, just a few short years later.
Carrie Underwood will be watching. Lindsey Vonn as well.
So too will the entire hockey world.