Which one area is most important for the Nashville Predators to fix this summer?

the PP sucks and seemingly always has. i believe the real answer is the connection of winning faceoffs and the PK. losing nichol and fiddler hurt us tremendously on the dot. they were both good PKillers, but i think their faceoff expertise had as much to do w/ that as anything. i actually like the lombardi signing w/ the one exception of his faceoffs. while i agree w/ gover that faceoffs help the PP, nichol and fiddler did little work there so the regaining the edge in our zone will go a long way toward determining our ranking while short a man. until last year PK has typically been a strength. the demise of it last year was more of our detriment than the PP IMO. we seem to be accustomed to winning w/o a good PP.

The penalth kill is only magnified because the PP is so ineffective. Everyone is picking on Horacheck but it’s Trotz who’s the man in charge. He says what goes on. Trotz designates who does what like Petersen handles the defense pairing and Horachek handles the forward pairings. So specifically does Horachek handle the PP? I think it’s a collective effort with Trotz the final say. I think they should bring in a PP specialist coach. They have a coach for goaltending why not for the PP. There are many problems connected with the PP. The first is they have no let’s say quarterback to man the PP either on the first unit or second one. The players that usually carry the puck into our zone are Erat and Suter. Sometimes Sully or Legwand will carry the puck in. Erat is most effective but he has problems too. Suter just slams the puck in and we play dump and chase. Sully tries to split the D and more times than not looses the puck. Legwand can usually get the puck in the zone but his first pass once he does that is always bad. The other teams have figured our game plan as well. They know that Weber fires missles so they don’t let him get wound up. When the obvious play is to move the puck down low we continue to fire from the point which they knows is coming. When Kariya was here he quarterbacked from the sideboards and now Erat and Legwand tries to do that as well without much sucess. Erat is the most effective. Legwand shouldn’t be on the PP in my opinion he makes too many bad passes but they have all camp to get him to relax and let the play come to him. There is just no imagination on our PP at all. I know if I can figure out what they are doing then the other team can see it as well. Please get Sully off the point!!!!

The team needs to slay a two headed monster …. 5on4 scoring and PK faceoffs.

When the team’s scoring is 11th or better in every ES or PP situation except for 5on4 that’s an easy one to spot as a glaring problem. With our top PP TOI forward gone we’re forced to at least switch up personnel and hopefully put Sully back on the left halfboards where he does best.

We had only one guy with more than ten PK draws who was over 50% at the dot … Smithson, and one just below 50% .. Goc. That was a significant drop from 08-09 where the team enjoyed 4 players in the high 40s-50s percentage wise at the PK dot with a significant number of draws. I might be misremembering events which didn’t happen, but, it sure seemed that a lot of the goals we gave up on the PK were immediately following lost draws in our zone.

Development of Kevin Klein will probably be the biggest question mark next season. Klein’s inconsistent play last season cost Nashville about 6 to 8 games alone… he tends to be weak on the Puck from time to time, which must be addressed. He has the. Physical ability to body up… Ala Shea Weber And Ryan surer style, but often lets up on opposing players. This flaw is especially true behind and infringement of the net. He often looks like a spectator when on the pk. Other players must develop too. Wilson must take a bigger role as well as the new comer from Wisconsin.

If Klein continues to struggle, the predators are better off eating his oneway contract in millwaukee.