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Avalanche Acquire Juuso Pärssinen From Predators

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The Colorado Avalanche and Nashville Predators are making yet another trade, with forward Juuso Pärssinen and a 2026 seventh-round pick headed to the Avalanche in exchange for forward Ondrej Pavel and a 2027 third-round pick.

The Predators have been shopping Pärssinen around throughout much of the month, with Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman reporting teams were interested in the forward two weeks ago. In the end, Nashville finds a typical suitor in Colorado. The two sides have already made one trade this season, swapping veteran backup Scott Wedgewood for young up-and-comer Justus Annunen and a draft pick in late-November. That move was one of four trades that Nashville has made this year, and one of three Avalanche trades. Both goalies have been fantastic in their new settings, with Wedgewood posting a 4-2-0 record and .932 save percentage in six games, and Annunen posting a 2-1-0 record and .941 in four games.

The two sides will now hope for similar profits from this deal. In Parssinen, Colorado receives the clear upper-hand, reeling in a six-foot-three, 212-pound 23-year-old with the ability to play either center or wing. Parssinen, originally a seventh-round pick in 2019, turned pro with the Predators in the 2022-23 season. He started the year in the minors, but earned a quick call-up after scoring nine points in his first 10 AHL games. Unfortunately, Parssinen couldn’t stay too hot at the pro level, though he did still manage an encouraging 25 points in 45 games as an NHL rookie. He made the Predators’ roster out of training camp last season, but managed just 12 points in 43 games before being reassigned to the minor leagues. Parssinen managed an additional 25 points in 36 games with the Milwaukee Admirals, setting him up to return to the NHL this year – but he still can’t seem to find his footing at the top flight. As it stands, he has just five points in 15 games this season – while serving in a true fourth-line role.

Parssinen still seems to have plenty of untapped potential, and middle-six upside. While Colorado mines that vein, Nashville clears up additional space on the NHL roster by acquiring career minor-leaguer Ondrej Pavel. Pavel also turned pro in 2022-23, joining the AHL’s Colorado Eagles for two games, and no scoring, after the end of Minnesota State’s season. He more formally played his rookie AHL season last year, recording 10 points and 37 penalty minutes in 61 games. Pavel also received the first two NHL games of his career last year, though one minor penalty and a -1 stand as his only stat changes. He’s continued to post menial scoring this year, with just two points in 14 AHL games on the season, and should head for a clear role down Nashville’s depth chart. That could open up space for the team to award more ice time to Fedor Svechkov, Reid Schaefer, or Joakim Kemell – three top prospects who have each performed admirably in the AHL. Predators general manager Barry Trotz said previously that, should the roster continue sliding, he’d like to prioritize getting top prospects NHL action – a statement vindicated by this move, and the team’s 4-5-1 record in their last 10 games.

Nashville Predators Recall Vinnie Hinostroza

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Journeyman Vinnie Hinostroza is set to play for the sixth franchise of his 10-year NHL career. The Nashville Predators announce they’ve recalled Hinostroza from their AHL affiliate, the Milwaukee Admirals.

Hinostroza is in his first year with the Predators organization after signing a two-year, $1.55MM contract on the third day of this past offseason. He’s spent the entirety of the 2024-25 in Milwaukee where he’s been the highest-scoring player up to this point.

He’s not only Milwaukee’s highest-scoring player but leads the entire American Hockey League with 11 goals and 33 points in 26 games. Hinostroza is only two points shy of his total production in 42 games last year with the Pittsburgh Penguins AHL affiliate, the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins.

Hinostroza’s recall seems like another move from general manager Barry Trotz to introduce more scoring into Nashville’s lineup. The Predators have infamously been one of the most disappointing teams this season after an explosive flurry of signings this past summer.

He won’t be the final answer for a lethargic Nashville offense but Hinostroza should at least help the organization increase their second-to-last-place 2.44 GF/G average. The Predators generate enough shots and offensive chances but aren’t connecting on their opportunities. There’s little expectation Hinostroza’s 21.2% AHL shooting percentage will translate to the NHL level but it’s a step in the right direction for the Predators.

Predators Place Cole Smith On IR

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The Nashville Predators have placed forward Cole Smith on injured reserve with a lower-body injury. The 29-year-old is expected to miss the next 4-6 weeks. Although no specifics about his injury were given, it is likely related to the hard shot he took off the ankle in Saturday night’s contest against the Los Angeles Kings.

Smith is in his third full NHL season with Nashville after a four-year NCAA career and a couple of seasons in the AHL. The native of Brainerd, Minnesota has never been a prolific scorer but has been difficult to play against in his brief NHL career, playing the role of a disruptive forechecker as well as displaying a keen ability to get to the front of the net. He has also been a good penalty killer, utilizing his 6’3” frame to force turnovers.

Smith had a career year last season, tallying nine goals and 14 assists in 80 games, but has seen his offensive output dry up this year with just two goals and three assists in 34 games. Although that is a dramatic drop-off in production, it is likely due to his deployment which has seen him start just 20.7% of his even-strength shifts in the offensive zone compared to 35.1% last season.

Deployment aside, Smith has also seen his PDO (shooting percentage + save percentage) drop a full five points and his CF% has also dipped from 48% down to 45.8%.

Predators Activate Roman Josi Off Injured Reserve

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While Predators defenseman Roman Josi landed on IR earlier this week, he wasn’t there for long.  Alex Daugherty of The Tennessean relays (Twitter link) that the team has activated the blueliner, making him available to play today versus Los Angeles.

The 34-year-old missed the last week and a half due to a lower-body injury.  As has been the case for many of the Predators’ top players this season, Josi has struggled a bit offensively, at least relative to his production from 2023-24.  He had 85 points in 82 games a year ago, making him the Norris Trophy runner-up along the way.

This season, he has produced seven goals and 16 assists through 29 games; he sits second on the team to Filip Forsberg in points while leading the way in ATOI at 24:59 per game so he certainly hasn’t been a primary reason for their surprising struggles.  Suffice it to say, his return will certainly be a key upgrade on the blueline as they look to get back on track before the holiday break.

The Preds sent blueliners Marc Del Gaizo and Kevin Gravel down to the minors yesterday so they had ample roster space to activate Josi.  Following this move, they’re back at 22 players on their active roster.

Predators Assign Kevin Gravel, Marc Del Gaizo To AHL

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The Nashville Predators have assigned defensemen Kevin Gravel and Marc Del Gaizo to the AHL. Del Gaizo passed through waivers on Thursday. The moves follow the arrival of new trade acquisition Justin Barron, who joined Nashville’s practice for the first time on Friday per NHL.com’s Brooks Bratten. Star defender Roman Josi also returned to team practice on Friday, one day after he was placed on injured reserve retroactive to December 10th.

Nashville will soon get to see what their blue-line looks like at full strength, after parting ways with Dante Fabbro and Alexandre Carrier, and sending Del Gaizo to the minors. Josi and Jeremy Lauzon will fill vacancies on the left-hand side, while Barron brings much-needed depth on the right.

The new look couldn’t come at a better time. Only two Predators defenders – Adam Wilsby (3) and Brady Skjei (2) – have recorded multiple points since the start of December. Josi will quickly address that lacking production, soon to return to his 23 points in 29 games this season. Nashville will hope that scoring can rub off on Barron and Lauzon, who each have just one point in 17 and 23 games respectively.

Meanwhile, Gravel will return to productive years in the minors. He serves as the Milwaukee Admirals’ captain, and has five points in 20 games this season, already halfway to his 10-point total from last year. Gravel will be joined by Del Gaizo, who played in just two AHL games before becoming an injury fill-in on the NHL roster. He hasn’t yet recorded any minor league scoring, but did post 34 points in 60 AHL games last year – a mark that led all Admirals defensemen.

Trotz: Predators Won’t Enter Full-Scale Rebuild

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Things haven’t gone to plan for the Predators this season. After general manager Barry Trotz had the most active free agency period of anyone, adding top-six wingers Jonathan Marchessault and Steven Stamkos while landing Brady Skjei for their defense, they’re the only team in the league without 10 wins this season and sit firmly entrenched in 32nd place with a 9-17-7 record and .379 points percentage.

It’s a weird outcome for a roster in a weird place. The Preds haven’t been bad enough to contend for the draft lottery – far from it, in fact. They’ve made the playoffs every season since 2014-15, aside from missing in 2023, and they still managed a 42-win regular season that year. But they’ve also lost six consecutive postseason series and haven’t advanced past the First Round since 2018. With Trotz, their former head coach, taking over for David Poile as just the second GM in franchise history in 2023, he made it expressly clear that he was planning on making higher-risk moves to help propel Nashville out of league-average purgatory.

That plan has worked in the sense that they’re no longer wild-card fodder, and they now have the chance to draft a legitimate direction-altering talent in next year’s draft if their record holds. But if they continue down that road, it won’t be because they make significant in-season subtractions from the roster. Trotz reaffirmed to Pierre LeBrun of The Athletic yesterday that they’ll continue to be active on the trade market but won’t act like traditional sellers.

It’s not a rebuild. I’m not in the business of not winning. I’m in the business of trying to win. We’re not selling off. We are resetting. We know where we are. It’s not where we thought we would be. But we want to move forward.

Trotz’s sentiment, without spelling it out completely, says to expect more moves in the vein of this week’s swap that sent Alexandre Carrier to the Canadiens for the much younger Justin Barron. The latter is a player Trotz has had his eyes on since assuming the GM’s chair, telling LeBrun that he called the Habs about Barron multiple times last season. “We’ve been very good at developing defensemen, so I just felt he was getting underplayed there a little bit,” Trotz said. “Hopefully, with his age and talent, we can get a decent player out of that.”

Carrier may not be the only defenseman on the wrong side of 25 who finds himself on the move before deadline day. 6’3″ lefty Jeremy Lauzon, who’s under contract through next season at a $2MM cap hit, led the league in hits by a wide margin last season with 383. He’s missed time with injury this season, posting one assist and a -5 rating in 23 games, but should carry a decent amount of trade value on his own for his reasonable cap hit or be valuable in a package for a higher-value asset, maybe one that helps Nashville address its nagging center-ice deficiency.

There have been speculative ties to the Sabres’ Dylan Cozens in that vein. While that hasn’t been addressed by Trotz or reaffirmed by a major source, Trotz did tell Emma Lingan of The Hockey News during his media availability yesterday that he expects to use his $11.2MM in current cap space “if there’s the right piece.”

In his conversation with LeBrun, Trotz also vehemently denied the slow-growing, unfounded speculation that he may look to deal Stamkos elsewhere at the trade deadline. The longtime Lightning captain has heavily underwhelmed with nine goals and 19 points in 33 games on the season in the first year of a four-year, $32MM contract. He also has a full no-movement clause.

It’s worth noting that the Predators still have quite a few highly-graded prospects in the pipeline. They have six forwards in the system aged 22 or younger with first-round draft pedigree, although, as Trotz implied by his acquisition of the younger Barron, things are considerably thinner on the blue line.

Predators Activate Jeremy Lauzon, Place Roman Josi On IR

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The Predators made two roster moves leading into tonight’s game versus Pittsburgh.  Per a team announcement (Twitter link), they have activated defenseman Jeremy Lauzon off injured reserve.  In a corresponding move, blueliner Roman Josi was placed on IR.

Lauzon has missed the last three weeks due to a lower-body injury.  The 27-year-old is off to a particularly quiet start offensively as he has just one assist in 22 games after putting up a career-best 14 points in 2023-24.  However, Lauzon’s physicality is the hallmark of his game and he leads the team in hits per game, checking in at 4.58, down only slightly from last year’s rate when he recorded 386 to lead the NHL by a significant margin.

As for Josi, he last played last Tuesday, meaning he will be eligible to be activated as soon as he’s cleared to return, assuming they back-date the IR placement (meaning he has already missed the required seven days).  The captain isn’t producing at quite the same rate as last year when he passed the point-per-game mark for the second time in his career but he’s still Nashville’s leader in scoring with 23 points in 29 games.

Canadiens Acquire Alexandre Carrier

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The Canadiens and Predators have swapped blueliners before Thursday’s roster freeze.  Montreal has acquired Alexandre Carrier from Nashville in exchange for defenseman Justin Barron.  Both teams have announced the deal.

Carrier is in his seventh NHL season, all of which came with Nashville after they drafted him in the fourth round back in 2015.  He has gone from a depth defender to one counted on inside their top four.

However, the 28-year-old hasn’t been able to duplicate his 2021-22 performance that saw him land a spot on the All-Rookie Team.  That year, Carrier had 30 points and 124 blocks in 77 games while logging nearly 21 minutes a night of ice time.  He only managed 29 points in the following two seasons and has seven in 28 outings this season while averaging just over 20 minutes per game.  Carrier is currently dealing with an upper-body injury but is believed to be ready to return to the lineup, relays TVA Sports’ Renaud Lavoie (Twitter link).

Carrier had a chance to test unrestricted free agency for the first time this past summer but instead elected to remain in Nashville, inking a three-year, $11.25MM deal that runs through the 2026-27 campaign.  With David Savard being a pending unrestricted free agent and a speculative trade candidate as a result, it stands to reason that Carrier will eventually take his role as the veteran option on the right side of Montreal’s back end, ensuring they’ll have one experienced player on that side beyond this season.

As for Barron, the 23-year-old was a first-round pick by Colorado back in 2020, going 25th overall.  It’s the second time in his career that he’s been on the move after he was the centerpiece of the package that the Canadiens acquired in exchange for winger Artturi Lehkonen back at the 2022 trade deadline.

At the time, Montreal was hoping that he’d become a key cog on their back end for years to come.  However, while Barron has shown flashes of being a capable NHL player, he has struggled with consistency.  Last season, despite a stint with AHL Laval, he collected seven goals and six assists in 48 games while averaging 18:38 per game and it appeared as if he’d turned a corner in his development.  That earned him a two-year, $2.3MM bridge deal this past summer.

Unfortunately for Barron and the Canadiens, that hasn’t been the case this season.  He has been a frequent healthy scratch over the first two-plus months of the year, only getting into 17 of 31 games.  In those outings, he has been limited to just one goal (without recording any assists) while his playing time has dropped to just 14:43 per game.

This move gives Nashville a younger player to try to turn into a full-time piece while saving the team $2.6MM on the salary cap.  Barron will also still have two years of team control when his deal expires while Carrier will be an unrestricted free agent when his contract is up.  With the Preds struggling much more than many expected this season, it will be interesting to see if GM Barry Trotz has any plans to quickly utilize those cap savings with the roster freeze approaching or if he’ll wait until the new year to try to add another piece to their roster.

Photos courtesy of USA Today Sports Images.

Predators Place Marc Del Gaizo On Waivers

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The Nashville Predators have placed defenseman Marc Del Gaizo on waivers per Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman. Del Gaizo has cleared through waivers once already this year, joining the long list of players to be waived and assigned to the minors before the season started.

Del Gaizo was recalled a few times in October but received a call that’d stick on October 30th. He’s stepped into 20 of Nashville’s 23 games since then, recording three assists, a -1, 28 blocked shots, and 32 hits. The appearances officially cement this season as Del Gaizo’s rookie year, after he played in nine games last season. He recorded a surprisingly similar stat line in those appearances as well – ending the 2023-24 NHL season with three assists, a +2, and 20 hits. Del Gaizo’s impact has been much clearer in the minor leagues. He has been a proud member of the Milwaukee Admirals blue-line since the 2021-22 season, after starting his pro career with a brief, nine-game stint with the Chicago Wolves in 2020-21. In total, he has recorded 89 points, 114 penalty minutes, and a +11 in 209 games and five seasons in the minor leagues.

Del Gaizo’s waiving suggests that one of Nashville’s many injured defenders could return soon. The team is currently without superstar Roman Josi, lineup pillars Jeremy Lauzon and Alexandre Carrier, and depth defender Spencer Stastney. Lauzon and Josi are both listed as day-to-day and both participated in Nashville’s practice on Tuesday. Stastney and Carrier are on injured reserve and would need to be activated to rejoin the lineup.

Predators Reassign Fedor Svechkov

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The Predators announced today that they have reassigned center Fedor Svechkov to AHL Milwaukee. The move frees up a roster spot, indicating that one of their IR-bound defensemen, Alexandre Carrier and Jeremy Lauzon, could be close to returning. According to Robby Stanley of NHL.com, neither will play tonight against the Rangers but skated this morning.

It’s not an unexpected result for Svechkov, who made his NHL debut earlier in his development than most expected. Nashville selected the 21-year-old in the first round of the 2021 draft, and he’s in his second season in North America after coming over from Russia in the 2023 offseason. He got off to a hot start with AHL Milwaukee, posting five goals and eight points in seven games, earning himself a performance-based recall with the Preds struggling to generate offense.

After scoring two goals and posting a -1 rating through his first nine NHL games, he’s returned to the minors for further development. He won’t require waivers to head to the AHL until the 2026-27 campaign or until he reaches 160 career games, whichever comes first.

Over the past few weeks, Svechkov has averaged nearly 12 minutes per game. He has won 46.2% of his faceoffs and recorded four blocks and 10 hits. He’s averaged a shot on goal per game and logged underwhelming possession numbers. He only controls 49.5% of shot attempts at even strength despite starting 73.1% of his shifts in the offensive zone.

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