Barry Trotz is confident he can make the transition from coach to general manager. And the Nashville Predators are ready and willing to find out.
“I thought long and hard about this,” Trotz said in his introductory news conference Monday, a day after the team announced he would replace longtime general manager David Poile. “How coaches, how managers operate — you’ve got to work together, and I’ve always tried to do that with David. He’s mentored me.”
Whether it was Poile making the calls or Trotz behind the scenes, Nashville was quite busy over the weekend. The Predators made three trades, acquiring some draft capital and signaling a move toward the future. But Trotz plans to reset rather than rebuild.
“We are resetting, we are collecting assets,” Trotz said. “There are some good players. There could be six first-round picks in Milwaukee [Nashville’s AHL affiliate] next year, so there are people coming.”
Trotz, 60, is keeping an open mind about Predators coach John Hynes, who is 121-86-16 in his fourth year in Nashville.
The Predators are six points out of the second wild-card spot after falling in the first round of the playoffs the past three seasons.
“I’ve been in coaching for a long time, so I know when a team is well-coached,” Trotz said. “John is a really good coach. The biggest thing for me is from now until the end of the season, I’m just going to evaluate.”
Nashville will host the NHL draft for the second time in June.
“We haven’t been able to get that franchise-changing center iceman,” Trotz said. “We haven’t been that poor to get that and there’s some luck. There are some guys that changed franchises that got drafted later.”
Trotz will get a chance to help shape the Predators’ future at the draft with his input, but cautioned that it requires patience.
“It’s not like football,” Trotz said. “Football, guys are coming out of college. They’re either 22, 23, 24, 25, and they’re men. We’re drafting 18-year-olds.”
Trotz said it takes six years for a lot of draft prospects to make an impact.
Poile exits as the NHL’s winningest GM with 1,519 victories in 39 years, but Nashville has won only one playoff series since making the Stanley Cup Final in 2017.
“I’ve got two loves in my life: my family and hockey,” Poile, 73, said. “I’m so lucky.”
Poile added that Trotz turned down several coaching jobs during the offseason, and during that time, he told Trotz this would be his last season as GM.
“Around, I’d say, Christmastime, he kind of said I’m not going to coach anymore, and he said could I talk to you about being a candidate for the GM position,” Poile said. “And from that time it went pretty fast with he and I talking and ownership getting involved, and probably by mid-January we probably had that done.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.