Nashville's Offseason Math: The Additions Are Real. So Is the Arithmetic They Have to Beat.

Start with Roman Josi. Twenty-three minutes and change of ice time per game, –11 plus-minus, and only 38 games played. That single line tells you more about what went wrong in Nashville last season than any narrative about inconsistency or lost momentum ever could. The Predators' best defenseman was on the ice for a net negative, playing the most minutes on the blue line, for fewer than half a season. Everything that followed from that — the 38–44 record, the –0.27 goals-per-game differential, the playoff miss — flows directly from the fact that the team's defensive anchor was both underwater and unavailable for long stretches. Brady Skjei logged 21.9 minutes a night and finished –10. That's the corps MacFarland inherited. That's what the offseason had to address.

So give MacFarland credit for moving fast and moving with conviction. The Drury signing — five years, $22.5 million for a faceoff specialist acquired from Colorado — is the kind of depth-center commitment that playoff teams make and 38-win teams usually don't. Faceoff percentage doesn't show up in highlight reels, but it shows up in puck possession, and puck possession shows up in goal differential. Nashville was –0.27 per game last season. You don't close that gap with skill alone; you close it by stopping the bleeding at the dot, in the corners, in the defensive zone. Drury is the right profile for that problem. The Bourque acquisition — six years, $33 million, with a 2027 second and a 2028 third going to Dallas — slots a 24-year-old center into what was a dangerously thin middle. The price in picks is real but manageable for a team that needs production now, not in four years.

Here's where the numbers force a harder conversation, though. Ryan O'Reilly posted 45 points in 50 games — 0.90 points per game, the clear engine of this offense. Filip Forsberg managed 35 points in 50 games. Steven Stamkos, 32 points in 48 games, at –10. Luke Evangelista was the team's only positive-differential regular forward with meaningful minutes, at +6. What that distribution tells you is that Nashville's top line was doing the work and the secondary tier was not covering its defensive costs. Stamkos and Haula were both –10. That is not a problem that Jack Drury alone corrects, and it's not a problem that Mavrik Bourque corrects on name value alone — he has to actually produce in a top-nine role against NHL competition at a level that justifies $5.5 million per year.

Lyubushkin is the piece I keep coming back to. He's a veteran presence on a blue line that desperately needed one — Josi's injury absence last season exposed just how little margin Nashville had behind him. Blankenburg at –2 over 38 games was a relative bright spot by this team's defensive standards, which should tell you something about the depth of the problem. My read is that Lyubushkin doesn't transform the back end, but he adds a body with NHL experience to a group that was running thin and bleeding minutes into negative territory. Whether that's enough depends almost entirely on Josi's health and availability in 2026–27. If Josi plays 70-plus games, this defense looks functional. If he misses another significant stretch, the same structural vulnerability resurfaces regardless of what MacFarland did up front.

The piece I wrote a few days ago flagged that the hard part wasn't done, and I'll stand on that. The additions are real — Drury, Bourque, and Lyubushkin represent genuine organizational investment in the right areas. But –0.27 per game is a number that demands more than three transactions to reverse. The Predators need Josi healthy, need Stamkos to stop being a net-negative presence despite his goal totals, and need Bourque to be something more than a depth acquisition at $5.5 million per year. The offseason has been aggressive enough to be taken seriously. The arithmetic hasn't changed enough yet to be taken for granted.