TORONTO — Despite their relatively short history, the Nashville Predators have a well-earned reputation for developing elite defenseman. General manager David Poile might lead a double life as Bolivar Trask and be the proud owner of a blue-liner Mastermold, or perhaps he just knows a thing or two about scouting and player development.
Either way, the impact of Nashville’s defenseman assembly line is felt around the league. Kimmo Timonen, Marek Zidlicky, Ryan Suter, Dan Hamhuis and Cody Franson — five players who log major minutes for their current NHL teams—either drafted or cut their teeth in Music City. On Thursday night in Toronto, the Predators iced a lineup featuring five defensemen who were drafted and developed by the organization. The sixth, Victor Bartley, signed with the club as an undrafted free agent.
Understandably, the Predators' blue line is a point of pride for coach Barry Trotz. “We're fortunate to have probably the best defenseman in the National Hockey League in my opinion,” Trotz declared, referring to captain Shea Weber without much prodding on Thursday night. “There’s some good ones out there, like Ryan Suter — and it was pretty special to watch those two guys play together — but I think Shea's up there with the top-5 guys in the NHL. He's our leader, this is his team, and they're taking on his personality."
On the road against a potent offensive club in the Toronto Maple Leafs, Trotz regularly started his top-pairing of Weber and Roman Josi in the neutral zone. If Maple Leafs coach Randy Carlyle, who in the normal course of business is rather obsessive about playing the matchup game, answered with a line other than Phil Kessel’s, Weber and Josi would change shortly the face-off.
“We did that all night,” Trotz admitted when asked about quick changing his top-pairing after Nashville’s 4-2 victory. “That was about matching up with Kessel.”
Of course parceling out the toughest matchups to Weber's pairing isn’t just about matching up with Kessel. It also reflects the youth and relative inexperience of Nashville’s defenseman. “We're led by Shea who has got about 450 games in the National Hockey League, (Kevin) Klein has about the same, Josi had 100 at the start of the season (so he's up near 120),” Trotz explained on Thursday. “And the rest of them combined don't have 100. So we have some youth back there, but the upside is tremendous."
The newest star pupil, of course, is American Seth Jones. Jones was the fourth overall pick at the 2013 NHL entry draft and only turned 19 on Oct. 3. He made the team out of training camp, and has impressed enormously in his first 22 games in the National Hockey League.
Jones leads all rookie defenseman in ice-time per game, by a lot. He’s played two minutes more per game than Mark Pysyk (in Buffalo) and Danny DeKeyser (in Detroit). It should probably be mentioned that DeKeyser is 23 years old and Pysyk is 21.
In fact, among rookie defenseman, Jones stands alone in terms of the difficulty of his minutes and defensive orientation of his usage. Only Brett Bellemore in Carolina and Psysyk in Buffalo are being used similarly among rookie defensemen, and they’re playing less often for teams with significantly less depth on the back-end than the Predators.
Just take a look at this usage chart featuring rookie defensemen with more than 10 games played this season from Rob Vollman’s excellent resource HockeyAbstract.com:
Because playing tough minutes as a teenager, and playing well, apparently isn’t challenging enough for Jones, he’s also been tasked with playing the left side. Jones shoots right-handed, so that would count as his “weak side” — though you wouldn’t know it from watching him.
Franson — now with Toronto and a right-handed shot — has been enormously impressed by Jones’ ability to handle his off-side. “It was a nightmare, it was no man's land,” Franson recalled on Thursday, when discussing his own adjustment to playing the left-side under former Leafs head coach Ron Wilson.
“Normally a right-handed guy doesn't have to play the left, because there just seems to be fewer right-handed defenseman than there is left, so usually the numbers work out,” Franson said. “But it makes everything more difficult.”
“When you're playing that off-side you're skating up the wall with your backhand to the middle of the ice, so anything you want to do cross ice is difficult. You have to move the puck from your backhand to the forehand, so you're passing the puck from behind you, almost.”
“Picking pucks up along the wall in the offensive zone, you're on your backhand, you have to move it to your forehand before you can shoot and it takes longer,” Franson continued. “It’s very difficult to do, but he seemed comfortable.”
Comfortable might be an understatement. Jones was enormously impressive again on Thursday night, and has been generally since his even-strength minutes were modestly reduced after logging top-pairing minutes for a 17-game stretch in October and November.
“We were giving him too many minutes … too many minutes for a 19-year-old,” Trotz told the Tennessean’s Joshua Cooper this week. “He was playing upwards of 28 minutes per night. We felt it was too much physically, too much mentally. … We have the minutes down to 22-23. That’s more of a fit for him.”
“I'm just going to play my game where ever I am,” Jones said on Thursday. “It's good playing with (Klein). He makes good plays and makes my life easier."
While Jones is seeing fewer minutes at even-strength, he and Ryan Ellis have supplanted Weber and Josi on Nashville’s first power-play unit of late. Jones even managed to cash in a power-play goal Thursday night with a seeing-eye knuckler that Leafs goaltender Jonathan Bernier couldn’t track through traffic.
“That's a new look we have on our power play, they've been together for a while,” Trotz said. “Both of them are very intelligent and can hammer the puck too.”
Obviously, there have been growing pains. The Predators have been outscored with Jones on the ice at even-strength this season (though some of that is just bad luck and poor goaltending), and he’s slightly in the red by all of the relevant shot metrics.
But none of that is surprising. What’s surprising is how quickly Jones has grown into a useful NHL player. Even his opponents are taking notice. “He's got a lot of poise for a kid his age playing the role he's playing on that team,” Franson told Sporting News after Thursday night’s game. “He's going to be a great player.”
“We've got some good young defensemen, you look at our whole D-corps and it bodes well for the future,” Trotz said.
Or in other words, status quo in Nashville.
Thomas Drance is a contributor to Sporting News partner Canucks Army and a news editor at theScore. Follow him on Twitter: @ThomasDrance.