Revisiting the Predators' Poor Decision to Waive Tolvanen

Let's go back to a day where the decision was made by the Nashville Predators to waive Eeli Tolvanen, a former first-round pick that just hadn't found his stride in the NHL yet. Usually, top prospects like he was aren't given up on that quickly. There was almost no way that a 23-year-old with the skill he had wouldn't be picked up by one of the 31 other teams when he was waived.

That ended up happening and the Seattle Kraken were the team that took full advantage. Tolvanen had only played 135 games in the NHL to that point and done pretty well in the AHL. What is odd about the decision to waive him is that the Predators were having a down year.

He was waived in December of 2022 and the team didn't opt to sell until closer to the trade deadline, bringing in younger talent later in the season. If the Predators would've just held onto him for a couple more months, he would likely be a staple in the middle-six right now.

Who's to say that getting an opportunity elsewhere didn't spark something in him, but there's also the argument that he wasn't in the right role to succeed in Nashville. In Tolvanen's final six games for the Predators, he played fewer than 11 minutes in five of the games and under 10 minutes in two of the games. He scored just one goal over that span. In his first eight games for the Kraken, he played over 12 minutes in seven of those games, scoring five goals and seven points. This was the opportunity that seemed to slip through his grasp in Nashville after going cold at the start of the 2022-23 season.