No matter what Barry Trotz does for the rest of his days, he will always be a well-liked and respected figure in New York. True, his Islanders teams never won a Stanley Cup, but his brief four-year run as the club’s Head Coach saw him preside over the most successful “post-dynasty era” in Isles’ history. 

With Trotz behind the bench, the Islanders went to the playoffs three straight years, twice making it to the third round before being eliminated by the Tampa Bay Lightning. After being let go by the Isles at the conclusion of the 2021-22 season, Trotz bided his time before taking on a new challenge. 

That new challenge was succeeding David Poile as the GM of the Nashville Predators, a team that he had originally coached from 1998 to 2014. While the move was announced in February 2023, Trotz didn’t officially take the reins until July 1, 2023. Nashville has been an up-and-down team during Trotz’s tenure as GM, with the 2025-26 season being just his third as the franchise’s leading man. 

So, with Trotz in attendance during Nashville’s trek through New York and New Jersey, Blittner’s Blue Line caught up with the Predators’ GM to discuss several topics.

*Editor’s Note: Questions and Answers have been lightly edited for clarity.

Question: With Mathieu Darche now a first-year GM on The Island, how does it feel to no longer be the rookie amongst your General Manager peers? 

Trotz: “Mathieu was in a role with Julien BriseBois for a lot longer than I’ve been in this role. So, he may be new at being the GM, but being in the thralls of all that GMs have to deal with, Assistant GMs, all those things, he’s been doing it for quite a while. So he’s probably had a lot more experience than I do. I’m very fortunate, I have a couple of what they call superstar GMs, future GMs, in the people I have as my AGMs and they really brought me along. 

“I think I still think like a Coach more than a manager at times. But, at times, I do realize, from a coaching standpoint, which is usually a short-term view of everything, when you’re coaching, you want to win for today. I think I have a pretty good balance of the now and the future. 

“Some of that is, when I took this job in Nashville, I knew that it was a team that David Poile, culturally, consistently was in the playoffs with good teams every year. But (they) haven’t had real playoff success, other than 2017. Haven’t really gone to The Finals a lot, but always a very, very good hockey team and a threat every year. And over those years, to be like that, you have to expend a lot of assets. 

“So, the cupboards started to get bare. When I took over, I wanted to keep the strong culture that Nashville had under David’s leadership over those years. I wanted to keep that, but I also knew that we had to build a new core. 

“You look at the age of some of our older players, Roman Josi, for instance, is probably the most prominent player. I mean, he’s gonna be in the Hall of Fame. He’s still playing at a very, very high level. But he’s gonna be 36. Filip Forsberg is still in a really good window and same with Juuse Saros. There’s three pretty good pieces, but after that, there wasn’t anything in the cupboards, if you will, because they hadn’t drafted very high for a long time. 

“David made a couple of really good moves to start that process by getting a couple first-round picks in his last draft. And we started that process, but I also knew that I had to fill in and buy some time. When you draft those 18-year-olds, they really don’t really hit it, unless you’re drafting one, two, or three, until they’re like 23, 24 (years old). So there’s a four- or five-year gap that I knew that I had to try to fill. So we tried to fill it with some free agents to supplement those three very important players that we already had and then try to develop our young players, get them into the system and then continue to build that new core. 

“We’ve had a number of first-round draft choices. I went out and moved a lot of people to get picks and extra drafts. We’ve been drafting pretty consistently. Last year, we recognized that we weren’t gonna probably be in that playoff race, so we peeled off. I think we peeled off 11 guys and we ended up drafting fifth and got a, what I believe, is a really good player in Brady Martin and Cameron Reid, with our second first-round pick and our third first-round pick was Ryker Lee. So with those guys all showing what they did at the World Juniors and continue to develop and be good players for us, that’ll be a good start to a real good core. 

“And then, really, some of these players that you’re starting to see now get on our hockey team, that they don’t have quite the impact yet, because they’re young. Like Matthew Wood and Reid Schaefer, you’re gonna see be coming up and be part of that new wave of players. And that’s sort of been our plan and my plan anyway since I arrived here. 

“We’ll continue on that path. I said, a lot of times, I know people were wondering what we were trying to do, but we were trying to buy some time. So the plan has always been, as I say, ‘The plan has always been in pen and the path has been in pencil.’ Because it is very fluid in this game. You try to react to where your team is, react to what The League has to offer. 

“So I’ve tried to do that, so that we can build that new core. Because I really think that Free Agency, I might have been part of really the last free agency with, you know, the Stamkos’s. Now, I don’t think you’re gonna see much in free agency anymore like we used to. With the salary cap going up, teams are re-signing their top players now.”

Question: Was that big free agent class you mentioned of Steven Stamkos, Jonathan Marchessault and Brady Skjei an example of you being stuck thinking more like a Coach then as a GM?

Trotz: “No, no. When I went to free agency, it wasn’t anything to do with, we could have probably went right down to the studs right away. As I said, the thought was to thread the needle a little bit for the group of players that we have, like Juuse Saros and Filip Forsberg and give them some sort of secondary people. 

“No disrespect when I say secondary people, I got good players in Stamkos and Marchessault and Brady Skjei replacing (Ryan) McDonagh, knowing that we had to buy some time. If you have six or seven players that can sort of keep you competitive, I think there’s a certain standard that you want to be at. 

“And I wanted people who are, as they call, ‘serial-winners.’ Guys who have won Cups, so that our young guys can see that going forward. Because those guys, if you just have a bunch of young guys that come in, who do they learn from? They sort of try to figure it out. But if you have some people in place and I know we do, then some of the young guys, they can see it and then they can sort of pass the torch on. And so, when our young guys do get there, we’ll already have some of our older of our young guys at least seeing it. So, they know what to expect and what to carry on forward as a culture. 

“I think it’s really important, for not only our fan base, but also for our culture, is that we may not be a top-level team, but we’re in every game every night. There’s very few nights this year that we weren’t in the fight and in the game. And I think that’s important, ’cause it’s really hard when you get into coming into a game and you’re consistently losing, 5, 6, 7, to 1 type of game. 

“That does nothing for your culture. Your young guys can’t thrive. All they’re doing is surviving. And so those are really important elements, culturally, that I take from the game, being in the game a long time now. McDonagh and some of the moves I’ve made, everybody can question, but unless you’re in our room and part of our plans, you really don’t know. It’s always everybody’s playing a guessing game and I think we’re well on our way to building a really young core here. 

“But we’re gonna have some leaner times too. I mean, as we get younger and younger, it could get leaner and leaner too. Last year, I made 11 moves and I brought our team, in those 11 moves, the average age in terms of what I moved out, to what I moved in, was four years. We got four years younger on average.”

Question: With the Olympic break about to start and the Trade Deadline roughly a month away, are you still trying to thread the needle?

Trotz: “I think we just, we’re playing it. I don’t think, like I said, the plan has never changed. I’m gonna watch our hockey team, and we’re not in the playoffs right now. I get this question. Everybody’s trying to get a defined answer from me and my defined answer is, we’re not in the playoffs and everything’s on the table.”

Question: With the experience and knowledge that you have, what do you make of what happened in Buffalo, where they fired their GM and then all of a sudden they turned their season around? How do you make sense of that? 

Trotz: “People look at that and they want to define something to one change. I can tell you and I’ve been in the coaching seat and now in the General Manager seat. It’s all things. Buffalo was coming. Buffalo was coming as a hockey team. They were coming as an organization. You could see and I had watched them just before they went on that run when they made the change. They had won three or four games. 

“But if you go back about 10 games before they made the change, they were playing well, but not winning hockey games. They were just on that verge. And then they started winning games. They started winning games. Then they started winning games they didn’t deserve to win. And it just took off. Organizationally, that group has got it now. It’s not one thing. It was all things that were building up to it. The maturity of their players, probably the commitment that they were finding that they needed to get out of…among different things…the winning details. How important they started becoming. 

“All those things came together for them. And they’re playing really well. We played them a couple weeks back and they’re a hell of a hockey team. That’s a really good young core of good players. They’ve drafted well. They’ve been in a position where they’ve had lots of picks. 

“Kevyn Adams, in his time, was building from within and put a lot of people in place. Jarmo (Kekäläinen) was there in an advisory role and came in and obviously got to see what it is. And he’ll do a fantastic job just as Kevyn did in building a lot of that. So it’s not one thing, it’s just everything coming together at the right time. Sometimes you’re fortunate. 

“You can talk to Mathieu (Darche) and I’ve become good friends with Mathieu, ’cause we actually coached Mathieu way back when and I get to talk to him a lot. We used to share the rookie tournament with the two Florida teams and Carolina. And Mathieu will tell you, coming in as a new GM and winning the first overall pick changed that franchise right away with Matthew Schaefer. So it’s not one thing. It’s good planning. It’s people staying consistent and resilient and everything coming together at the right time. 

“If you’re there and you keep doing it right, then usually things come to fruition. I’m really happy for Buffalo, because that’s a really good market. And I’m really happy for Jarmo, who is an excellent hockey man, to be there. And some credit goes to Kevyn Adams for putting a lot of time and effort in putting a lot of that roster together and letting it mature and not being impatient. 

“A lot of people, on that side, get a lot of credit for that success. And (I) also believe that probably on the island with Patrick (Roy) coaching and Lou Lamoriello, who was there before Mathieu, keeping a lot of those core pieces intact and building a really great culture. You get a little bit of luck at the draft and doing a really good job and that team, with some shrewd moves over the course of the last couple years and they’re right there. So they got a really good situation, because I was there when we were bouncing around through different buildings and COVID and all that. 

“When I say, when you look for one thing, if you talk to the people inside, they’ll probably tell you, it’s a combination of a lot of things coming together and the players getting it done on the ice. That’s why they’re having success. To get belief. Things fall in and it’s exciting for both of those franchises.”

Question: Last question, who do you think is going to win The Super Bowl?

Trotz: “I used to follow football pretty well, but I’m gonna say I like the fact that the Patriots turned it around so quickly. And Mike Vrabel, who was in Nashville, obviously. I’m gonna go with the Patriots.”