Preds walking the line

Nashville cats desperate for a playoff spot - and to get the South
singing the praises of hockey

By ROBERT TYCHKOWSKI -- Edmonton Sun

They've been climbing into vans and crisscrossing the Tennessee
landscape since 1998, ambassadors as much as hockey players, trying
to sell the game in a place where common sense said it couldn't be
sold.

Six years later the Nashville Predators are poised to take the most
important journey in the organization's history.

Into the playoffs.

That their spot has to come at Edmonton's expense makes no never
mind to the Predators, who've been waiting for this a lot longer
than the Oilers have.

Last year they stumbled badly down the stretch and were out of it
long before April. This year the Predators came into the final
weekend with their fate in their own paws.

"It's been a long road for the franchise to get to this point,"
said Barry Trotz, the only head coach the Predators have ever
known. "We wanted to be at this point last year. We said we wanted
to be in that playoff hunt right to the end ... this is very
important to our franchise."

So are veterans Scott Walker, Greg Johnson and Tomas Vokoun, the
three remaining players from the original 1998 expansion draft.

"So many things come to mind when you look back, it's hard to
believe six years can go by so quickly," said Johnson, who had to
juggle his own career, a young family and selling hockey in a
foreign market when he arrived in Nashville that first summer.

"It was kind of a serious time for us, but at the same time hockey
in Nashville was at such an early stage. Sometimes you'd be trying
to focus on your career and at the same time you'd be explaining to
someone what icing was."

PUZZLED LOOKS

When Oilers and Eskimos visit rural schools they're met with mass
adulation. For early Preds on trips to small Tennessee outposts, the
locals wore puzzled looks and furled eyebrows.

"We were trying to bring a non-traditional sport to a new
marketplace," said Walker. "All the guys did their part to spread
the word."

He remembers climbing into a van with Karlis Skrastins and driving
to a school near the Tennessee-Kentucky border for what they thought
was a hockey clinic. When they got there they found two chairs and a
microphone in the middle of a packed gymnasium.

"There must have been a mix-up because they wanted us to speak
about drugs and alcohol," laughed Walker, whose teammate barely
spoke a word of English.

"Karlis was very concerned, but I looked at him and said, 'What are
you worried about? I'm the one who has to do all the talking.' But
we got through it and it was fun."

All part of the growing pains, good and bad, that go hand in hand
with life on an expansion team.

"This has been a great learning experience," said Walker, who is
Nashville's all-time leading scorer but has never played a playoff
game in his career. "It'll be a thrill for myself to take it to the
next step with this team."

As much as Walker wants it, Nashville needs it. The Preds took
their town by storm in 1998, when a convoy of Hummers delivered the
players on opening night. But the shine wore off and average
attendance fell from 15,882 that first season in Smashville to just
over 12,000 this year. A playoff series or two could really help the
cause.

"It's not like in Canada here, where you have sold-out buildings
and you open up other venues for people to see the games," said
Trotz, who wishes he had a fan base like here, where they packed
movie theatres and the Jubilee Auditorium to watch stretch-drive
games.

"It's not like that. We have trouble filling our building. I think
it's important for us as an organization, and for our young kids who
haven't been in the playoffs and also for our fans to go through
this - to see how the level of play increases and how tough it is."

INFECTIOUS GAME

Give Nashville fans a taste of the playoffs, says Trotz, and
they'll be hooked.

"It has to help because our game is infectious. When you get the
playoffs there's no sport that has the adrenalin factor and
atmosphere of a playoff hockey game.

"I've been to different events and there's very few that have that
intensity and can embody a whole city and especially your fan base."

Vokoun is a Czech who plays in Tennessee, but he's hungrier for
this than any Edmontonian.

"For our sake as players, the sake of our franchise and everyone's
sake," he said. "When you get into the playoffs, everybody benefits
and everybody's happy."

Almost everyone.

But for the long-suffering Predator vets who drove to the schools,
explained a hundred times a season what offside is and waited six
years for a shot at the second season, this is huge.

"I think it's extra-special for those guys because they've been
through the whole process," said Trotz. "They are the fabric of our
organization. They're the cloth we kept to stand the test of time."