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hen Ryan O’Reilly ran into the kitchen to tell his wife, Dayna, she asked him to repeat the news “because it didn’t seem real at first,” he remembers. Once it began to sink in for her, O’Reilly called his parents and opened the conversation with an excited, “Have you heard?” They hadn’t, and when he told them Steven Stamkos had signed with the Predators, his mom screamed with excitement.
Roman Josi was driving and noticed his phone lighting up so many times he pulled over to see why. His group chat with teammates, including Filip Forsberg, Gustav Nyquist, Luke Schenn, and O’Reilly, was going non-stop about the Stamkos news. “I knew we were trying to get Stammer, but a guy like that, you’re hoping for it, but you don’t actually believe that it’s going to happen,” the Predators captain says, smiling. “We were all texting, and I was like, ‘Oh my god, this is crazy!’”
Predators general manager Barry Trotz got a lot of messages, too, from players and others in the organization. All of them were some version of: “I am pumped!”
“That’s when you know you’ve done a good job,” Trotz says, of July 1, a day that many a Predators player has since likened to Christmas, when Nashville kicked off 2024’s free-agency period by signing not only Stamkos but also fellow 40-goal scorer Jonathan Marchessault and defender Brady Skjei.
Trotz admits he didn’t think Stamkos would be available. Sure, he’d casually asked Julian BriseBois how negotiations with their captain were going when he’d seen him at the NHL awards on June 27. And yeah, the Lightning GM had told Trotz he didn’t think they were going to get a deal done. But still, “like everyone I thought, ‘Oh, they’ll get it done,’” Trotz says.