There are a lot of areas you can point to for why the Nashville Predators fell well-short of expectations, but Ryan Johansen certainly isn’t one of them. He’s actually the straw that stirs the drink for Nashville’s top line, which carried the brunt of the work for the majority of the year.
Johansen set a career-high in assists with 50, showing how he made the offense tick. His contributions to making Viktor Arvidsson and Filip Forsberg look like superstars cannot be overstated. Maybe Arvidsson and Forsberg will become superstars on their own in due time, but Johansen fuels the engine for this club.