The Nashville Predators arrived in Pittsburgh on Oct. 24, 2026, with the same nine points as the Penguins, but carrying very different momentum into a game that had become a test of whether Nashville could finally slow a series that has tilted the other way for years. Pittsburgh brought a nine-game point streak against Nashville into the matchup, and the teams were set to meet again Nov. 21 in Nashville.
The numbers make the snapshot hard to miss. Nashville entered at 3-3-3 and seventh in the Central Division, while Pittsburgh was 4-6-1 and sixth in the Metropolitan Division, leaving both clubs level on points but with one side backed by a longer history of success in this head-to-head. The game was shown locally on Sportsnet Pittsburgh and Scripps and streamed out of market on +.
For Nashville, the timing mattered because the Penguins’ run against them stretches back to April 2022, when Pittsburgh began a 7-0-2 stretch in the matchup. That history hung over a team that had lost four of its last five games in a 1-2-2 stretch and had just come off a 6-0 loss to the Boston Bruins, a result that exposed how quickly a shaky start can deepen. Andrew Brunette called that defeat his club’s worst effort of the year by far, then said the Predators needed more players engaged and that they had too many passengers.
The challenge for Brunette is that the broader shape of the roster is still settling. Friday’s practice pointed to projected lines of Steven Stamkos, Ryan O’Reilly and Matthew Wood; Filip Forsberg, Mavrik Bourque and Jonathan Marchessault; Ross Colton, Alex Kerfoot and Nils Hoglander; and Reid Schaefer, Jack Drury and Adam Edstrom, with Jack Ahcan, Nick Perbix, Vitali Pinchuk and Ilya Lyubushkin listed as potential scratches. William Trudeau was on injured reserve with an upper-body injury and was listed as week-to-week, while the veteran core of Stamkos, Roman Josi, Forsberg and O’Reilly still carried the expectation that Nashville would look more like a contender than a club chasing balance in late October.
That is why this game was more than just another meeting between teams tied on points. Pittsburgh’s recent edge in the series, Nashville’s uneven start and the looming rematch in November all made Oct. 24 a measuring point for both clubs, especially for a Predators team that has already spent too much of the first month trying to recover from the last bad night.
