Stamkos staying positive for his kids, Predators despite frustrations entering Global Series

STOCKHOLM -- Steven Stamkos thought he had it all figured out. He had spent the summer changing his approach, cleaning up his diet and his sleep. His family was now comfortable in Nashville, with routines smoothed out, with systems in place. He was strict with himself, his attempt to correct for the effects of time, his attempt to correct for all the upheaval that had come with changing teams, his attempt at a restart.

This, he thought, would work.

This, he thought, would be different.

This, he thought, was going to be the Stamkos he had been in Tampa, the Stamkos he had imagined being in Nashville when everything was still bright and shiny and new, when the questions posed were about the chance of a potential Stanley Cup run and it hadn’t yet all fallen apart.

“It’s funny,” Stamkos told NHL.com on Monday. “This offseason I felt fantastic. I was more comfortable coming in, it felt great physically. I was doing things off the ice that I hadn’t done in a few years in terms of feeling really good coming into camp, changing some things with diet and sleep and things like that. It felt fantastic.

“And then sometimes it’s frustrating when you do all those things hoping results are going to come and they don’t come.”

That, in essence, has been the hallmark of the Stamkos-in-Nashville era, a sense of frustration, a sense of confusion, a sense of loss at all that was happening and all that wasn’t happening and none of it was working.

It still isn’t, not really.

The Predators are in Stockholm this week as part of the 2025 NHL Global Series Sweden presented by Fastenal, playing the Pittsburgh Penguins on Friday (2 p.m. ET; FDSNSO, SN-PIT, NHLN, SN) and Sunday (9 a.m. ET; FDSNSO, SN-PIT, NHLN, SN) at Avicii Arena. They are 5-9-4 and have the second-fewest points in the Western Conference.

Stamkos, who had 81 points (40 goals, 41 assists) in 79 games in his final season with the Tampa Bay Lightning in 2023-34, has four points (three goals, one assist) in 18 games this season. Last season, his first with the Predators, he had 53 points (27 goals, 26 assists) as they finished with the third-worst point total in the NHL after a season that had begun with much fanfare after the signings of Stamkos, Jonathan Marchessault and Brady Skjei that July 1.

Stamkos had worked all offseason to reverse engineer himself into the player that he had been for most of a career that will land him in the Hockey Hall of Fame someday. He entered camp with confidence. And then the season started.

“You almost want to go back to things that maybe weren’t necessarily better for you that you were doing,” Stamkos said. “So, it’s tough in that regard.”

It has been tough in many regards.

Which is why it would be easy for Stamkos to fall apart when he goes home, easy for him to bemoan the divorce he never wanted from the Lightning, easy to give in to frustration. But Stamkos has a guard against that: his children.

The two eldest of his three children, boys aged 6 and 4, are just getting into hockey, understanding what their father does, getting to an age when they can enjoy it alongside him.

“You want to be a good role model for them,” Stamkos said. “Sometimes you put yourself in the shoes of the father, hey, if my sons are going through a tough time, like what are your expectations of them going to be in that moment? It’s not going to be to pout and quit and take the easy road. If they came to me and asked for my advice, I’d tell them, let’s dig in, continue to work, next game’s a great opportunity to do something.

“So, when you think of it that way it makes the mindset pretty simple. For sure there’s times of frustration and you’re angry things aren’t going the way you want, but the negativity will swallow you up, right? So, it’s just finding a way to balance that out.”

Because otherwise? As Stamkos said, “If you don’t have the right mindset then it’s a dark headspace you’ll be in if you think of certain things the wrong way.”

And one can turn into the other all too quickly.

It has been a season of frustration for many on the Predators, so much so that it spilled over in a recent postgame interview by Ryan O'Reilly, who said after a game last week that “I’ve had one good year in my career,” an interview that he later said he regretted, calling it “whiny.”

But O’Reilly has seen Stamkos handle everything that has happened, everything he has been dealt, as well as possible.

“I think he’s done an incredible job just being around the room, the leader that he is,” O’Reilly said. “Always saying the right thing and doing it. It feels like he’s not affected by anything and that’s tough to do.”

Stamkos, in some ways, has practiced for this.

It’s not the first time the forward has dealt with adversity. Stamkos has fought through multiple health challenges, from the broken leg that cost him his chance at the 2014 Sochi Olympics to the blood clot and lateral meniscus tear in 2016 to the abdominal core muscle injury in 2020, among others.

“Coming back from some of those injuries, I’m sure there’s times where certainly other people thought that you were never going to get back to a certain level or you start to doubt that a little bit just based on your physical limitations, but I feel like I’ve tried to adapt to that,” Stamkos said. “And sometimes you just have to look yourself in the mirror and that’s what I’ve tried to do is just continue to grind and hope it gets better.”

To Stamkos, each new day is a chance to get momentum, to get confidence, to get back to being himself.

He has no interest in shutting down, in playing the “poor me card,” instead trying to take the disappointment and shelve it, approaching each game as a chance to do better and be better, to find a way out of a funk that has leveled him for the past year-plus.

He is finding the mindset that works for him.

“It just comes with age and experience and perspective, I think,” he said. “Listen, I’ve been around this game a long time and seen the ultimate highs and some really bad lows. Perspective matters, right? You want to go out there and understand the situation that we’re in and getting a chance to play in the best League in the world, you find some other motivations too sometimes.”

That’s where those kids come in.

And his teammates, who have seen so many positives.

“He’s been a great, great person for us, he’s been great on the ice, great off the ice,” forward Filip Forsberg said. “I think he’s getting more and more comfortable. Being in a place for that long and then having to change, I can only imagine what it would be like. I think he handled it really well despite all the adversity we were going through last year. And I think this year he looks more comfortable, he’s taking more of a leadership role.”

There’s some extra salt in the wound this season, though, in the form of the Olympic Winter Games Milano Cortina 2026. Stamkos, who might otherwise have been a fixture for Canada during his career, broke his tibia on Nov. 11, 2013, getting tied up with defenseman Dougie Hamilton and crashing into a goal post in a game in Boston. It cost him that Olympics. The NHL hadn’t allowed players to go back until this season.

“Listen, it’s something I wish I would have had the opportunity to do, no doubt,” he said. “But it’s just one of those things that probably just wasn’t meant to be. … You look at it, you could have had the chance to play in three and you play in zero. That’s just the way it goes.

“Some guys play 20 years, they don’t get a chance to be in a Final, so I’ve been fortunate enough to play in four of them.”

That’s the 10,000-foot view of his career, with Stamkos on the brink of 1,200 games (1,182) and 1,200 points (1,194), with two Stanley Cup rings, two wins of the Maurice “Rocket” Richard Trophy, a captaincy, four trips to the Final, and a future as a Hall of Famer.

The now, though? That’s harder to see his way through.

It is not what he wanted it to be. But, for Stamkos, tomorrow is another day, another game, another chance to be the person he wants his children to become.

“I think obviously things haven’t gone as good as we wanted [them] to,” Stamkos said. “It’s crazy what a difference a year can make in terms of the expectations of our group with where we were last year.

“But, honestly, you’d drive yourself absolutely insane if you keep dwelling on that. … At this point, there’s no point in looking back. You have to look forward and figure it out.”