O’Reilly Sits at the Center of Nashville’s Next Big Gamble

Ryan O’Reilly is still the kind of center who changes the temperature of a room, and Nashville’s roster math keeps circling right back to him. The real question is not whether he matters - everybody in the room already knows that - but how the Predators shape the middle of the ice around him without boxing themselves into a corner. This is the sort of cap-and-lineup puzzle that tells you what a front office really believes about its window, and Nashville is staring straight at that decision now.