Feb 13, 2023; Nashville, Tennessee, USA; Former Nashville Predators defenseman P.K. Subban waives to the crowd with members of his Blueline Buddies organization he founded during a pregame tribute and ceremonial puck drop before the Predators game against the Arizona Coyotes at Bridgestone Arena. Mandatory Credit: Christopher Hanewinckel-Imagn Images
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Dec 5, 2016/vol. 70, issue 08
THE P.K. EFFECT
On the ice and off it, all Subban does is bring it. And the Predators are lapping up all the attention – and the revenue – the P.K. brand has brought to Nashville
BY DAVID BOCLAIR
IT BECAME A ritual throughout July and into August. Every day, Nat Harden, the Nashville Predators’ vice-president in charge of tickets, stepped into the office of CEO Sean Henry with the same message.
“It didn’t end again.”
The “it,” in this case, was a rare surge in sales at a time when people, particularly those in Music City, are focused on things other than hockey.
The origin of the swell was the 2016 All-Star Game that Nashville hosted in late January. It continued to grow a few months later, as the organization began in earnest to ride the wave in the wake of its best post-season to date, a two-round run that ended with a Game 7 loss to eventual Western Conference champion San Jose.
Then came a six-year contract for Filip Forsberg, the team’s leading scorer each of the past two seasons.
But none of it compared to what followed the June 29 blockbuster that brought P.K. Subban to Nashville in exchange for Shea Weber.
This wasn’t a tsunami of revenue that rushed through the ticket office then quickly receded, as happens with many high-profile transactions. The acquisition of Subban produced a prolonged high tide that has washed over the entire organization and swept up the fan base in a rush of optimism the likes of which it has never experienced.
It also has given Subban an opportunity to expand his profile beyond the NHL’s Main Street into one of the league’s relative backroads, where a passionate fan base has overwhelmingly embraced his unconventional approach.
You could call it the placebo effect, the idea that a person can believe in the perceived benefits of a treatment enough that he or she actually experiences those benefits.
But the P.K. effect is real. He has provided a genuine joy seemingly to everyone who works for, plays for or supports the Predators. Even coach Peter Laviolette, a serious and often dour sort, recently remarked to one of the team’s executives about Subban, “You see him walking down the hall and you feel better about yourself.”
“What we told everybody internally when we were talking about this trade was that 90 percent of the people would be sad because we were trading (Weber), the ultimate Predator, but 100 percent were going to be really excited about it,” Henry said. “That’s kind of what happened. But I really thought it would die a little bit. I thought there was going to be a big burst, then we’d have a normal summer. It hasn’t died off. People are just excited about him.”
Gerry Helper, an executive vice-president who has been a part of the Predators’ front office since their inaugural season, has worked in the NHL as long or longer than pretty much everyone else in the organization.
During his career, he has developed a theory that all any team wants from a trade is for the player(s) acquired to do what is expected as soon as possible. If you get a fighter, he should fight. If you get a scorer, he should score.
In Subban, the Predators got a star, and he didn’t hesitate to step into the role.
The magnitude of the transaction meant an unusually large percentage of the hockey world was watching when Nashville opened its season Oct. 14 at home against one of its chief rivals, the Chicago Blackhawks.
The same had been true since the first day of training camp. More Canadian media descended on Nashville to document Subban’s first days and first game with the team than had been on hand for any other hockey activities other than the 2003 draft or last season’s All-Star Game.
Right on cue, Subban scored the Predators’ first goal of the season. It happened 7:46 after the opening faceoff, tied the score 1-1 and set a celebratory tone that continued all the way through that night’s 3-2 victory.
“The place exploded,” Henry said. “That was a game we wanted to win for all the obvious reasons…We have our own giant, and he showed it on an international stage and national TV. Our fans loved him before that. I think the ring got put on that day.”
While franchise officials and fans basked in the moment, Subban saw it as an opportunity to reassure his new teammates that no matter how much attention he receives off the ice, he doesn’t intend to let it take away from what he does on it. He addressed the dressing room immediately following the game and made it clear that he might be the center of attention but doesn’t consider himself the center of the universe on the team or in the league.
“I just look forward to being able to put all the crap that’s happening in the media, off the ice, around us, away because we’ve got a great group of guys,” Subban said. “If we’re focused, and the focus is on our team and not just crap off the ice, then we’re going to have a lot of success. That’s part of what I said in my speech after the game.”
Subban knows, though, that for him, at least, there will always be “crap” off the ice. Initially, the number of interview requests for him startled and overwhelmed the Predators’ media relations department.
Quickly, a separate strategy was developed and a policy set to handle all the queries. More than a month into the season, at least six to eight media outlets outside Nashville ask for a few moments of his time each week. Those are just the ones related to hockey.
For his off-ice pursuits, such as the P.K. Subban Suiting Collection or other artistic endeavors, Subban works with the William Morris Agency. He also has two sisters who work to maximize his opportunity to engage in charitable endeavors through the P.K. Subban Foundation.
His first post-trade visit to Nashville lasted fewer than 40 hours, but it included a meeting between Predators front office personnel, him, his sisters and his mother in which they talked about the philanthropic goals of the player and the team and ways they might complement one another.
“It was a meeting that probably should have been 45 minutes or an hour, and it turned into close to a two-hour meeting because you just started building off each other’s ideas and trust,” Henry said. “He’s committed to the team, committed to himself, committed to winning. As he says, the better he plays, the better the team plays, the bigger the impact he has on the community and what we do together.”
Truth be told, his teammates have been happy to have someone absorb as much of the media glare as Subban has. Even as captain, Weber was a reluctant and reticent spokesman who preferred to send messages with his play.
Emerging stars such as Forsberg and Roman Josi, as well as longtime Predator Pekka Rinne, have been willing to do their part based on their performance, but none has an outsized personality that commands the cameras.
Walk into the dressing room these days following a practice, a morning skate or a game and there almost certainly will be a crowd around Subban’s stall, which allows the others to go about their business in peace.
“I love it,” Rinne said. “He has a personality that people want to hear what he has to say, and he seems really comfortable doing it. If people want to talk to him instead of me, I’m fine with it.”
From a hockey perspective, the Predators had plenty of reasons to make the trade. Subban is almost four years younger than Weber, and Subban’s skills, specifically his skating and his puck-handling, are a better fit for the style Laviolette wants to play. They also were well aware of what Subban offered in terms of his personality.
The potential to generate more publicity in a decidedly non-traditional market
wasn’t simply appealing. It was one of the factors that convinced leadership and ownership it was the right thing to do. The payoff has exceeded all expectations. “Everywhere he goes, he seems to really attract people,” said GM David Poile. “He’s like a magnet for people and publicity. Does he seek it out? In certain instances, absolutely. But it also seeks him. He just has one of those special personalities that allows him to interact with people of all different levels, whether it’s your bigtime stars in other sports or at the hospital.
“But it was really surprising, in all honesty, how people really thought this was an exciting move.”
Increasingly, there’s the sense that it would require a cinema verite approach to successfully capture all of his interactions, not to mention to satisfy the public’s seemingly insatiable appetite for all things Subban.
For example, a Predators video crew followed him around downtown when he visited in July, which resulted in heavy traffic on the team’s website. It didn’t, however, get the moment he chatted up a three-year-old on the street or when the boy’s father figured out who he was.
And no cameras were rolling when, on his way to the airport to leave town, he delivered pizza to a local police station.
Fans can have their photos taken with likenesses of several players in the Bridgestone Arena concourse. Subban is the one who takes it to another level.
“He’s the guy who tweets it out. He’s the guy who sits in it and jumps out at you on a Saturday afternoon when people are just rolling over from Broadway,” Henry said. “It’s just a lot of fun. I don’t know if he knows how to say no. And when he says yes, he’s all in.”
There can be no better example of this than Subban’s appearance before more than 65,000 at a Tennessee Titans game Oct. 23. That was when Subban stole the show as the NFL franchise’s ‘12th Man’ for its game against the Indianapolis Colts, the minimum requirements of which are to wave to the crowd and drive a sword into the midfield logo during pre-game festivities.
Subban doused himself in Gatorade, ripped off his shirt and wielded the sword in his best impression of a samurai, all of which instantly created a stir in the stadium and across social media.
“No one remembers the guy who goes out and does an adequate job,” Subban wrote in a first-person account of the experience on the Predators’ website. “It’s not a conscious thing for me. But whenever I have the opportunity to bring it, I want to give more than the guy before me – hockey, off-ice stuff, just life in general. You only have one shot at most things, so why not give it everything you’ve got, right?”
The Predators have adopted the same approach. A franchise that has endured a shortage of star power and felt underappreciated in the hockey world throughout most of its first two decades intends to take full advantage of the opportunities that come with a player like Subban.
It is only in the standings that his impact hasn’t been immediate. Ten games into the season, Nashville had fewer points than every Western Conference team except one, and Laviolette was still occasionally experimenting with his defense pairings.
None of that, however, has done anything to dampen the mood that has persisted since the moment the trade was announced.
“All the good he does off the ice might be as contagious as anything else – all of it builds,” Henry said. “Where it helps is the international attention he draws. The sheer volume of interview requests from outside our market – we didn’t get that before. You got it in April but not in July and August.
“He’s going to help us do what we want to do, which is to bring our logo together with a lot of other logos, because he sees this as his city already.”
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