Nashville Predators Open The Game With Rare Penalty For Starting The Wrong Lineup

Nashville PredatorsIt has not been a fun season for the Nashville Predators, so on top of all the losing and underwhelming play from key free agents, why not take a bizarre penalty that you hardly ever see to open a game?

Because that's exactly what happened to the predators on Wednesday night against the Seattle Kraken.

The Kraken and Predators hit the ice, but during the first stoppage, there was a bit of a meeting over at the by the penalty boxers between the referees and the off-ice officials.

You know how when you go to a pro hockey game, they read the starting lineups before the game? Well, those are supposed to be the lineups that start the game, obviously.

It turns out that the team had submitted a starting lineup that included Steven Stamkos — No.  91 — but, instead, they started No. 9, Filip Forsberg.

It would seem that either the officials themselves or someone on the Kraken staff noticed, and Nashville was slapped with a bench minor.

According to Sportsnet, the visiting team is supposed to submit their lineup first — not unlike how the home team gets the last change during the game — and changes that they want to make need to be approved before the opening faceoff.

That obviously didn't happen, but it wasn't that the Predators were trying to pull a fast one. Notice the numbers involved? Head coach Andrew Brunette admitted after the game that he simply added the "1" to Forsberg's No. 9.

Unfortunately for them, they have a No. 91 on their roster, otherwise the official scorer probably would have just said, "Yo, you made a mistake," and they could have gotten it straightened out ahead of time.

That's not what happened, and so Nashville took the penalty, which they managed to kill off.

However, the rest of the game didn't go much better for the Preds as they were shut out by the Kraken, dropping their record to 6-11-3 on the year.