Nashville Predators vs. Columbus Blue Jackets

Lore & Background

When the Predators skated onto the ice in October 1998, they were the NHL's newest club, a team built on the promise of a passionate Tennessee fanbase and a roster that would, over the years, feature names like Shea Weber, Ilya Kovalchuk, and Pekka Lonkoranta. Columbus followed two years later with Rick Nash as its marquee acquisition and a franchise identity rooted in Ohio's blue-collar work ethic. For the first decade of their shared existence, the two teams occupied different sides of the conference map. Their games were interconference filler—interesting but not consequential in the standings.

The 2013 realignment rewrote that equation. Both clubs landed in the Central Division alongside St. Louis, Minnesota, Winnipeg, and Dallas. The Predators and Blue Jackets now saw each other six times a season, often on the same road trip, sometimes in back-to-backs. The tone shifted from curiosity to competition. Fans in both cities began to notice the other's name in the schedule with a particular eye-roll, a muttered 'here they come again.'

The rivalry has no single defining incident the way some older feuds do—no famous brawl, no infamous playoff series. Instead, it is a slow-burn, season-long attrition: a 3-2 overtime loss in Nashville, a 4-3 shootout win in Columbus, a stretch of four consecutive meetings where both teams sit in the same playoff picture. It is the rivalry of two clubs that understand each other because they grew up in the same expansion era, fought the same identity battles, and now share the same divisional trenches.

In Their Own Story

The arena in Nashville hums with that particular low-frequency buzz that builds before a Central Division night. The ice is fresh, the Zamboni's last pass still glistening under the lights. In the visitor tunnel, the Blue Jackets' equipment room smells of tape and cold rubber. A Predators fan in the lower bowl, a kid maybe sixteen, holds up a hand-painted sign: 'STAY IN OHIO.' His friend next to him grins and points at the Blue Jackets' warm-up bench across the rink. Out on the ice, a Nashville winger drops the puck for a faceoff in Columbus' zone, sticks clicking, skates carving little crescents into the surface. The crowd noise swells, just for a moment, into something that feels like a war cry. It isn't a war. It's just Tuesday. But in the Central Division, Tuesdays add up.

Reader's Guide

Opposing team: Columbus Blue Jackets. Origin: The rivalry is fundamentally a product of the 2013 NHL realignment, which placed both expansion-era franchises into the Central Division. Before that, Nashville (West) and Columbus (East) met only as interconference opponents, so the animosity is young and structural rather than born from a single incident. The tone is that of a grinding divisional war—six regular-season meetings a year, shared road trips, and a constant tug-of-war over the same handful of playoff berths in a stacked division. Defining moments are less about one explosive game and more about the accumulation: the overtime losses that cost a team the tiebreaker, the back-to-back series where one club goes 3-1 and the other snaps back the following weekend, the late-December stretch where both teams sit within a point of each other and every shift feels personal. For fans, the rivalry lives in the small stuff—the heated faceoffs, the body checks along the boards, the post-game handshake lines where neither team looks away first. It is a rivalry still writing its own mythology, defined more by proximity and repetition than by a single legendary night.

Did You Know?

• Both franchises arrived in the NHL as expansion teams within two seasons of each other—Nashville in 1998-99 and Columbus in 2000-01—making them peers from the league's late-90s/early-2000s expansion wave.
• For roughly thirteen seasons (2000-2013), the Predators and Blue Jackets played in different NHL conferences, meaning their meetings carried no divisional stakes.
• The 2013 NHL realignment placed both clubs in the Central Division, transforming their relationship from interconference curiosity to a six-game-a-year divisional rivalry almost overnight.
• Because both teams are mid-market clubs in the same division, their head-to-head results often directly affect which team earns a playoff spot or a favorable seeding, making each meeting feel higher-stakes than the box s