Luke Evangelista Talks Locker Room Vibes, Changing Line Mates, and Being a Healthy Scratch

Tonight Luke Evangelista gets ready to play his 41st career NHL game. The Toronto native made his NHL debut on February 28 as the Nashville Predators took on the Pittsburgh Penguins, and Evangelista has been with the team ever since. His stand out play from that February debut until the end of the 2022-23 season gave the front office and fans as idea of what a roster reset could look like as the team developed young players. 

Evangelista made the Predators roster right out of camp this season and has a part of one of Nashville's most productive lines. Evangelista, Tommy Novak, and Kiefer Sherwood were one of the Predators' most reliable forward combinations through the first stretch of the season. An injury to Novak on November 11 interrupted that momentum, and Evanglista's most recent center, Cody Glass, is out now with an upper body injury. Tonight Juuso Pärssinen will center Evangelista and Sherwood. 

Changing line mates means making small adjustments. 

"It's a little bit different," Evangelista said when asked about having a different center on his line tonight. "Each of those guys [Novak, Glass, Pärssinen] plays a different game. They think the game a little differently."

"At the end of the day, broad picture, we're just trying to go have positive shifts as a line, create chances, and get a win at the end of the day. It's maybe a couple adjustments here and there, but overall it's the same goal."

Evangelista was a healthy scratch for Monday night's game against the Colorado Avalanche, but the move was called a "reset" by Andrew Brunette and not cause for concern. 

"It was just a little but of a reset," Brunette said of the decision to sit Evangelista Monday. "I think his game slipped a little bit, and with the young player, at least in my experience, I just don't want it to become a habit. So it's great to have it and then go back to work."

"My talk with him is the league gets harder and gets harder from game one, and it's way harder now," Brunette continued. "It's going to be harder in game forty. I don't want to lose him game seventeen. I want to make sure he's building his game, because it's a long season. We're going to need him."

Evangelista called being a healthy scratch a "wake up call" but understands what he needs to do to get back to his game.