Hot chicken and high water: How Winnipeg and Nashville match up, off the ice

On the ice, you practically need a picometre-precision microscope to separate the Nashville Predators and the Winnipeg Jets when it comes to talent.

The top two teams in the National Hockey League face off in Tennessee on Friday in Game 1 of a second-round playoff series that has the potential to be the most entertaining matchup of the post-season.

The Jets and Preds are both blessed with oodles of offence, solid defenders and Vezina-nominated goalies. Both teams can roll with four lines who can score. Both teams displayed flashes of dominance when they played each other during the regular season.

But when you get away from the ice, the only thing Nashville and Winnipeg have in common is the central time zone, summer thunderstorms and the occasional tornado warning.

Here's how the two cities match up, using measures that have absolutely nothing to do with hockey. You're so amped up about this series, you're going to read this anyway.

The Soggy Bottom Index

Every few years, Winnipeggers justifiably wonder why their city was built in the middle of a flood plain. Some years, the Red River engorges itself to the size of a lake. In other years, the Assiniboine swells up like Brandon Tanev's ankle after a penalty-killing shift.

An enormous trench wraps around our eastern flank just to avert floodwaters. To live in Winnipeg is to live with the constant threat of flooding in some form, although mostly that just involves basement seepage.

Nashville is also a city full of waterways. The Cumberland River, the largest in the Tennessee capital, flooded so severely in 2010, the floodwaters damaged Bridgestone Arena, where the Predators play.

Nashville has struggled with the idea of building a flood wall to protect its downtown. The $125-million US price tag is a major obstacle, the Tennessean newspaper says.

Advantage: Winnipeg, thanks to the Red River Floodway. The only flood to reach Bell MTS Place was defender Mark Flood, who played for both the Jets and the Manitoba Moose.

The name game

Nashville takes its name from Francis Nash, an American general who was killed in 1777 as a result of severe injuries sustained during the Battle of Germantown in Philadelphia. 

During the battle, a two-kilogram cannonball sailed over George Washington's head, killed Maj. James Witherspoon and then mortally injured Nashville's namesake.

"The ball struck Nash's horse in the neck and crushed Nash's thigh. Both fell to the ground, with the brigadier-general pinned under the dead horse," Vanderbilt Magazine says.

The origin of Winnipeg's name has a murkier history — literally and figuratively. The conventional wisdom is Winnipeg is Cree for muddy or fetid water, which is an apt description for both the Red River and Lake Winnipeg.

But the name Winnipeg may not have had anything with Manitoba, originally. The first settler use of the term "Ouinipeg" applied to an entirely different body of water, 1,000 kilometres southeast of Lake Winnipeg.

That would be Green Bay, a narrow portion of Lake Michigan that juts into Wisconsin.

Advantage: No one. Philadelphia might as well be playing Green Bay.

Battle of the bands

Winnipeg loves to pride itself on a music scene that spawned the likes of the Guess Who, Crash Test Dummies, Chantal Kreviazuk, the Weakerthans and Propagandhi.

Neil Young also spent four teenage years in the Manitoba capital, an experience he recalls ever-so-fondly in Don't Be Denied.

"When we got to Winnipeg, I checked in to school. I wore white bucks on my feet, when I learned the golden rule," he sang in the 1973 love letter to his hometown. "The punches came fast and hard, lying on my back in the school yard."

Nashville, on the other hand, is home to thousands of recording artists, not all of whom assemble burrito bowls at Chipotle's.

Carrie Underwood, one of the more successful Nashville musicians, is married to a Predator, quasi-retired fourth-line-centre Mike Fisher.

Brad Paisley, Rascal Flatts, Faith Hill, Luke Bryan, Dierks Bentley, Martina McBride, Lady Antebellum, Keith Urban and Kelly Clarkson — none of whom work at Chipotle's — have all sang national anthems or have otherwise performed at Preds games.

Winnipeg has the Burton Cummings Theatre for the Performing Arts, formerly known as the Walker Theatre, as well as the Odeon Theatre.

Nashville has the Grand Ole Opry, which was flooded during the same 2010 deluge that damaged Bridgestone Arena. 

Advantage: Nashville, by about 7,000 guitars. When it comes to music, it's not even close.

Whose cuisine reigns supreme?

The most famous food in the Tennessee capital is Nashville hot chicken. A cut of bird is breaded, fried and coated with cayenne or chili, then served on white bread with pickles.

Nashville is also famous for more widespread southern dishes such as country ham, fried catfish, cornbread and all manner of low-and-slow barbecue.

Winnipeg, meanwhile, is home to the fat boy, a well-done burger slathered in mayo and topped with pickle spears, lettuce, onions, tomato and a greasy liquid condiment known as chili, which bears little similarity to chili sauces anywhere else on Earth. 

We can also take pride in smoked goldeye, though few of us eat it often, not to mention bannock, fried pickerel, vinarterta and honey dill sauce; the latter must be fed to all newborns intravenously in order to ensure they grow into proper Manitobans.

Advantage: Cardiologists on both sides of the border.