Congratulations Senators fans, we made it.
Okay, so the team failed to reach the postseason thereby cashing in on the oh so glorious, glorious gate revenues that accompany it, but every single one of you deserves a pat on the back for enduring this unmitigated disaster of a 2015-16 season.
If only the ensuing disaster was averted by having Craig Anderson start the home opener.
The Senators’ story is familiar.
In a league in which more than half of its teams reach the postseason, the Senators failed to fulfill even the most modest of goals. As staunch believers in the philosophy that anything can happen once you’re in, the Senators not only missed the postseason for the fourth time since appearing in the 2007 Stanley Cup Final, but for the eighth time in the last nine seasons, the Senators failed to reach the second round of the playoffs.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
Following last season’s magical run, this organization opted for an innocuous offseason: electing to return with what was essentially the same collection of players and hoping last season’s momentum would carry over into the 2015-16 season.
Like most John Muckler draft selections, this momentum never panned out.
It’s one thing to believe that players can benefit from the experience of playing in the postseason and carrying learned lessons with them, but following the 2012 playoff victory over the Canadiens and last season’s historical run, the Senators have struggled to translate these experiences into better or even more consistent future performance.
Momentum makes for a nice buzzword and an easy talking point, but the truth of the matter is that circumstances rarely replicate themselves across seasons.
In the case of the 2015-16 Ottawa Senators, they struggled throughout the season to generate any momentum, let alone sustain it.
Highlighted by a thin farm system – the by-product of trades, the graduation of the team’s best prospect to the parent roster, weak draft classes compounded by iffy selections (following the team’s vaunted 2011 haul) – and a roster whose best players are still under cost-efficient contracts, the troubling reality of Ottawa’s situation is that Bryan Murray and his staff assembled a roster that is constructed to win now.
It’s just that the Senators aren’t winning enough.
Mediocrity is easier to accept when the price of a losing season is softened by stockpiling prospects through trades, creating financial flexibility and working towards a better future, but it feels like the Senators are spinning their tires and haven’t made significant progress in quite some time.
The frustrating year forced Senators brass to spend many long nights trying to figure out where it all went wrong.
Of course, that didn’t stop fans, analysts, players, coaches and the media from sharing their own ideas for what plagued the Ottawa Senators.
Some lazily attributed all of the problems to the Senators’ internal budget.
Curtis Lazar believed the team’s misfortunes had to do with their practice habits.
“I’m going to say it how it is. I think at times this year, this team was a little too soft, the way we practised. There’s nothing wrong with going into the corner and hitting your buddy. It’s a long season and you have to be careful, but I’m not going to take it easy on him.
“That’s where Dion (Phaneuf) comes in. You see his intensity in practice and that’s what we need, guys willing to push each other.”
Since the opposition scored first in 52 of the team’s 82 games (62.2-percent), a few players naturally lamented about how difficult it was for them to keep playing from behind early in games. (Note: For what it’s worth, only the Toronto Maple Leafs and Vancouver Canucks scored fewer first goals than Ottawa did this season.)
Others blamed injuries to two of the team’s key forwards – Kyle Turris and Clarke MacArthur – for compounding the team’s problems.
The hockey operations department took some heat for failing to address its easily identifiable blue line problem and failing to understand the dynamics of what made defensive pairings or forward lines tick and contributed so heavily towards the team’s success the previous season.
Some believe the coaching staff contributed to the problem through its personnel decisions, player usage, their failure to rectify the shot suppression problem and the team’s horrendous power play (15.8, tied for 26th) and penalty kill (75.8, 28th) rates.
In turn, because he was unable to criticize the talent that his bosses outfitted him to work with, head coach Dave Cameron resorted to imploring his players to improve things that were under their control – even going so far as to wish that his players had Mark Borowiecki’s compete level.
Like an onion, they’re all layers that cover up the core and not surprisingly, Erik Karlsson, this team’s captain, probably had the most accurate assessment for this team’s struggles.
“First off, we’re a budget team here,” Karlsson said. “We don’t have the same players as most teams do that are high-skilled and we’re not going to win games from a skill base. We’re not going to win games by scoring fancy goals and stuff like that. We have to realize we’re a grinding team. We’ve got to get back to that a little bit more. (Tuesday), we tried to do it a little bit fancy. We don’t have enough players to win us games like that.”
Ignoring the budget talk and Karlsson using buzz words like “grinding” to pull at Don Brennan’s heartstrings, Karlsson skirted around the principle problem: this team does not have enough talent.
Shot suppression and puck possession troubles, poor special teams play, inane coaching decisions, injuries pushing the functional capacity of this team’s depth, blaming practice habits or compete levels, these are all symptomatic of a team that does not have enough talent.
Even when the team compiled a 15-8-5 record through its first 28 games, they overachieved riding the strength of the percentages. In shooting 8.8-percent and stopping 93.4-percent of the five-on-five shots, the Senators were able to overcome the fact they had the league’s second worst possession rate (46.1 CF%) during this stretch of hockey.
If the numbers didn’t portray a situation wherein the Senators were due for some regression, the toughness of their December schedule cemented it. Once Kyle Turris rolled his ankle on December 5th and Andrew Hammond was felled by a concussion after taking a shot to the mask in practice and forced Dave Cameron to roll with Craig Anderson each and every night, the team’s fate was sealed.
Even though the losses mounted and the Senators’ playoff odds proportionately dwindled, there were still a number of reasons to tune in and watch this team perform on a nightly basis.
Erik Karlsson’s offensive production was at a level that is rarely ever witnessed. He was the first defenceman in 30 years to finish top-five in league scoring since Paul Coffey, who finished third in 1985-86. He also became the first defenceman since Bobby Orr in 1974-75, who tied Bobby Clarke with 89 assists, to lead the league in assists.
Put in the context of Ottawa’s less than stellar season, marked by a woeful power play and an injury to Kyle Turris, the team’s number one centre, Karlsson’s offensive numbers are even more impressive.
Beyond the production, Karlsson was a principle driver in whatever success this team had. He had the third highest relative Corsi rates amongst NHL defencemen (min. 500 five-on-five minutes), but here’s a better look at the impact he had on the Ottawa Senators.
Goals For %
Corsi For %
Shots For %
Scoring Chances For%
OTTAWA TOTAL
50.17
47.45
46.24
46.16
WITH KARLSSON
49.36
51.44
49.74
48.76
WITHOUT KARLSSON
51.06
44.22
43.42
43.98
What the table displays is the Senators were an average team with Karlsson on the ice, but they resembled an ECHL team with him resting off of it. If it weren’t for some percentage driven metrics that boosted Ottawa’s goals for percentage with Karlsson off the ice, just imagine how much worse things could have been for the Senators if not for Karlsson’s Norris Trophy-worthy season.
Speaking of percentage-driven performance, Zack Smith turned in one of the unlikeliest 25-goal seasons in recent NHL history – setting career highs in goals (25) and points (36). Smith always possessed a decent shot, but thanks to the excellent play of late season linemates Mark Stone and Jean-Gabriel Pageau combined with a 20.7-shooting percentage that was essentially double his previous regular season high (10.4 in 2011-12), Smith exceeded expectations.
Sophomore Mark Stone overcame a slow start to prove that last season was no fluke. Not only did he lead the league with 128 takeaways (note: the next closest competitor, Jeff Skinner, had 77), Stone surpassed the 20-goal and 60-point benchmarks for the second consecutive season.
Like Stone, Hoffman proved that his rookie campaign production wasn’t an anomaly. A second-half cold spell caused ‘the Hoff’ to fall one goal short of reaching the illustrious 30-goal club, but he did manage to set career regular season highs in goals (29) and points (59).
Once Kyle Turris was shut down for the remainder of the season, Jean-Gabriel Pageau finally was granted the opportunity to play with a smart player like Mark Stone. Together with Zack Smith, they formed a productive line that restored everyone’s confidence in Pageau after he languished for the better part of the season playing even strength minutes alongside linemates who were abhorrently poor complements to his game.
Unfortunately what happened with Pageau through the first half of the season is a microcosm of what has plagued the Senators this season.
From management right on down to the coaching staff, the organization failed to understand or recognize what helped make the 2014-15 Senators successful down the stretch. Dave Cameron was given a ton of credit for helping the Senators reach the postseason — receiving a two first place votes, four seconds and three third place votes in last year’s Jack Adams Trophy balloting – but when the Senators returned a healthy lineup to start the 2015-16 season, Cameron fell into the same pattern of behaviour that ultimately cost Paul MacLean his job.
It is easy to pinpoint where Cameron erred – a refusal to make Mark Borowiecki or Chris Neil a healthy scratch, inserting Curtis Lazar into the top-six despite the fact that of the 352 NHL forwards who’ve played over 1,000 five-on-five minutes over the last two seasons, Lazar’s 328th in points per sixty minutes of ice time, rewarding Alex Chiasson repeatedly because he does the “little things”, his discretion on which prospects to recall from Binghamton **cough*,*cough** David Dziurzynski **cough**, **cough**, his relationship with Mike Hoffman and poor special teams performance.
Yet, as transparent as these problems were, it’s important to remember that Cameron was Eugene Melnyk’s patsy and that ownership not only thrust Cameron onto Paul MacLean’s staff as an assistant, but allowed him to take the reins once the organization fired MacLean as a scapegoat for their poor 2014-15 start.
Moreover, Cameron’s not the one who assembled the collection of talent that he had to work with.
To a man, every player on the Senators’ roster is someone who was drafted, signed or acquired in a trade by the Senators’ front office and everyone within the hockey operations department shares some culpability for the franchise’s predicament.
To the organization’s credit, there are pieces, significant pieces, to work with and build around, but this organization has failed to support them. The talent level around Erik Karlsson is so bad that pundits have stressed Karlsson’s leadership role and how he has to dumb down his style to set a better example for others in regard to defensive accountability.
It’s depressing, but taking the responsibility and leadership aspect one step further, management has continued to emphasize the importance of hiring a new head coach who has NHL experience so that the players can respect him and the structure and accountability he will try to impose.
This team’s struggles are an indictment of the players and talent level within that room.
In order for it to improve, the process and manner in which this team evaluates its players needs to improve.
The good news is that in the days that followed the conclusion of the regular season, the fallout was larger than anticipated and optimism is slowly starting to creep back in.
Eugene Melnyk’s non-committal stance regarding Dave Cameron’s future and reflections on the “stupidity” of some of Cameron’s decisions with nine games left in the regular season foreshadowed his coach’s fate, but even late in the season, it was presumed that Murray wanted to stick around for one more season.
Melnyk even went so far as to admit that if Murray wished to return, he would allow his general manager to come back.
“Well, with respect to Bryan, I’ve just said all along that as long as he wants to stay on as GM and can stay on as GM, then he is welcome to (stay).”
A few weeks later, the Senators held a press conference to announce that Murray would be stepping aside to allow assistant general manager Pierre Dorion to succeed him.
When a lifelong hockey guy steps aside like that, it’s bound to gain some national media attention, but what was particularly striking were the comments from Murray’s close confidante, Doug MacLean.
“Enough already. I don’t know where this all goes, but Bryan Murray’s out and… not a chance (that he wanted to step aside). Not a chance. Not a chance. I don’t know if he was pushed, but something happened. I guarantee you something happened.”
MacLean frequently expresses himself on radio or television by saying things without coming right out and explicitly stating them. As a friend of Murray’s, who worked with the man for ten years, if he’s getting fed stories about how payroll sounds like it’s going to be dropped or he has a gut feeling that “something happened”, it’s reasonable to assume that he’s getting a lot of his Ottawa information right from Murray himself.
The reasons behind his departure notwithstanding, there was clamour within this fan base for some fresh ideas because the process under Bryan Murray wasn’t working.
This responsibility now falls squarely on the shoulders of new general manager Pierre Dorion, who was named as Bryan Murray’s successor on April 10th.
Dorion’s an interesting figure because he’s been with the organization for the past nine seasons and has served as an assistant general manager since Tim Murray bolted for Buffalo for their general manager position in January of 2014. Like it or not, not only has he been involved in every recent hockey operations decision, he essentially has his fingerprints all over this roster.
Even though is a certain degree of culpability for his involvement in the past, there is a sense of guarded optimism that Dorion can be his own man. In fairness to him, he made a habit of emphasizing that point in his introductory press conference.
Saying the right words is the easiest part however. We’ll only be able to judge him by his actions and canning Dave Cameron was a great first step.
Whether Cameron’s firing the only significant change remains to be seen, but Ian Mendes credited Dorion as being “more than open to the concept of advanced stats. He’s in constant contact with an analytics person he hired on a freelance basis to look at the team starting midway through last season.”
As someone with his amateur scouting background and a reported openness to hockey analytics, the hope is that Dorion can successfully being able to meld these two elements together to make more informed decisions because it would give him a leg up on his old school predecessor.
The onus is going to be on him to follow through on his words.
Bringing in a part-time freelance analytics hire into the fold is a step in the right direction. However, it is one thing to have this person on board and another for there to be a complete buy-in for analytics, or to fully commit and spend the resources necessary to really flesh out an analytics department that goes beyond using publically available scoring chance data or puck possession proxies to assess players. Collecting meaningful proprietary data that provides a competitive advantage is a labour intensive process that cannot be done well on the cheap.
Hockey analytics has essentially turned into an arms race and it seems like the number of full-time employees who are hired by organizations increases every year. It may not be on same level as baseball or basketball, but hockey’s trending in that direction.
It pays to invest in analytics early, but thanks to the emergence, popularity of statistical databases like Behind the Net, War on Ice, Extra Skater, HockeyViz.com and Corsica.Hockey, it’s cheap and easier than ever for teams to access this information and draw their own conclusions.
This accessibility comes with a hidden cost.
The more teams accept the findings and use these underlying metrics and proxies to supplement the decision-making process and make more informed decisions, the less significant the gains will be. The troubling part for teams like the Senators is that although there may be diminishing returns for teams who buy in, the teams that refuse to engage with analytics will find themselves falling further behind the curve. This statistical evolution will mirror baseball’s growth necessitating forming larger analytical departments who can track and log proprietary data and information, develop databases to store it and then have analysts sift through the data to determine strengths, weaknesses and strategies that can be exploited by the coaching staff and its players.
The best part is that most of this can simply be funded through a reallocation of resources. Instead of signing veteran AHL lifers like Eric O’Dell, Michael Kostka and Mark Frasor at the cost of a combined cost of $725,000 in AHL salary, the organization could simply invest this money to an analytical department which would have a bigger impact on the success of not only the parent club, but the minor league affiliates as well. Better yet, it would also save the organization from having more embarrassing press conferences to announce an AHL signings like O’Dell’s.
Of course this approach requires a sweeping buy-in from every facet of the organization and if there is one particular concern, it’s that the Ottawa Senators have historically taken blissful pride in its ignorance of the information that analytics can provide.
@senstats you keep your stats… Never been a minus in my career.. Yet a Corsica rating somehow makes sense? It’s stats for nerds
— Bobby Ryan (@b_ryan9) November 1, 2014
Then after scoring an empty net goal in January, Mark Borowiecki teed off on detractors who use puck possession proxies to cast Borowiecki’s game in a poor light.
“(The goal) probably had a lot to do with my Corsi (rating) on that shift. I really possessed that puck well, hung on to it in my own end. Good Corsi leads to good goals, you know. So it’s good stuff.
“I’m not on social media, I don’t go on social media. For me making those remarks – my friends are on social media, my wife is, my parents are, so that’s kind of where it comes from. You go ask the guys in that locker room what they think about analytics – you’ll probably either get punched in the face or they’ll laugh you out of there. There’s not too many guys who take it seriously.”
Then there is the owner, Eugene Melnyk, who responded to an interview question from Ian Mendes that asked whether the organization would start investing more resources into hockey analytics.
“Well, I’ve actually had a lot of experience in analytics when it comes to horse racing. In horse racing, it doesn’t work. I can tell you that. I spent a lot of money on it. In hockey, you defer to and it depends on who you talk to. It can work as a tool, but it’s only a small tool. It’s not even half the tool. It just tells you… a lot of statistics, you have to be into that, but a good, experienced hockey person like a Bryan Murray – of that vintage – they don’t need analytics. They can see it already. They’ve seen the play over and over and over again and they know how to fix things because they’ve been there and done that. It’s just another day in the office, so analytics are great. People should see it, but it’s not the beginning and the end. There’s no chance that it will make that big of a difference.”
Borowiecki’s comments are particularly striking. I totally understand a player publicly expressing frustration or acting defensively because he and his family or friends are seeing criticisms which are rooted in quantitative substance. The internet can be a vile, vile place where the human element in sports is rarely ever considered.
At the same time, whether it’s smug ignorance that was fostered from years of the organization treasuring his competitive spirit and intangibles or a lack of awareness that the Senators even employ an analytics person, his words point to an underlying disconnect between the players, management, the coaching staff and ownership.
From ownership on down, the Senators need their entire organization to be on the same page and it’s clear that this isn’t happening.
It’s with this in mind that I’m hoping like hell that Dorion and can enact his vision of what a hockey organization should be and distance himself from the anachronistic ways of his predecessor.
The Senators have one of the smallest front offices in the league – which means that as an organization that relies heavily on eye-tests, fewer eyes are evaluating this team.
The front office needs support and in a league where the amount of data entering front offices is massive and will continue to grow exponentially as bio-technology and tracking technology are rolled out on a league-wide basis, the Senators need to evolve and embrace it so that they can collect more information and make more informed player decisions and better tactical decisions on the bench.
As we’ve seen in recent years, the Senators have struggled to recognize or identify trends that could help them make better personnel decisions.
Even looking back at last offseason, you can understand some of the organization’s decision-making when viewing through a vacuum. It allowed Erik Condra to walk as an unrestricted free agent and even passed up on Condra offering the organization the last right of refusal to match Tampa’s offer because they believed it was important to create opportunity for young players like a Shane Prince or a Matt Puempel.
Condra and Prince have a similar story. On their own, these players were never huge cogs in the Senators’ success and therefore, in theory, they could be easily replaced. The problem is that the organization failed to recognize what made them valuable contributors.
In letting Condra walk, the organization believed in creating opportunity for younger players like Prince. On paper, it made sense, but when it came time to roll out the lineup, Condra’s former linemates –Pageau and Lazar – struggled without him. Robbed of a smart defensive player who moved the puck responsibly, the third line went from being one the team’s best strengths to dragging down the team’s performance.
While a spot in the lineup was created for Prince, he actually played effectively well and was productive in a role on the fourth line and was instrumental in propping up their play. For reasons, the coaching staff was never enamoured with Prince’s overall performance. On occasions it would make him a healthy scratch to dress shittier veteran alternatives. On others, the coaching staff elected to dress Mark Borowiecki as a forward to send a message to its forwards about the kind of compete level it wanted to see.
It didn’t matter that Prince was one of the team’s most productive players relative to his ice time or that he accomplished this despite the fact that Chris Neil was his most common linemate.
Here’s a look at how the Senators fared when Chris Neil was on the ice with Shane Prince and when he played away from Shane Prince at five-on-five:
TOI
GF60
GA60
GF%
CF60
CA60
CF%
Neil With Prince
196:00
3.06
2.76
52.6
63.06
42.24
59.9
Neil Without Prince
535:27
1.34
1.79
42.9
47.06
55.02
46.1
So what did the organization do?
Naturally, it awarded Chris Neil with a one-year extension praising him for his commitment to dropping weight over the offseason and the hard work that he put in to improve his skating. At the trade deadline, the Senators shipped Prince and a seventh-round pick to the New York Islanders for a third-round selection – of which, the likelihood that this third-round pick ever amounts to what Prince is now is small.
Pierre Dorion explained the trade in an interview on TSN 1200 later that day:
“Well, with Shane we just felt that he had a chance and didn’t really take the chance to be more than a fourth liner. Another team really wanted him. We have quite a lot of depth in Matt Puempel that we’ve called up or will call up later on today and we just felt that a team really wanted him and the price was good price to get for a third round pick.”
Keep in mind that the trade was made after consultation with the coaching staff who felt that other young players had passed him on the depth chart. Yes, the same entire coaching staff that was relieved of its duties a few short weeks ago.
Poor management decisions have compounded poor coaching judgement and as an organization that is financially strapped and lives on the margins, the Senators should be looking for whatever incremental gains it can get.
Players like Condra, Wiercioch and Prince should never be key cogs on a team, but they underscore the importance of recognizing their inherent value and how they make the players around them better and improve the team’s results when they’re on the ice more than they hurt. Discarding these players for essentially nothing and replacing them with lesser players made this team worse and speaks to this organization’s inability to surround its core talent properly.
Even if you’re a fan who doesn’t give much credence to the idea that the loss of valuable depth contributors can add up, it’s impossible to ignore management’s decision to enter the 2015-16 season with THAT blue line.
It was understandable for the Senators elected to roll with the top four that performed down the stretch. Erik Karlsson and Marc Methot were excellent from the time that Methot returned from injury while Patrick Wiercioch did something that no other defensive partner has been able to do: buoy Cody Ceci’s performance. Rather than spend money on a proven an insulating presence who could step in in the event of an injury or drop in performance, the organization hoped that Jared Cowen could begin to fulfill some of the lofty projections that were placed upon him after he was made the ninth overall pick in the 2009 NHL Draft and that he and some combination of Mark Borowiecki and Chris Wideman could perform well in a supporting role.
Collectively, they failed as a group and now it’s up to the new general manager to figure out ways to improve his club.
Dorion has the opportunity to endorse a philosophical shift and help bridge the gap between traditional analysis and the new age analytics that can help the organization make more informed decisions.
I’m hoping he will, but admittedly, he’s walking into a difficult situation here.
The team’s leading goal scorer, Mike Hoffman, remains under team control for one more season, but Hoffman possesses all of the leverage. Having proven he can be an elite even strength scorer, he can demand term and market value on his next contract or settle on a one-year contract that will take him to unrestricted free agency. Rather than have Hoffman’s status linger over the team for the duration of the season, it makes him a prime candidate to be moved.
A number of the team’s young players have also struggled to flourish at the parent level and despite their stagnant development, the organization was reportedly hesitant to include them in trade negotiations of them for higher upside players. As the man responsible for overseeing the amateur staff for the past nine seasons, will Dorion let loyalty and feelings for his drafted players get in the way of moves that can benefit his club?
Despite the lavish praise being thrown Dion Phaneuf’s way, the blue line is still a mess.
Erik Karlsson has taken some flack as someone who has to take ownership as a leader and change the way he plays and be more accountable in the defensive zone.
Marc Methot is coming off an underwhelming year and the Patrick Wiercioch/Cody Ceci pairing failed to live up to the expectations.
Wiercioch’s confidence, and management’s confidence in him, eroded to a point where everyone can confidently assume that he will not receive a qualifying offer this summer to allow the Senators can retain his rights.
Their struggles bolstered the idea that Ottawa needed to upgrade its top-four and in February, the Senators traded two future assets – Tobias Lindberg and a 2017 second round pick – with Jared Cowen, Milan Michalek and Colin Greening to the Toronto Maple Leafs in exchange for Dion Phaneuf, Matt Frattin, Casey Bailey and Ryan Rupert.
From the moment that Phaneuf arrived, he was lauded for stabilizing the top-four and insulating Cody Ceci on the second pairing.
Here is a look at how Ceci fared at five-on-five before and after the trade (note: the following numbers are courtesy of War On Ice):
G/60
Pts/60
CF%
PDO
PSh%
Oct-Feb 9th
0.2
0.9
42.1
101.6
5.0
Feb 10th onward
0.6
1.0
48.0
103.7
12.2
And here’s a look at Phaneuf’s numbers following the trade:
G/60
Pts/60
CF%
PDO
PSh%
Feb 10th onward
0.2
0.7
49.5
100.4
4.3
Ceci’s numbers unquestionably improved across the board and from an eye-test perspective, Ceci was noticeably more assertive with the puck and jumped into the play more aggressively than he has at any other point in his career, but it’s impossible to not to look at his personal shooting percentage and believe that Ceci benefitted from some pretty good fortune.
Delving a little bit deeper thanks to the Puckalytics.com’s ‘Super WOWY’ tool, this pairing shared the ice together for 217:38 of ice time generating 48.5-percent of the shot attempts. The duo was on for 61.5-percent of the total goals, but you don’t have to look further than Ceci’s individual shooting percentage or the fact that Ottawa’s goaltenders stopped 96.18-percent of the shots when they were on the ice to realize that luck factored heavily into this pairing’s success.
The fear is that like last season, the Senators are banking on the idea that the top-four has been resolved because the organization is so infatuated with Phaneuf’s character and leadership skills, and so while focused on immediate results, that they will fail to recognize the importance of the process. The Senators should be way of ignoring the ominous underlying numbers as they move forward.
The failure or ignorance of the process is essentially what paved the way for the Phaneuf deal in the first place. Ill-advised contract extensions to Colin Greening, Milan Michalek and Jared Cowen, coupled with ownership’s refusal to buy out the remaining years on their contracts, painted the organization into a corner. The only mechanism management felt it had available to it was, as one Twitter follower put it, debt consolidation: trading short-term hindrances for one long-term problem that could hopefully make the Senators more competitive in the interim.
How the deal will play out remains to be seen, but when taking it (five-years and $33-million outstanding with an average annual value of $7.0-million) into consideration with the Bobby Ryan contract that has six-years and $44.25 million remaining on it, the Senators have committed a large sum of money to two players who are already in decline.
That’s not to say that either player isn’t talented or that they don’t have utility, they do. It’s just that for a financially strapped team like the Senators that will need to re-sign its best young and cost-affordable talent when their entry-level or second contracts expire, Ryan and Phaneuf are quite literally luxuries that the Senators cannot afford.
According to GeneralFanager.com, the Senators’ projected end of season cap total was approximately $65-million. Since the season ended, there have been rumblings that their budget to spend on players may drop next season, meaning that the Senators, who are already allocating about 22-percent of their cap towards just Phaneuf, will only see that percentage climb if that those rumours prove to be true.
Dorion will have to operate having these two albatross contracts looming over him.
The longer they remain on the books, the greater the risk of diminished returns will be and with it, the harder they will be to shed. There will come a point, and in my opinion, that time should be now, for the team to exhaust every opportunity to shed these contracts, but considering how the Senators are in that compete now phase, it feels safe to assume that this won’t happen.
It’s not the idea of competing now and shedding these players has to be mutually exclusive, since neither player is a significant driver of this team’s success, but if Dorion moves forward with both, he’s going to have to get creative so that we stop hearing fans or the media voice concern with the Senators wasting the prime years of Erik Karlsson’s career.
In fairness, every year 28 other fan bases can make the same claim about their favourite star players’ primes being pissed away. Barring injury or him bolting the team as an unrestricted free agent, Karlsson should age gracefully because his skating, vision and puck-moving skills are at an elite level. Any erosion in these skills will still leave him as an elite player.
And as much emphasis there is on Karlsson’s prime, similar concerns should be echoed for wasting the cost-effective contract years of players like Mark Stone, Kyle Turris, Mika Zibanejad or even Jean-Gabriel Pageau for example.
It was never going to be easy to begin with, but doing it within this window of opportunity while operating under strict financial constraints and with Melnyk watching over his shoulder will make it that much more difficult.
The hope is that Bryan Murray can serve as a buffer between the eccentric owner and Dorion, but even a recent radio interview indicated, Melnyk still has the ability to undermine his general manager’s credibility.
When asked to corroborate Dorion’s comments about ownership giving him the resources necessary to bring in the best head coach, Melnyk backed off that position.
“Does he walk on water? I mean, $5-million… I know… look, sometimes the markets get silly. I’ve seen it in horses, I’ve seen it in hockey players and things change all of a sudden, somehow and some way. You’re only good… I know this history with these coaches and general managers and proven track records to a certain point, but take a look at who’s been winning Stanley Cups for the past 10 and 15 years. You don’t really see dynasties like you used to. You don’t see the dominance of the management over the players. Frankly, you don’t ever see really one or two maybe players dominate the team and make it all the way. It’s really a team effort and I think it’s a team effort on the coaching and the GM side and the hockey ops. To put that kind of money out for one single person, that’s tough, even from a management point of view. You wouldn’t do that with an executive, why go crazy in the business of hockey to do that? And I don’t think it can make that much of a difference. I really don’t. If I thought it did, what do you do? Do you trade out a $5-million player? You want to do that? I tell you, the $5-million player isn’t one without a good coach, I get that. But, you don’t want to go crazy either and blow your ability to spend later.”
Every time Melnyk speaks, it’s like air is let out of the balloon.
And that’s why when it comes to being a Senators fan, it’s never easy.
The complexities of going from the highs to the lows in such short periods of time is numbing. Just when the disappointment of a poor season is met with by the appointment of a new general manager and head coach, and the announcement that the Senators’ RendezVous LeBreton bid was selected as the preferred proposal for the redevelopment of LeBreton Flats by the NCC, it’s incredibly difficult to shake the nagging skepticism that the Senators can improve the process while Eugene Melnyk continues to own the team.
As much as I want to believe that fresh faces and new voices within the hockey operations department can play a pivotal role in facilitating change, I can’t help but wonder whether these individuals will get the support and resources that are needed from ownership.
We’ll have to wait and see, but when the organization repeatedly goes out of its way to relay the message that the team will spend money at some undetermined point in the future when the team is more competitive, it’s becomes increasingly difficult to take what it says at face value.
Broken promises and unfulfilled potential have marred the Melnyk era, but what has made the process even more frustrating is knowing that team can do more. Up to this point, it has just elected not to – believing that experience and traditional scouting alone were enough to make them successful.
In an era where the importance of stretching every dollar available to it is critical to this team’s success, the Senators need more bang for their buck. Their margin for error is that much smaller than that afforded to rival clubs who have an easier time papering over their mistakes, so there should be an added emphasis on doing everything within its power to mitigate mistakes and identify trends that can be beneficial for knowing when to buy low and sell high. The less money spent on superfluous players or those who offer diminishing returns, the more money that will be available to augment the roster with better players.
I want to believe in Pierre Dorion and whomever is named as the next head coach. I want to believe that they can look at the assembled talent pool and exploring what structural or strategic modifications can be made to maximize the results and bring out the best in the team. But more than anything, I want to believe that this hockey operations department can recognize and learn from the errors of their past.
What I don’t want to do is look longingly into the future and invest into this idea that a downtown rink on LeBreton Flats will be the difference maker that Senators need to win a Stanley Cup.
“Yeah well, everyone keeps pointing at me and I keep trying to remind everyone, no, we spent almost to the cap. If there was no currency crisis, we would have been at the cap or just close to it. You know, it’s not so much that, the financials are important because they fund the team. But, the team is even more than just the players’ salaries. You have got executives and you’ve trainers, coaches, GMs and scouting staffs. Think of what we could do with the extra money. I would spend it on scouting – professional, amateur, junior – your drafts are important long-term. You’ve got to get people in there. Compare our departments, our hockey departments, to others and we really do it in a shoestring because we have to. But, this will bring in a whole new era for us. We expect attendance to go up substantially. There will be a lot more revenues being downtown. We need some assistance to roll back some of the legislative things that have been put in place that kind of restricts us from our efforts in sales of tickets. I think overall, it’ll be a big, big plus for the whole city and that will lead to a Stanley Cup certainly, I think, in the next few years after we open up (at the new arena), definitely.” ~ Eugene Melnyk on TSN 1200 explaining the impact that a new arena will have on revenues.
The Senators need more than the extra revenues that a new building will provide. Hope shouldn’t be tied to this entity that could be five to 15 years away. Fans shouldn’t have to wait that long for the Senators to start fixing their process today.