With the arrival of the offseason, it has become an annual tradition to reflect on how critically important it will be for the Ottawa Senators.
After years of stripping away the valued pieces from the roster that reached the 2017 Eastern Conference Final, expectations have slowly begun to rise. As the Senators progressed through this 2020-21 season, it felt like a weight was lifted off this team. Most of the deadweight veterans that congested the roster and boxed out the young talent were shed and with each competitive game, the whispers of the Senators being a darkhorse playoff team next season grew louder.
Increased expectations are something that general manager Pierre Dorion will have to deal with. This accompanying pressure to deliver results will grow proportionately with the swelling expectations of the fans and an unapologetically micromanaging owner. As we enter this 2021 offseason, it is not hyperbole to describe it as one of the most critical ones in recent Senators history.
Last summer was an important one for entirely different reasons. The organization publicly promised to be better, but even the most optimistic fans recognized that the Senators were destined for a losing record. Instead, its importance stemmed from it being the first opportunity to reveal any insight into how much, if any, the organization’s process had evolved.
Stepping back for a second, this front office has had very little changeover over the past few years. Randy Lee resigned in 2018 and a publicized search for a president of hockey operations never manifested into anything beyond a press release. There have been some promotions. Tim Pattyson has quietly risen through the ranks. Starting as a video and data analyst, Pattyson rose to the director of hockey operations position before earning the shiny new title of manager of hockey operations. Aside from some minor scouting turnover, there just has not been much growth or turnover.
The evolution of the Senators’ front office pales in comparison to an organization like the Los Angeles Kings, who recently announced the hiring of Ryan Kruse, Jake Goldberg, Vukie Mpofu and Rosie Yu to its hockey operations department. According to the press release, Kruse spent the past seven years with the Chicago Cubs. He most recently “served as Director of Baseball Systems Development where he led a team of software engineers and delivered several custom products built for the enhancement of baseball operations.” Like Kruse, none of the hires are conventional in the hockey realm, but they are part of an emerging trend to hire the brightest minds. To help put things into perspective, Yu’s resume features a Ph.D. in Materials Engineering from MIT and a Master of Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
There simply aren’t these kinds of announcements being made in Ottawa. Even the positive revelation from a Troy Mann interview that the Senators are paying for Sportlogiq’s large dataset is offset by the acknowledgment that the team was one of the last in the league to do so.
Better late than never? Absolutely.
Is it fair to wonder how far behind the curve they are or wonder how a small front office will cull this and their own proprietary data to develop strategies that will help this team on and off the ice? Again, absolutely.
With so few additions, adaptation and self-improvement are paramount. Every organization needs to mitigate mistakes to the best of their ability, but with the Senators, they have one of the smallest margins for error simply because they employ one of the smallest front offices and scouting staffs in the league. They do not have the budget to employ the legions of analysts and scouts that an organization like the Toronto Maple Leafs has. In consequence, it puts more pressure on the organization to stretch its limited dollars as far it can.
When the Senators have made mistakes in recent years have been born out of impulsiveness or the need to save money. Easily identifiable and avoidable risks were overlooked or simply ignored.
So, when the people pulling the strings have not changed, it becomes paramount to demonstrate that the organization can evolve. Can the front office learn from its mistakes and adapt? Have new measures been implemented? Or, has it reformed the mechanisms already in place to avoid pitfalls that could undermine what good has been done?
When we entered the 2020 offseason, I was hoping to get answers to these questions. Unfortunately, I don’t believe I ever found them.
For all of Dorion’s efforts and spending last offseason, he earned praise in some hockey circles.
In others, the Senators’ moves were maligned.
“The Senators added more salary than any other team and … they’re not exactly better for it. That may seem strange but it comes as a result of the players they targeted likely not being as good as advertised.” ~ Dom Luszczyszyn, The Athletic
The dichotomy of opinion was predictably split. Conventional thinkers looked at where the Senators finished last season and how many bodies they added through their spending before concluding that the team simply had to be better than they were previously.
Analytically inclined pundits like Luszczyszyn believed that the Senators did not allocate their resources well enough.
The Senators took on more than $56 million and 15 years of combined term for eight players through trades and free agency.
Without getting into the nuances of each acquisition, veteran character players were targeted.
The problem is that the majority of last summer’s moves bombed. At least in the cases of players like Erik Gudbranson, Braydon Coburn, Cedric Paquette and Alex Galchenyuk, these players were on short-term deals and the Senators were able to recoup some assets during the season for them. Unfortunately, the most expensive of the deals belonging to Evgenii Dadonov (three years, $15 million) and Matt Murray (four years, $25 million) will be on the books for a little while longer.
It is easy to gloss over these additions. Rather than rely exclusively on the team’s youngest and most unproven players, Dorion found placeholders who could fuel the perception that the team was actively trying to improve without ever really pushing the team away from the likelihood of landing another desirable high draft pick. In his end-of-the-season media availability, Dorion never reflected on their poor on-ice contributions. Instead, he preferred to reflect on the intangibles and leadership these veterans provided while they were here believing that it assisted the development of the team’s youth.
The problem with these placeholders is that we don’t really know how much the organization believed these players would help the team on the ice. For certain, based on the capital and opportunity cost, players like Derek Stepan, Matt Murray and Evgenii Dadonov were supposed to help this team’s competitiveness. There is just no sugarcoating the fact that the Senators spent considerable draft capital and/or cap space acquiring sub-replacement level performance last summer.
Not all of Dorion’s moves turned out badly, however.
Signing Artyom Zub as an undrafted free agent out of the KHL is one of Dorion's greatest moves since inheriting the general manager’s title in 2016. It did not take long for Zub to prove he was the Senators’ best defensive defenceman. According to Evolving-Hockey.com’s ‘Total Defence’ metric (DEF) that uses an aggregate of ‘Even-Strength Defense Goals Above Average/Replacement’ and ‘Shorthanded Defense Goals Above Average/Replacement’, Artyom Zub has the league’s 10th-highest rate (5.4). Zub’s emergence as an impactful and highly competent defender has been one of the Senators’ most unanticipated stories this season.
There is a duality to Zub’s success. As important as his contributions are on the ice, Zub’s success is crucial because he came from an area where the Senators don’t typically pull players from.
Zub’s success could have a ripple effect across many layers.
If the Senators draft a European, often it’s someone who has already played in North America. The reason being that the North American junior leagues provide more viewing opportunities and more familiarity with the player. (As an aside, this may give the Senators more comfort, but it certainly doesn’t create an advantage over their competition.)
The Senators may look at Zub’s performance as proof that they can find hidden gems playing overseas. Whether that influences their outlook on the amateur draft or in free agency, Zub’s development could encourage the team to invest more money in European amateur and professional scouting to help unearth more hidden gems. With better scouting coverage, the organization could be less inclined to draft players who they have simply seen more of. Rather than bet on safely projectable floors, the organization may start to roll the dice on higher upside plays — especially now that the team’s prospect depth is one of the organization’s strengths.
Sticking with the positives, one of the most important developments continued off the ice. The organization actually shied away from the limelight. Aside from a bizarro world editorial in The Hockey News that described Eugene Melnyk as some misunderstood hockey genius, the organization has done a much better job staying out of the bad news cycle. Every effort to keep general manager Pierre Dorion and the polarizing owner away from microphones and the public realm was important. With fewer opportunities to say the wrong thing or insult the fan base’s intelligence, the only things fans could evaluate and analyze were the player personnel decisions or the action on the ice. For the first time in a long time, things felt normal. It allowed stories like the growth and development of this team’s young players to deservedly come to the forefront.
Everyone should absolutely be thrilled with the presence and growth of players like Tim Stützle, Thomas Chabot, Brady Tkachuk, Drake Batherson, Josh Norris and Shane Pinto. This is an excellent collection of great, young players who will one day be complemented by prospects like Jake Sanderson and Jacob Bernard-Docker. Throw in the possibility of another top-10 pick this summer and it is easy to dream on the quality and depth of young talent that this organization boasts. Better days lie ahead and inevitably, the Senators will improve.
An unintended consequence of this youth-driven improvement is that it can mask whatever shortcomings may continue to exist. Or worse, the success can create false confidence that impacts future resource allocation and decision-making. If the Senators have not improved their scouting or taken greater steps integrating their use of analytic data to help the team make the most informed decisions possible, the risk of future missteps is very real.
Having Sportslogic data readily available to it is an encouraging step forward, but there will be a lot of pressure on this organization as it transitions from a rebuilding phase into putting a more competitive team on the ice.
Heading into the summer months, the easiest path for the Senators to pursue would be to invest in the youth and patiently keep adding prospects to the mix. With the 10th overall selection in the 2021 NHL Draft and two second-round picks to go with it, the Senators have the luxury of being able to add a few high picks to their stable of young prospects.
Having been burned by many of their decisions last summer, no one could really blame the Senators for preferring a conservative approach that continues to stockpile young assets.
As competitive as the Senators were down the stretch, one has to wonder how management will look critically at the North Division and wonder how this team would match up once the league realigns to its traditional divisions next season. The quality of teams within the Atlantic Division will represent a significant uptick from what the Senators experienced in 2020-21.
Taking another year to assess this organization’s young and inexpensive talent would be the easiest path. Not only would it keep expectations lower, but by avoiding some win-now moves, it keeps management protected from more scrutiny.
I just don’t know if that is going to happen.
Pierre Dorion played it coy in his exit interviews with the media when he was asked about the direction of the franchise and what kind of additions he could make. Eugene Melnyk let the cat out of the bag a short while later in an interview with Bob McCown.
“We are going to search and destroy trying to find two key pieces (a first-line centre and a defensive defenceman) to our team that we need to fill,” Melnyk told the longtime Toronto broadcasting fixture."
These would represent two significant additions to the lineup. The cost to acquire such assets through free agency or the trade market would be sizable. Fans have grown accustomed to hearing Melnyk speak in hyperbole.
The Senators could be looking at adding a nominal first-line centre and a top-four defensive defenseman for all we know. What I mean by that is that these additions could fit in the same vein as Nikita Zaitsev playing top-pairing minutes or adding Derek Stepan to be a top-six forward. Both of them were given opportunities to fill those roles, but they would play a lesser role on a better NHL team.
Already this offseason we have seen several names kicked around the rumour mill.
Buffalo’s Jack Eichel headlines the list of “available” centres. The second overall pick from the 2015 NHL Draft is in his prime and is under contract through the next five seasons. If a team is looking for a dynamic offensive talent who can most certainly headline a roster. The only knocks against Eichel are his reputation and a recent neck injury. In consideration of how poorly the Buffalo Sabres have been run, should anyone blame Eichel for being frustrated with the organization? Between the team’s performance and their disagreement with Eichel on how his neck injury should be treated, it is easy to feel sympathy for the player here. The prohibitive cost and the unlikelihood of Buffalo moving Eichel to a division rival means the Senators will probably have to look elsewhere.
Beyond Eichel, players with Ottawa ties like Sean Monahan and Claude Giroux have been spitballed as possibilities. Philadelphia probably will not move its captain, but Monahan is a player the Senators would do well to avoid. At 26 years of age, he is under team control for the next two years. Although he has had significant offensive impact in three seasons, Monahan has historically been a poor defender.
Over the last two years, Monahan’s offensive contributions and impact have diminished greatly. Such a decline is suspect for a player of his age, but if injuries are hampering his offensive game to this degree, whatever organization wants to acquire him has to make damn sure that he has a clean bill of health moving forward. As he slowly exits his prime years (22 to 27), his best offensive years may already be behind him. In knowing that, the Senators should be looking to avoid overpaying for past production on a player who already struggles away from the puck and has a negative impact defensively.
With one year left on his deal, an impending unrestricted free agent in Nazem Kadri offers an intriguing two-way skillset. After a strong World Championships representing Canada, Adam Henrique is garnering attention for his performance. With three years left on a deal that carries an average annual salary of $5.825 million, it is easy to understand why Henrique passed through waivers last season unclaimed.
In one of Bruce Garrioch’s most recent pieces, he mentioned Dylan Strome, Sam Reinhart, Phillip Danault and Ryan Nugent-Hopkins as prospective options. Of those names, Reinhart is the most desirable player. He can play on the first or second line and has the best blend of offensive and defensive aptitude. Like Eichel however, will Buffalo be comfortable trading him within the division? Nugent-Hopkins and Danault will both be unrestricted free agents this summer, but of the two, Danault makes more sense. He is a strong defender whose offensive game has floundered. The term and dollars on his next deal should not be too prohibitive and he would afford the Senators some strong defensive depth at the bottom of the lineup. Dylan Strome will never be mistaken for a strong defensive player, but his underlying numbers and possession metrics have always tended to be decent. At just 24 years old, he is at an age that would fit in well with Ottawa’s young core and he has shown he can put up some points with the right linemates.
On defence, provided that the Senators can avoid acquiring Rasmus Ristolainen this summer, that will be a win in itself. Like the centre position, there is no shortage of options this summer and with a flat cap and the expansion draft around the corner, there should be every opportunity for the Senators to explore finding good players that teams no longer have a fit for.
The trick for the Senators will be to demonstrate that they have learned from their mistakes. There should no longer be an emphasis on adding short-term veteran placeholders. There should not be any willingness to overpay for past production or name players whose best years are already behind them. Ignore the veterans who can only help this team for a year or two, target players who can help move the needle three, four or five years out when this team should really be in its competitive window. And at the same time, do not spend significant opportunity costs acquiring players who will only fill depth roles or be passed quickly by this team’s young prospects. Draft pick and prospect capital is something that the small-market Senators should guard closely. If picks and prospects need to be moved, use it to acquire a preeminent talent if it’s available.
And if it’s not available, don’t waste it acquiring the Sean Monahans of the world who will not significantly alter this team’s trajectory or make this team better in the medium to long term. Exhibiting some patience and watching this team play a normal regular season to assess the team’s strengths and weaknesses may not be the sexiest and most exciting direction, but giving their young players another year to evaluate their professional growth before making any significant roster decisions may be the smartest thing for the organization to do.
The last thing the Senators want to do is undercut all of the good work that they have done on the amateur side. There is going to be a lot of pressure on Pierre Dorion and his staff need to prove that they can mitigate mistakes and properly insulate their young talent. And now that the rebuilding phase is drawing to a close, the focus on Ottawa’s personnel decisions will only be more heavily scrutinized.
There are no excuses anymore. If there are any mistakes, it will be because of the process and the people at the top pulling the strings.
That is the pressure facing the general manager.
Good luck, Pierre. Everyone’s watching.
I am in favour of more tracking data and getting a variety of opinions on hockey decisions. I think there has been a bit too much romanticism when it comes to statistical models. Advanced stats are getting better all the time, but being behind the curve may not necessarily be a bad thing. The strength of the Leafs right now comes down to several seasons of tanking and picking at the top of the draft not their advanced stats wizardry.
I agree that staying the course is the best route ahead for the Senators. The Sens are good at drafting and developing and relatively weak at making trades. They should focus on their strengths and let their assets appreciate for another year before thinking about making any big moves in the trade market.
Lastly, I could tolerate a UFA signing to add experience, as long as it is someone who will actually be productive and who is not signed to crazy term.
Great post. Thanks!
Now watch them trade for Matthew Tkachuk.