As you get older, time goes by faster.
It is a common refrain that I’m sure many of you have heard before. I can vividly remember being at the Corel Centre on April 12, 1997. My siblings and I were sitting about halfway up the 300 level behind the visitor’s goal. With a bird’s eye view of the entire ice, it created the perfect vantage point to watch Alexei Yashin beat Garry Galley to a loose puck with four minutes left in the third before curling at the top of the circle and threading a perfect cross-ice pass to Steve Duchesne. The defenceman joined the rush, caught and released a perfect shot that beat Dominik Hasek to his blocker side. As the waning seconds ticked down and the realization kicked in that the Senators would be heading to the postseason for the first time in modern history.
Having missed the playoffs in each of their first four seasons, it was agonizing. It felt like a lifetime. Watching Wade Redden leap into the arms of a jumping Ron Tugnutt and then the rest of his teammates mob the goaltender, the players understood it what it meant in that moment too. It was pure cathartic bliss. A weight had been lifted off this city’s shoulders. The Ottawa Senators were going to the postseason.
Four years!
Four painfully long years of drafting and development were highlighted by contract holdouts, a highly regarded prospect wearing a nurse’s outfit and crappy hockey. A lot of crappy hockey.
Four years felt like forever.
Fast forward to the present day where Senators have failed to qualify for the playoffs for a sixth straight season.
Six seasons. The same number of campaigns that Hall of Famer Marian Hossa donned a Senators jersey for. Six. Freaking. Seasons.
Amazingly, there is nowhere near the same level of frustration being voiced for this lull.
What works in the organization’s favour is that many of these years were overseen by the late Eugene Melnyk. He was a destructive force. His mercurial and self-sabotaging tendencies are widely believed to have been detrimental to the business operations of the organization and its hockey operations department. Having a young and exciting core that has been cultivated through years of drafting near the top of the first round has provided hope. Their presence has certainly made it easier for fans to believe that with competent new ownership around the corner, it is only a matter of time before this team reaches the postseason again.
At least that is the vision that general manager Pierre Dorion is assuredly selling to prospective ownership groups as they meet with the Senators’ current brain trust.
Would any incoming ownership group prefer to keep Dorion though?
That’s the golden question.
As Ian Mendes has often reiterated, no general manager in the history of the salary cap era has survived six consecutive seasons in which their team missed the postseason.
It is unprecedented.
Context is important though and assuredly, one of the things that Dorion reminded every prospective ownership group he pitched his vision to is that the Senators intended to be bad for many of these years.
“Mr. Dorion, how do you explain these years of mediocrity and why should we have any faith in your ability moving forward?”
*Checks iPad notes*
“We’re a front office.”
The real answer is that it was intentional. Maybe. Sort of. It depends on whether you believe the Senators a conscious decision to tear everything down four months after throwing Kyle Turris and a huge opportunity cost to the Colorado Avalanche for Matt Duchene and like eight months after the team pushed the Pittsburgh Penguins to the brink in the Eastern Conference final. Given everything that has happened since, it is kind of hard to fault anyone for cynically believing that the rebuild wasn’t a strategic hockey decision but a directive from the owner to cut costs.
Whatever the case, fans were asked to endure years of losing by design for the greater good.
Since the start of the 2017-18 season, only two teams have accumulated fewer regular season points than the Senators’ 403. The Detroit Red Wings (388) and a Seattle Kraken (160) expansion franchise that just finished its second regular season in the league.
If the intent was to be bad, few teams were worse.
Mission accomplished.
So, how does one go about analyzing the performance of a general manager who can downplay the losses while stressing the complications of working under one of the worst owners in North American professional sports?
The only way to do it is to evaluate his track record by evaluating his draft record, trades and contract signings.
So, without further ado…
Draft Record
The Ottawa Senators have developed a reputation for being amateur draft savants.
A lot of that notoriety hinges on the performance and development of its young core. Talents like Brady Tkachuk, Tim Stützle, Drake Batherson, Jake Sanderson and Shane Pinto have helped form a nice base for the Senators to build around.
Through Dorion’s seven years as the general manager, the Senators have made 48 draft selections with 20 of those selections occurring in the first or second round. Excluding the 15 draft selections from the 2021 and 2022 draft classes because the majority of the players are still removed from playing professionally in North America, the Senators have made 33 from the preceding years. Of those players, 22 have appeared in an NHL game. Having two-thirds of those selections play NHL games seems like an absurdly high number.
In fact, it is. I crunched the numbers and since the 2016 draft, only the Columbus Blue Jackets (21 of 42 draft selections) have produced a higher percentage of draft picks who have played NHL games than the Senators.
If the barometer of success was simply playing NHL games, the Senators would come out looking strong. The ability to draft and develop young talent that can eventually step in and log minutes at the game’s highest level is important because it allows organizations to avoid having to look for external solutions that often wind up being more expensive. The idea is that by allocating roster spots to younger players, who hopefully can outproduce or outperform their contract, the team will have more money to acquire more talented players who can play higher up the lineup.
The problem with using games played as an indicator of success however is that it does not describe the quality of play in those games. If a drafted player turns out to be sub-replacement depth fodder that is easily replaceable, should it matter that he was drafted by the organization playing him?
Interestingly, the three teams who lead the NHL in this metric are the Blue Jackets, Senators and Flyers. Although the Senators have produced some good players through the draft, sharing company with the Blue Jackets and Flyers is not truly inspiring since neither franchise is regarded highly for their farm systems.
Case in point, take Ottawa’s 2011 draft in which eight of the team’s 10 selections wound up playing NHL games. The draft is widely regarded as one of the organization’s strongest, but is it one of its best because Matt Puempel, Shane Prince, Freddy Claesson, and Max McCormick played NHL games? Absolutely not. It’s an excellent draft because the team grabbed Mika Zibanejad with a top-10 pick and then found excellent talent in Jean-Gabriel Pageau (4th round, 96th overall) and Ryan Dzingel (7th round, 204th overall) late in the draft. Similarly, four of the team’s seven picks from the 2013 draft played NHL games, but is that a successful draft? Should scouts be patting themselves on the back because Curtis Lazar, Marcus Hogberg, Tobias Lindberg and Ben Harpur all played NHL games?
Quality matters.
Instead of placing emphasis on games played, a more suitable criterion places greater stock on how impactful these games played were.
So, how impactful have the picks been during the Dorion era?
Brady Tkachuk and Tim Stützle are already two of the most important draft picks in franchise history. Tkachuk is a unicorn who blends shot generation and physicality while providing all of the on and off-ice intangibles that you want in your captain. He is the kind of player you just wish the Senators had 20 years ago. Tim Stützle led the team in scoring for the first time in his career and became one of just three Senators centres to register 90 or more points in a season. Alexei Yashin and Jason Spezza were the others, but they accomplished the feat when they were older. It is a different era of hockey, but for Stützle to put up that many points in his age-21 season is impressive — especially when he’s already a much better two-way player than either of Spezza or Yashin.
Stützle just might be the most unassuming star player I’ve ever seen don a Senators jersey. Perhaps it is his German upbringing, but Jimmy Stü always carries himself with a smile and a happy-to-be-here vibe that is hard to fake.
Despite not being the top overall pick, both players are the highest point producers from their respective draft years.
Only seven of Ottawa’s draft picks during the Dorion era have played more than a full season of NHL games (82-plus games): Logan Brown; Alex Formenton; Drake Batherson; Shane Pinto; and the aforementioned Tkachuk and Stützle. Jake Sanderson (77 games played) and Mark Kastelic (81 games) will expand that list to nine next season.
Where the draft history under Dorion gets interesting is that only six of his selections have produced more than 30-plus career points: Alex Formenton; Drake Batherson; Brady Tkachuk; Shane Pinto; Tim Stützle; and Jake Sanderson.
Three of those six players were top-five selections. When you select in that range, there is an accompanying expectation that you will draft a very productive player. I have already highlighted why Brady and Timmy are arguably the most impactful players to be selected in their respective draft years. In Jake Sanderson’s case, there is a chance he may ultimately wind up being exponentially more valuable than those selected ahead of him.
To the credit of the Senators and Dorion’s staff, they have hit home runs with their top-five picks.
At the same time, there is another dynamic at play. In Stützle’s draft year, the Senators were in the driver’s seat. As Dorion acknowledged ahead of that draft, there were three consensus players at the top of the draft — Stützle, Alexis Lafreniere and Quinton Byfield — and the Senators were always going to select whichever one was available to them. It just happened to be Stützle.
The Senators avoided disaster by opting for Tkachuk over Filip Zadina, but if Montreal doesn’t place an emphasis on the centre position in 2018, maybe they wouldn’t have drafted Jesper Kotkaniemi ahead of Tkachuk.
This lady knew.
Jake Sanderson is the one I believe the Senators deserve credit for the most since he was far from a consensus pick with the fifth pick in 2020. At the time, there were even questions about whether he was the best defenceman available. In their final North American draft rankings, Central Scouting had Anaheim’s Jamie Drysdale rated ahead of Sanderson.
In landing Sanderson, the Senators have bolstered their top two pairings. His skating ability, gap control and ability to break the puck out of his own end were on full display all season. And, any concerns about his ability to contribute offence were erased as the season went on. Sanderson tallied four goals and 32 points while spending the bulk of his season alongside Travis Hamonic. Perhaps the most flattering recognition of Sanderson’s talent is the support Hamonic is getting to bring him back on a short-term deal as a depth defenceman.
Moving past Ottawa’s top-five picks is where things start to get muddied.
In the seven drafts under Dorion, the Senators have had nine first-round draft selections (including four top-10 picks) and 11 second-rounders.
Here is the breakdown of those picks:
Having 20 of a team’s 48 picks over a seven-year period is an incredibly high volume of valued picks. Over this span of time, the Senators took a ton of flak from prospect analysts who belaboured the point while adding value through their sheer volume of picks, the Senators did leave a ton of draft value on the board by not taking more well-regarded prospects who were available at the time.
Outside of the players drafted in the top five, the only prospects who have really established themselves from this group are Alex Formenton and Shane Pinto. It is no fault of the organization, but the former missed all of last season while waiting for the results of the league’s investigation into the Hockey Canada sex scandal marring the 2018 WJC team. The latter was forced into a difficult spot last season thanks to Josh Norris’ shoulder injury. Despite the customary struggles that most freshmen experience, Pinto finished with a 20-goal campaign— becoming just one of eight rookies to reach that threshold in a season while playing for the Senators.
Using Evolving-Hockey’s ‘Goals Above Replacement’ (GAR) and ‘Wins Above Replacement’ (WAR) values that measure a player’s value in terms of how many goals or wins they are worth above the contributions of the median NHL player, we can measure how much cumulative GAR and WAR the Senators’ draft selections have been worth during the Dorion era.
The Senators’ draft selections have combined to produce 86.2 GAR and 14.9 WAR respectively. In terms of total value added since the 2016 NHL Draft, the Senators rank 14th in terms of GAR and WAR.
Thanks to Auston Matthews’ production, the Maple Leafs lead the league in cumulative value (GAR, WAR) for top-five picks since the 2016 NHL Draft. They are followed by the Devils, Canucks, Avalanche, Blue Jackets and Senators. Tkachuk, Stützle and Sanderson have combined to produce 64.4 GAR and 11.3 WAR for Ottawa — which accounts for what is essentially three-quarters of the team’s value. Only Columbus, Seattle and Colorado have produced a greater percentage of their total draft value with their top-five picks than Ottawa and in Kraken’s case, their drafts have relied exclusively on the performance of Shane Wright and Matt Beniers.
Aside from the big three, Pinto and Batherson have produced positive value and despite their small sample size of games, Greig, Kastelic, Kleven and Bernard-Docker have produced some positive value early. Mandolese is the only goaltender to produce some positive value to this point, but like the rest of the goaltenders, it is a really limited sample size of games, so that value is volatile and does not carry much weight.
The numbers reemphasize the point that beyond the team’s top-five picks, their draft record becomes muddied.
When looking at draft value outside an organization’s top-five picks since the 2016 NHL Draft, the Senators have added 21.8 GAR and 3.6 WAR worth of value which ranks in the bottom third of the league during this span. In fact, if you look at the percentage of the team’s draft value, only three teams have accumulated a lower percentage of GAR or WAR outside of the team’s top-five picks than the Senators. The Avalanche’s draft value is propped by the selection of Cale Makar and Bowen Byram. I mentioned Seattle earlier with Wright and Beniers and they fit here too. The only other team is the Blue Jackets whose draft value is buoyed by Pierre Luc Dubois and Kent Johnson.
Looking at a few metrics like GAR or WAR per draft pick or GAR or WAR per draft pick who has played, the Senators still come out looking fairly pedestrian. The team ranks 19th in terms of the average GAR or WAR value of a draft pick who has played (4.31 GAR, 0.36 WAR), but comes out looking a little better if we simply look at the average GAR or WAR per pick. Dividing the team’s total GAR or WAR by the number of selections, the Senators come out 13th in terms of total value per pick. Just to put those numbers into perspective, the Senators essentially have mirrored value numbers when they are drafting outside the top five to the Maple Leafs. So, if you think the Maple Leafs haven’t drafted particularly well outside of their high selections, well, chew on the fact that both teams have compiled just under 25-percent (TOR: 24.92 GAR, OTT: 24.16) of their total draft GAR/WAR outside of their high picks.
Considering the volume of high draft picks, it would have been easy to assume the Senators would have come out looking better than they have.
Logan Brown was a bust and Jonathan Dahlen, represented a relatively valuable opportunity cost at the time he was dealt for Alex Burrows, who was well past his expiration date. Shane Bowers has played one career game. Jonny Tychonick became an unrestricted free agent after not being tendered an entry-level deal by the Senators. He signed a two-year AHL contract with the Toronto Marlies this past March. Ben Roger signed an amateur tryout with the Belleville Senators once his OHL season ended, but there is no guarantee that the Senators will offer him an entry-level contract.
Ridly Greig stands out as the player with the most safely projectable upside and he should be a regular next season while playing a depth role. There is still hope that players like Tyler Boucher, Zack Ostapchuk, Lassi Thomson, Jacob Bernard-Docker, Tyler Kleven, Mads Sogaard and Egor Sokolov can fulfill some of their upsides, but none of these players are safely projected to play major roles for the organization down the road.
The best value that the Senators have found in the mid-rounds is Drake Batherson with their fourth-round pick, 121st overall, in 2017. In 227 career games, the right winger has scored 62 goals and 159 points while logging minutes playing on Ottawa’s top two lines.
During the Dorion era, one of the hallmarks is that scouting has been focused primarily on North American talent or European talent that is easily accessible. For a smaller scouting staff, that makes sense. It is far easier and cheaper to watch players in North America than scour the European markets for talent.
The Senators have not drafted an eastern European-born player out of their respective homeland league since 2006 when Kaspars Daugavins was drafted out of Riga, Latvia. For Russian-born players, it was Dmitry Megalinsky in 2005. For the Czechs, it was Tomas Kudelka from that same 2005 draft class. And, it is not like the Senators are avoiding European players, their preference is just to select ones they have an easier time gathering intel and multiple viewings on. It explains why the team has selected so many who played in Sweden, Finland or those who are already playing in North America.
The problem therein is that there is no competitive advantage created by adhering to this philosophy. If anything, it just underlines the gap between the haves and the have-nots. Without more scouts and video/data analysis to vet the qualitative information being provided, it certainly feels like the Senators have fallen behind some of the modern trends.
It could help to explain why it often appears that the Senators are comfortable taking high-floor/low-ceiling players who have a chance to play NHL games.
Ottawa’s reputation for being amateur savants is overemphasized, but it is understandable given the circumstances. For years this fan base was stuck cheering for an organization run into the ground by a loathsome owner who put kowtowing employees in decision-making roles. The only people this fan base could invest hope into were the players.
Fortunately, the Senators hit early on some very important pieces that should shape a nice future for the organization, but in saying that, Ottawa’s reputation hinges largely on the success and development of their lottery picks. These obvious home runs have helped overshadow a fair number of whiffs — including helping fuel the decision to take Tyler Boucher 10th overall in 2021. At the time, the organization expressed concerns about having too many skilled players who would eventually take up a significant chunk of the salary cap.
For a franchise that has had as many high picks as the Senators have had, even with the graduation of many of its most highly regarded prospects, it is fair to point to the organization’s cupboard and say that there should be more there than there currently is.
Draft Stats:
Percentage of Drafted Players Who Have Played Games:
Columbus: 50.0%, 21 of 42 picks
Ottawa: 41.7%, 20 of 48 picks
Philadelphia: 40.0%, 22 of 55 picks
New Jersey: 38.3%, 23 of 60 picks
San Jose: 37.5%, 18 of 48 picks
Total Drafted GAR (WAR):
New Jersey: 198.0 (34.8)
Carolina: 193.6 (34.5)
Dallas: 171.8 (29.8)
Toronto: 171.4 (30.5)
Vancouver: 134.2 (23.7)
**Senators finished 14th (86.2 GAR)
Percentage of Total GAR Created by Top-Five Picks:
Columbus (100.0% — Dubois, Johnson)
Seattle (100.0% - Wright, Beniers)
Colorado (93.3% - Makar, Byram)
Ottawa (74.7% - Tkachuk, Stützle, Sanderson)
Toronto (74.2% - Matthews)
Total GAR Created by Picks Made Outside the Top-Five:
Carolina - 161.1
Dallas - 129.1
Boston - 109.4
Chicago - 93.7
St. Louis - 89.5
** Ottawa 23rd with 21.8 GAR
Average GAR/Pick
Dallas: 3.73
New Jersey: 3.30
Toronto: 3.23
Carolina: 3.07
Vancouver: 2.92
** Ottawa 13th with 1.80 GAR
Average GAR/Pick Who Has Played Games:
Carolina: 19.36
Boston: 13.68
Dallas: 13.22
Vancouver: 12.20
Calgary: 11.54
** Ottawa 19th with 4.31 GAR/Pick
Trades
Since inheriting the general manager from Bryan Murray on April 10, 2016, Pierre Dorion has been one of the most active executives in the league.
Over the past seven years, Dorion has made a staggering 78 trades for an average of 11 per year. The man flips assets around like he plays franchise mode in NHL 23.
Of those 78 trades, 17 can essentially be categorized as being of the minor league variety. In other words, these kinds of trades involved minor league players being dealt for minor league players, late-round picks or future considerations.
For the remaining 60 trades, they can essentially be categorized into three distinct phases: the pre-build, the rebuild; and the “Are we or aren’t we still rebuilding?” phases.
When the 2017-18 season concluded, Pierre Dorion indicated in his end-of-the-season media wrap-up that he and ownership decided in February of 2018 that the team would pursue a rebuild. For the purposes of this section, everything that occurred from April 2016 through February 2018 will be considered the pre-build. Everything from 2018 through the 2020-21 season is the rebuild and everything thereafter is a bit of a je ne sais quoi.
Dorion’s first move was to trade a third-round pick with the team’s 12th overall selection to New Jersey so that they could move up one spot to draft Logan Brown.
That move was followed up by trading Alex Chiasson for Patrick Siefoff, who unfortunately is a footnote in Senators history for concussing Clarke MacArthur with a stupid and unnecessary hit during the 2017 training camp.
A few weeks later the Senators dealt Mika Zibanejad and a 2018 second-round pick to the New York Rangers for Derick Brassard and a 2018th seventh.
Blame Zibanejad’s DJ’ing hobbies or the front office’s level of comfort extending him at a figure they deemed to be prohibitive, the Senators moved the young Swede because Brassard represented a comparable centre who, after the Rangers picked up the tab and paid out his signing bonus, saved the Senators some money. To underline how important it was to cut costs, the Senators sweetened the deal by throwing in a second-round pick.
Brassard would play 139 games for the Senators before being moved at the 2018 trade deadline. He contributed 32 goals and 77 points during that time while being worth 16.0 ‘Goals Above Replacement’ (GAR) and 3.0 ‘Wins Above Replacement’ (WAR) per Evolving Hockey. Most importantly, he combined with Erik Karlsson to provide one of the franchise’s most memorable scoring sequences in its modern history.
In the 486 games since, Zibanejad has gone on to put up a ‘Wins Above Replacement’ (WAR) value of 12.8 and a ‘Goals Above Replacement’ (GAR) value of 70.3 per Evolving Hockey. Only 34 forwards have been more valuable over this stretch of time than Zibanejad, who blossomed into a number-one centre for the Rangers.
The Brassard for Zibanejad deal foreshadowed the future. It was the first real example of the Senators trying to preserve their short-term competitiveness while cutting costs.
In the months that followed, the Senators moved some futures to bolster the team’s depth for the 2017 playoff push. Amazingly, the one deal that did not really adhere to the Senators’ philosophy at the deadline wound up being one of Dorion’s deals. The Senators capitalized on Curtis Lazar’s pedigree and gambled that this would be one of the last opportunities to capitalize on whatever value he still held. The general manager flipped the Western Hockey League product to the Calgary Flames for a second-round pick.
Despite the team’s run to the Eastern Conference Final, none of the depth players the team acquired at the trade deadline lasted long with the organization. Tommy Wingels and Viktor Stalberg left as unrestricted free agents. Alex Burrows signed a two-year extension following his acquisition, only to be bought out one year into that deal.
After failing to upgrade the team’s talent or depth in the offseason, the Senators struggled out of the gate to open the 2017-18 season. Dorion ignored the team’s poor underlying shot and goal metrics believing that the team’s 2017 Eastern Conference Final appearance was not some high-water mark. In November, the Senators dealt their 2017 first-round pick (Shane Bowers), a conditional 2018 first-round pick (that became a 2019 lottery pick that landed the Avs Bowen Byram), Kyle Turris, a 2019 third-round pick and Andrew Hammond for Matt Duchene.
Turris was immediately flipped to Nashville for Vladislav Kamenev, Sam Girard and a 2018 second-round pick.
Duchene’s addition never stopped the bleeding. By the end of the 2017-18 season, Dorion told reporters at his end-of-the-year availability that the organization made an internal decision that to undergo a massive rebuild — approximately four months after taking a massive swing on Duchene and the year and a half remaining on his deal that brought him to unrestricted free agency.
As part of the organization’s recurring tradition, a major acquisition would spend fewer than two seasons with the Senators after being acquired. When it became clear that Duchene was uncomfortable signing an extension, he was dealt as part of the rebuilding effort.
That rebuilding effort began with Derick Brassard at the 2018 trade deadline. The centre was moved with Vincent Dunn and a 2018 third-round pick for Ian Cole (who was subsequently dealt for a 2020 third-round pick), Filip Gustavsson, a 2018 first-round pick and a 2019 third-round pick. It was an impressive haul at the time and represents one of Dorion’s better moves.
Unfortunately, Gustavsson would be moved for a season’s worth of an underperforming Cam Talbot. The 2018 first-rounder turned into K’Andre Miller after the Rangers traded their first-round pick (Jacob Bernard-Docker) and a 2018 second-round pick (Jonny Tychonick) to move up and grab the defender they wanted. The 2019 third-round pick was eventually packaged with a 2019 second-round pick to move up to grab Mads Sogaard.
Mike Hoffman was the next casualty of the rebuild. Following a bizarre series of events in which his spouse and Erik Karlsson’s spouse became embroiled in allegations of online bullying, Hoffman was dealt with a minor leaguer and a 2020 fifth-round pick for Mikkel Boedker, Julius Bergman and a 2020 sixth-round pick. Hoffman was clearly the more valuable player and the Senators sold low. Coming off a 22-goal and 56-point season, Evolving-Hockey pegged Hoffman as being worth 13.6 GAR and 2.6 WAR. Boedker, on the other hand, was coming off a 15-goal and 36-point season in which he was worth 4.6 GAR and 0.9 WAR. It was not depressing enough that the Senators clearly traded the better, and younger, player. They also traded the higher of the two picks involved in the deal. The only silver lining was that, and stop me if you’ve heard this before, the Senators saved $2.65 million per year in the swap. That sentiment didn’t last long as the Sharks marginalized Ottawa’s return further by immediately flipping Hoffman to their Atlantic division rivals, the Florida Panthers for a 2019 second-round pick and a 2018 fourth and fifth-rounder.
Boedker underwhelmed in his first season scoring only seven goals and adding 28 assists in 2018-19. He was a frequent healthy scratch in the final year of his contract and would only play in 20 games during the 2019-20 season before agreeing to a contract with Lugano in the Swiss league.
Erik Karlsson was the next casualty of the rebuild. During training camp, the Senators traded their generational defenceman to the Sharks with Francis Perron for a 2020 first-round pick, a 2021 second-round pick, a 2021 second-round pick, Dylan DeMelo, Chris Tierney, Rudolfs Balcers and prospect Josh Norris.
At the outset, the return felt light. Sending Karlsson to a strong Sharks team was expected to help put that team over the top and improve their contention window. No one expected what happened next. Injuries plagued the 2019-20 version of the Sharks and Martin Jones turned in one of the worst statistical seasons of any goaltender in the league. What reasonably was expected of being one of the lowest picks of the first round wound up being an unprotected lottery pick that turned into Tim Stützle.
Tierney and DeMelo wound up being nothing more than veteran placeholders, although, in DeMelo’s case, the organization may have been better off holding onto him than trading him for a third-round pick, only to use a comparable pick (2020 fourth-round) to acquire a lesser defenceman in Josh Brown that offseason.
The following trade deadline, the rebuild continued with the Senators sending Matt Duchene, Mark Stone and Ryan Dzingel. The return for Duchene looked fine from the outset. A projected mid-first-round pick with a conditional first attached to it provided the Blue Jackets could re-sign Duchene, along with two prospects who may or may not turn into something. The completely separate Dzingel trade, again with the Blue Jackets, was a fleece job. The Senators moved the winger for a flier on Anthony Duclair and two second-round picks. Duclair wound up being way more productive than anticipated. He was one of the Senators’ two All-Star representatives in 2020 and he finished the 2019-20 season with 23 goals and 40 points. Despite being a great story, the Senators failed to qualify Duclair as a restricted free agent because of money. Despite being nowhere near the cap ceiling, the team was concerned that the possibility of arbitration. As an arbitration-eligible player, Duclair could have made significantly more than the $1.65 million qualifying offer would have been. After scoring 10 goals and 32 points in a shortened 2020-21 season with the Panthers, Duclair would sign a relatively inexpensive multi-year deal with the Panthers before rewarding them with a 31-goal season in 2021-22.
The two second-round picks that were thrown into the deal? One was used by the Senators to acquire Derek Stepan and the other was the primary asset used to bring in goaltender Matt Murray.
In what was described as “the proudest day I've ever had as a general manager in the NHL,” Dorion sent lynchpin Mark Stone to Vegas for Erik Brannstrom and a second-round pick. Brannstrom has not developed into the star that Dorion proclaimed he would be, but he has turned into an effective depth defenceman who gets nowhere near the credit he deserves for his defensive play this season. The second-round pick was eventually used to draft Egor Sokolov in the 2020 NHL Draft.
Stone has played parts of five seasons in Vegas and he has continued to play near a point-per-game clip while continuing to be one of the best two-way players in the league when healthy. Injuries have plagued him lately, but since the start of the 2019-20 season, only 16 forwards in the NHL have produced more value than Stone’s 55.6 GAR and 9.7 WAR.
The last major piece that the Senators sold off was Jean-Gabriel Pageau and like the Dzingel trade with Columbus, some of Dorion’s best work occurred when he was auctioning off talented depth players. In this instance, Pageau was flipped for a 2020 first-round pick, a 2020 second-round pick and a 2022 third-rounder.
With a roster stripped of all its quality veteran talent, management set about its goal to add as much veteran character as possible while adding players that its coaching staff had familiarity with. And, if the Senators could cut costs in real dollars while adding players with higher cap hits (ie. trading Zack Smith for Artem Anisimov), all the better. The Senators used draft pick currency, and some of it being valuable, to acquire players like Austin Watson, Erik Gudbranson, Josh Brown, Derek Stepan, Travis Hamonic, and Nikita Zaitsev.
Together, these players played parts of 13 seasons for a total of 601 games with the Senators.
What did they cost?
The Senators flipped one second-rounder, two thirds, two fourths and a fifth while costing the team $31.9 million in real dollars. Their investment was worth -3.3 WAR in value.
Dorion can wax poetic about how the price to acquire character players was worth it because of the players’ willingness to stand up for teammates and protect the kids, it is not difficult to demonstrate that the Senators wasted considerable money and future assets acquiring inconsequential players. It is simply another instance of the organization failing to look for inefficiencies and add players who could outperform their contracts. That the Senators actually wasted draft picks to get negative value is just a reflection of how much this organization needs to stop putting so much emphasis on the recommendations of its coaching staff. After the Guy Boucher experiment, I would have assumed the organization would have learned its lesson. It has not. If the small pro scouting department is problematic, it only reinforces the idea that the organization desperately needs to do a better job of using data analysis and analytical work to ensure that mistakes are mitigated and talent is vetted properly.
Even in the instances when the organization went out and made splashes believing that they were adding quality players, those deals bombed. Matt Murray was waived six appearances into the second season of the four-year, $25 million contract that he signed in 2020. Evgenii Dadonov was dealt to Vegas nine months after inking a three-year $15 million contract as an unrestricted free agent.
In a weird bit of incongruency, the Senators traded Nick Paul to the Tampa Bay Lightning at the 2022 trade deadline once it became clear that the player and team could not come to terms on a contract extension. Instead of moving Paul for the highest draft value or prospect that it could, Dorion flipped Paul to the division rival Lightning for Mathieu Joseph. Dorion explained that the team was no longer in a position where it needed to add draft currency to its coffers, so he added a depth player who the organization could move forward with. The rationale made sense to a certain degree, but four months later, the Senators dealt Connor Brown to the Washington Capitals for a second-round pick.
At the time, the prevailing assumption was that this second rounder would be flipped to address the Senators’ depth on the blue line, but no trade ever materialized. If the intent was to improve the team’s short and medium-term competitiveness, why would the team prefer draft picks for Brown but not Paul?
It is possible that trade negotiations fell apart and the Senators were content to hold onto this pick. It is also possible that no pocket deal was ever in place. After the Senators acquired Alex DeBrincat and his $9.0 million ($6.4 million AAV) salary, the simplest explanation may be that management exhausted its internal budget and Brown was a casualty of it - despite the fact that his presence would have improved the team’s depth significantly.
Recency bias and a preference for veteran options have always impacted the Senators’ goaltending decisions going back to the Bryan Murray era and under Dorion, that has not really changed. After an unimpressive season in which he was relegated to Belleville following the Matt Murray acquisition, Filip Gustavsson was dealt to the Minnesota Wild for veteran Cam Talbot.
Rather than exploit Minnesota’s cap situation and leverage the fact that the team desperately needed to create cap room, Dorion flipped a young asset with pedigree, a small sample of NHL success and years of team control for a 35-year-old goaltender who was on an expiring contract worth $3.0 million ($3.667 million AAV).
The deal was sold as a chance to add a quality veteran who appeared in the 2022 NHL All-Star Game. What his underlying analytical numbers portrayed however was that this was a player who had surface-level success playing behind one of the best defensive teams in the NHL. According to Evolving Hockey’s data, Talbot was worth -17.26 goals saved above expected (GSAx). In other words, he allowed 17.26 more goals than he should have based on the quality of chances that he faced.
In Minnesota, Gustavsson eventually wound up developing into their number-one starter compiling a 22-9-7 record, a 2.21 goals against average and a save percentage of .931. Playing behind one of the league’s best defensive teams assuredly helped Gus, but what separated him from Talbot’s 2021-22 season was that Gustavsson stopped way more pucks than he should have based on their quality. Using Evolving Hockey’s data again, Gustavsson had a GSAx of 24.54. Only six goaltenders saved more goals than Gus did in 2022-23 and they are all widely regarded as the league’s best goaltenders: Ilya Sorokin; Juuse Saros; Linus Ullmark; Connor Hellebuyck; Igor Shesterkin; and Andrei Vasilevskiy.
According to Iyer Prashanth's data, Gustavsson’s numbers were the product of a sheltered goalie. He demonstrated an ability to steal games for the Wild.
In fairness to Dorion, the presence of Leevi Merilainen and Mads Sogaard in the system likely eased his decision to move Gustavsson. But, one year later, the Senators are in a similar situation to where they were last year.
Sogaard earned ‘Rookie of the Month’ honours for February, but even with a strong month there, the freshman posted some underwhelming numbers despite an 8-6-3 record. The Dane had an .889 save percentage and a team-worst GSAx of -4.38. The Senators may view him as the goaltender of the future, but the organization may be uncomfortable with the idea of assuring him an NHL job next season.
The 2022 offseason and season pivoted from previous years in terms of their transactions. For the first time since the Senators acquired Dany Heatley from the Atlanta Thrashers, the team targeted young players in their prime who could grow with the young core of players that this team has drafted over the past few years.
In adding Alex DeBrincat and Jake Chychrun, Dorion paid a considerable opportunity cost to get both players. The Senators dealt the seventh overall selection in the 2022 NHL Draft, a 2022 second-rounder and a 2024 third-round pick to the Blackhawks for the Chicago forward. The chance to acquire a two-time 40-goal scorer was too good to pass up, but it was not without risk.
Although DeBrincat offered the team two years of control, he only had one year left on his contract which took him to his final year of restricted free agency. The general manager's challenge was convincing DeBrincat to sign an extension. Thanks to his real salary of $9.0 million in 2022-23, they would need to qualify him at $9.0 million to maintain his rights. If DeBrincat wants to maximize his earning power, it would be easy for him to accept his qualifying offer and test unrestricted free agency next summer.
In a vacuum, the DeBrincat trade made sense considering the team’s desire to become more competitive. What never made sense was its inability to bolster the team’s blue line. From reports, it wasn’t for a lack of trying. The issue is that the team made an all-in acquisition on what, at worst, is a one or two-season player in DeBrincat. If the intent was to put the best foot forward, maximize this small window, and help convince the player to stay, management should have been doing everything within its power to improve the state of the blue line. Allowing Travis Hamonic to play top-four minutes was inexcusable and although he started the season strong, Nick Holden’s game fell off a cliff in the second half.
Dorion eventually addressed the blue line acquiring Jake Chychrun at the trade deadline for a 2023 first-round pick, a 2024 second-round pick and a 2026 second-rounder. There is no question Chychrun is a talented defenceman who bolsters the top four and offers some incredible cost control across the next two seasons, but it carries its own share of risk. As a natural left-shot defenceman, his presence means that someone in Ottawa’s top four now has to play their off-side. Fortunately, Chychrun and Jake Sanderson have experience doing that, but an opportunity to experiment with the pairings was lost down the stretch. Chychrun has been beset by some unfortunate and frustrating injuries, so I don’t want to pay it too much mind. Hopefully, he is able to shake his bad luck and avoid them moving forward.
At least with Chychrun, the Senators have more team control. Although the team has confirmed that it will qualify DeBrincat as a restricted free agent, there is a chance that the team may have to trade him. If the player is intent on maximizing his worth, accepting the qualifying offer and betting on a stronger 2023-24 campaign is a safe one. There always is the possibility that an injury could hamper DeBrincat’s performance this season, but he has historically been a healthy player. In four of his six seasons in the league, he has played a full 82-game schedule. And, as a two-time 40-goal scorer, even if he did get hurt, teams would likely be tripping themselves over the opportunity to add this calibre of scorer who would hit unrestricted free agency at 26 years of age.
Unless DeBrincat really enjoys it here and likes playing with the Senators’ young core of players, the team will have no choice but to move him this offseason. They cannot afford to have such a valuable asset play next season and risk getting hurt. The likelihood of being able to extract any value resembling what the team gave up last year is small, but that is the risk that Dorion willingly accepted when he pulled the trigger on the deal.
As much as it was a much better bet considering the state of the roster and how DeBrincat could fit in with this group, if Dorion cannot get a DeBrincat extension done, the blame belongs exclusively to him.
Finally, one of the things that has really characterized the Dorion era has been a willingness to trade and acquire draft pick currency of considerable value. Looking at the first and second rounds, Dorion has dealt five first-round selections and 10 second-rounders in his seven years in the general manager role while securing six first-rounders and 13 second-round picks over that same stretch of time.
Five separate deals involved the Senators using first or second-round picks to move up or trade down in the draft. The team has traded up three times and moved down twice. In these transactions, the Senators wound up with Logan Brown (traded up in 2016), Jacob Bernard-Docker and Jonny Tychonick (traded down in 2018, Rangers took K’Andre Miller), Mads Sogaard (traded up in 2019), Tyler Kleven (traded up in 2020), and Ben Roger (traded down, Kings selected Francisco Pinelli). None of the players that Ottawa took with their selections have been impactful yet, but there is some hope. Across a small sample size, Kleven put up some really strong underlying numbers in his eight appearances. There is a chance that Kleven, Bernard-Docker, and Sogaard will be pieces moving forward, but prospect attrition is a real thing. Had the Senators kept the Miller pick, there is no guarantee that they would have taken, but that does not take some of the sting away. It is simply hard to ignore how well a defensive defenceman like Miller would have fit on the Senators’ blue line these past few years when it was so sorely needed.
In regards to trading or acquiring draft picks, what really stands out is how the Senators have moved a significantly higher calibre of players to recoup draft assets than they have acquired for valuable picks of their own. DeBrincat, Chychrun and Derick Brassard are the obvious exceptions who added some value. Unfortunately, Brassard arrived at the expense of Zibanejad and a second and only stuck around for a season and a half. DeBrincat’s future with the organization is murky in the sense that he could be a one-and-done if his interest in signing an extension is tepid. Compounding this problem is that the Senators did not get a lot of value out of players like Stepan and Murray.
Examining their trade history and exploring the value (read: Evolving Hockey’s GAR metric) that the Senators have brought in or moved during the Dorion tenure, an obvious thing that stands out is the team’s negative trade deficit. According to the data that I compiled, the Senators’ trades have created a GAR value of -185.3 or -196.8 if you include the team’s decision to move the K’Andre Miller pick to the Rangers for a first and second-round pick. (Note: this does not include the GAR value that Duchene has accrued in Nashville. I only listed the value he contributed in Columbus, which wasn’t particularly great. If you include Duchene’s Nashville value, the trade deficit swells by another 40 GAR.)
Some of that deficit can be easily explained by the team moving out star-calibre players. The cumulative value that players like Stone, Karlsson, Duchene and Zibanejad have produced outside of Ottawa has been significant. And, when the Senators essentially took returns built around futures, the risk was real. Prospects like Lassi Thomson may never fulfill their potential and in other cases, it will take time for players like Josh Norris and Stützle to chip away at the lost value created by Karlsson. In the Zibanejad or Gustavsson deals, the Senators will never recoup any more value in those trades. They will continue to get worse over time.
What is concerning is that whether you are examining the rebuild phase or what has been the build phase where Dorion has tried to augment the roster to insulate the young players, he has struggled to win hockey deals. And, often in the instances where he does win deals like the Derick Brassard to Pittsburgh one or the Ryan Dzingel to Columbus trade, what value he adds eventually crumbles into nothing.
Contract Signings
Unlike his trade activity, Pierre Dorion’s ability to sign free agents has been limited to a few significant factors. It cannot be easy overseeing a Canadian franchise during a well-publicized rebuild. That situation is never going to appeal to the most talented players on the market — especially with an unstable owner who is unable to spend to the upper reaches of the cap ceiling.
During the Dorion era, the team has only signed 21 players who were or were set to become unrestricted free agents to multi-year deals. Four of these players were available on the unrestricted free agent market: Claude Giroux (July 13, 2022); Evgenii Dadonov (Oct. 15, 2020); Michael Del Zotto (Jul. 28, 2021); and Nate Thompson (Jul. 1, 2017).
Nine others already played for the Senators and wanted to continue their respective careers here: Artem Zub (Dec. 21. 2022); Zack Smith (Jan. 23, 2017); Anton Forsberg (Mar. 21, 2022); Mike Condon (Jun. 28, 2017); Craig Anderson (Sep. 29, 2017); Anders Nilsson (May 29, 2019); Alex Burrows (Feb. 27, 2017); Mark Borowiecki (Oct. 5, 2017); and Tom Pyatt (Jun 26., 2017). (As an aside, it is interesting to see how short-term success influenced management to reward its goaltenders with multi-year deals.) Another eight of these multi-year contracts were given out to what can be best described as minor-league depth options.
Although he has only played a third of his contract, the Claude Giroux signing has already gone down as one of the franchise’s best. Granted, the alternatives are pretty limited. The organization simply isn’t rich, figuratively and literally speaking, when it comes to unrestricted free agency. Sergei Gonchar was a quality add and Dominik Hasek was a brilliant one until an adductor injury at the Olympics in Turin cost him the remainder of his season and his team any chance of contending for the Cup. Beyond that though, the quality has been thin.
Dorion deserves credit for obviously getting Giroux signed to a contract, but at the risk of sounding cynical, one of the things that I’ve heard in is that the biggest factor in Giroux’s decision was the importance of playing here and being closer to family. He wanted to come home.
Assuming Giroux finishes his contract here, he will only be the third free agent who had unrestricted free agent status to play out his contract in Ottawa. Borowiecki and Anderson were the others. The rest were: 1) traded a year or two into their contract; 2) were bought out; or 3) were waived 10 games into their deal before being bought out later that season. (Apologies to Michael Del Zotto.)
Of the single-year UFA deals that Dorion has signed, the only one who signed for significant money ($3.5 million) was Ron Hainsey — another player who had a direct connection with head coach D.J. Smith from their time together in Toronto.
It is not an impressive list of players, but where Dorion does deserve credit is for his ability to re-sign players coming off entry-level deals to sign extensions with the team.
Given everything that happened between 2017 and this past season, it would have been easy for some players to balk at signing long-term deals. Thomas Chabot was the first domino to fall, but I believe the catalyst for moving things in a positive direction was Brady Tkachuk.
Had Tkachuk demanded a bridge deal that would have taken him to unrestricted free agency at 25 years of age, no one would have batted an eye. Not after the way his friends, teammates and roommate/mentor in Mark Stone left town. It would have only been the latest in a series of unfortunate events to plague the team.
Brady did not do that, however, and Dorion got him to sign an extension that helped pave the way for negotiations to move smoothly with Josh Norris and Tim Stützle. (Note: Drake Batherson signed a team-friendly extension one month before Tkachuk’s contract was done.)
Unfortunately, there have been some mistakes on the restricted free agent front. Colin White’s extension was the product of the team overcorrecting for the departures of its major stars. Instead of recognizing that his 2018-19 numbers were likely a byproduct of spending the majority of the season centring Tkachuk and Stone, the organization signed and cited White as an example of players who wanted to stay in Ottawa. He was the ideal bridge candidate, but instead, management signed him to a long-term deal — hoping that fans would ignore or fail to recognize the difference in RFA and UFA statuses and how White was negotiating without a ton of leverage.
Giving Matt Murray a four-year contract after an injury-plagued and ineffective 2018-19 season in Pittsburgh was a mistake. The Senators simply bet that the first two seasons of Murray’s career were a reflection of his upside — while ignoring the data and risk that Murray’s best days were already behind him. If he was a low-cost play, the move would be easy to defend, but by moving a valued asset and giving Murray an expensive long-term deal, the Senators made a high-price/high-risk play that blew up in their face.
Best Moves:
I looked analytically at the most valuable and least valuable moves that Dorion has made looking at the value the Senators immediately added or gave up in trades or signings using Evolving Hockey’s GAR and WAR metrics.
Going strictly by the numbers, Dorion’s best moves have been:
Signing Brady Tkachuk to a contract extension (20.7 GAR, 3.6 WAR)
Acquiring Matt Duchene for Kyle Turris, 2019 first-round pick (Bowen Byram), Andrew Hammond and Shane Bowers (18.2 GAR, 3.3 WAR)
Signing Claude Giroux as an unrestricted free agent (13.8 GAR, 2.3 WAR)
Signing Tim Stützle to a contract extension (7.9 GAR, 1.3 WAR in 22-23)
Derick Brassard to Pittsburgh (10.3 GAR, 1.9 WAR)
His worst:
Mark Stone, Tobias Lindberg for Erik Brannstrom, Oscar Lindberg, and a second-round pick (-55.2 GAR, -9.8 WAR)
Mika Zibanejad and a second-round pick for Derick Brassard (-54.3 GAR, -9.8 WAR)
Filip Gustavsson for Cam Talbot (-35.8 GAR, -6.1 WAR)
Dylan DeMelo for a third-round pick (-22.1 GAR, -3.9 WAR)
If I consider the K’Andre Miller for Jacob Bernard-Docker and Jonny Tychonick swap, it qualifies as the fifth-worst (-11.5 GAR, -2.0 WAR). Otherwise, it is surprisingly Evgenii Dadonov for Nick Holden and a third-round pick (-8.5 GAR, -1.6 WAR)
These rankings are, of course, without added context. They are viewed exclusively in a vacuum under the lens of cumulative value. The Duchene deal looks good because it does not account for the Senators’ decision to go into a full-scale rebuild shortly thereafter. He was also pretty damn effective while playing in Ottawa. Across his season and a half of play, he was worth 16.0 GAR and 3.0 WAR. Bowen Byram has also only played in 91 games and should chip away at that figure while Ottawa earns no future value going forward.
Gustavsson for Talbot looks horrendous right now because of the season Gus just had, but even if he continues to play at a reasonably decent level, it has a chance to surpass the Stone and Zibanejad deals. At least with the Stone deal, Brannstrom has a chance to earn solid future value.
Here are my rankings of Dorion’s best and worst deals:
Signing Brady Tkachuk to a 7-year, $57.5 million extension: without Tkachuk signing an extension, the likelihood of the rest of the young core following suit drops significantly.
Signing Tim Stützle’s to an 8-year, $66.8 million extension: this contract is longer and probably holds more value than Tkachuk’s considering Tim’s the better offensive player and still has tons of room for growth. I gave the edge to Tkachuk in the rankings because of its symbolic significance.
Signing Claude Giroux to a 3-year, $19.5 million contract: like Tkachuk’s extension, this one carries a lot of significance because of its symbolism. Even if the transaction can simply be attributed to Giroux’s desire to play at home, his decision to sign here brought some symbolic credibility to an organization that has lacked it for way too long.
Trading Ryan Dzingel: trading Dzingel for two second-round picks and taking a flier on Anthony Duclair was an impressive haul for the speedster. Dzingel’s career was never the same after leaving Ottawa furthering the notion that he was the classic good producer on a bad team. Despite the fact the Senators let Duclair walk for free and turned the two-second rounders into Matt Murray and Stepan, this was a great deal when it went down.
Trading Derick Brassard: I want to give an honourable mention to the Curtis Lazar deal here because it was a departure from Dorion’s norm. He was able to recognize an asset in decline that he could maximize value on before it was too late. The Brassard to Pittsburgh trade deserves the nod here, however, because the Senators added a first-round pick, Ian Cole, and Filip Gustavsson for the centre. It was good value for Brassard, who was absolutely dreadful for the Penguins as he tried to play through injuries. Brassard was worth -8.8 GAR and -1.6 WAR in 54 games with the flightless birds.
Worst Moves:
Trading for Matt Duchene: ignoring the poor record, the poor underlying metrics or the remaining holes on the roster, the organization moved significant future assets to go all-in on a productive centre. By the end of the season, Dorion admitted that the decision to commit to a full rebuild was made less than four months after acquiring Duchene. In moving Kyle Turris and a ton of futures, the Senators helped the Avalanche rebuild their defence (Sam Girard and Bowen Byram) while the Duchene trade ultimately wound up with the Senators having Lassi Thomson to show for it.
Trading Mika Zibanejad and a second-round pick for Derick Brassard: it is not that Derick Brassard was not an effective player for the Senators. He was. The problem is that Dorion and his staff gave up on a young asset with more controllable term for a veteran without it. To include a second-round pick because the Rags were willing to absorb Brassard’s signing bonus was just the cherry on the top. Zibanejad just dropped Tim Stützle-like numbers in 2022-23 (39 goals, 91 points).
Trading Mark Stone: Stone was natural captain material when the Senators traded Erik Karlsson to the San Jose Sharks. The road to moving Stone was paved when Dorion failed to come to terms with Stone on a multi-year extension, ultimately settling for a one-year deal worth $7.35 million. Instead of moving Stone shortly thereafter when the market for his services would have been larger, the Senators held onto Stone, risking injury and landing on a second-round pick and Erik Brannstrom being the preeminent return.
Trading for Derek Stepan: Rather than allow Tim Stützle to develop at the centre position, the Senators flipped a second-round pick to the Arizona Coyotes for a past-his-prime Derek Stepan. All the veteran contributed was a lone goal and six points in 20 games played before a shoulder injury washed away the rest of his season. The willingness to flip such a valuable asset just signified how desperate the Senators were to acquire players with big cap hits and significantly lower salaries to help the team reach the cap floor.
Trading for Matt Murray: A recurring problem for the Senators has been the organization’s inability to leverage the cap situations of other teams. Rather than use the opportunities to drive down the prices of certain pieces (ie. Murray, Talbot, Connor Brown), the Senators took on significant salaries without ever getting rewarded for it in terms of their competitors adding futures to richen the deal in Ottawa’s favour. All Murray did in two seasons with the Senators was provide inconsistent injury-plagued years that forced the team to relegate Filip Gustavsson to a depth role where he frequently bounced between Belleville and Ottawa without getting settled.
Honourable Mentions:
The Erik Karlsson trade: The Karlsson trade was an excellent trade that will inevitably wind up being mentioned in the same breath as the Jason Spezza and Zdeno Chara return for Alexei Yashin. Adding two significant assets in Josh Norris and Tim Stützle has bolstered their middle and given the team two significant building blocks to build a franchise around. So, why is it not higher? The only reason it is not mentioned above is because its success largely hinges on an inordinate amount of luck that was well outside anyone’s control. Stützle only wound up being part of the return because of the Sharks’ combination of injuries, goaltending and having the ping-pong balls land their way at the NHL Draft Lottery. The Sharks were in the league’s top 10 in many shot and goal metrics, but they came out on the wrong side of the proportion of actual goals allowed because of their league-worst goaltending. If Tomas Hertl, Logan Couture and Erik Karlsson don’t miss significant time, or Martin Jones and Aaron Dell do not combine to post the league’s worst five-on-five and all situations save percentages, the Senators never get a lottery pick that turns into Stützle. Replace Jimmy Stü with a pick in the 7-15 range and Ottawa’s everyone is looking at the team’s rebuild slightly differently.
Qualifying Cody Ceci: It is not a trade nor is it a free agent signing, but the decision to qualify Cody Ceci as a restricted free agent in 2019 piggybacked the organization’s mistake to protect him in the Vegas expansion draft. The expansion mistake cost the Senators the popular and effective Marc Methot, but by qualifying Ceci, the Senators moved him shortly thereafter to the Toronto Maple Leafs with Aaron Luchuk, Ben Harpur and a third-round pick for Connor Brown, Nikita Zaitsev and Michael Carcone. Although Brown wound up being an effective penalty killer and five-on-five player across three seasons, the Senators allowed their hated division rivals to rid themselves of an ineffective defenceman and one of the leagues’ worst long-term contracts. Senators fans were forced to endure Zaitsev for parts of four seasons before the team used a valuable second-round pick to get out from underneath the last year of his deal.
Conclusions
Regardless of whether new ownership decides to clean house and bring in their own people, no one will ever be able to take away the fact that Dorion inked key parts of this team’s young core and helped shift the narrative that this team cannot keep good players in the fold.
No one should pretend that there isn’t a difference between a restricted free agent’s options and those of an impending unrestricted free agent, but Dorion was the general manager of record who helped convince Brady Tkachuk not to sign a bridge deal. I don’t know how he did it given the circumstances of what the organization went through in Melnyk’s final years of ownership, but there needs to be an ESPN 30 for 30-like investigative report detailing the intricacies of how Tkachuk’s contract extension got done.
Had Tkachuk signed a bridge deal, chances are we are not regarding Ottawa’s rebuild in the same light. Perhaps Tim Stützle and Josh Norris follow his lead and pursue bridge deals of their own. Without these pieces in place, the vibes in this city would be different.
Tkachuk’s decision spurred change and fueled a groundswell of support and fandom that was lost during the Melnyk era. If and when Dorion is eventually relieved of his duties, this is what he should be remembered for, locking up Brady Tkachuk, Tim Stützle and most of the young core signed to long-term deals.
Successful rebuilds ultimately require a great deal of luck. It is not just one thing to be bad, a team has to be lucky in good draft years while having the ping-pong balls and outside picks go their way. Inadvertently having Tim Stützle materialize as one of the pieces of the Erik Karlsson trade is one the greatest strokes of luck this franchise has ever seen. To management’s credit, drafting Tkachuk and Sanderson while avoiding the pitfalls of a Filip Zadina or some of the prospects picked after Sanderson is a credit to the scouting staff for identifying the right player at that respective spot. Together these players created a foundation for this organization to build around.
In regards to other things that Dorion has done well, auctioning off talent led to some of his better deals (ie. Ryan Dzingel, Derick Brassard, Jean-Gabriel Pageau, Erik Karlsson), but some of his better and underappreciated work involved getting out from underneath some bad contracts.
Trading Dion Phaneuf and Nate Thompson to the Kings for Marian Gaborik and Nick Shore was tidy business. Flipping Anders Nilsson and Gaborik to the Lightning for Braydon Coburn, Cedric Paquette and a second-round pick was solid, despite the fact that the LTIR contracts Ottawa sent the other way alleviated a division rival’s cap situation and helped them win a Stanley Cup. After Matt Murray reportedly nixed a prospective trade to the Buffalo Sabres near last year’s draft, the expectation was that it would be prohibitively expensive to get out from underneath the remaining two years on his deal. Somehow it only cost the Senators a 2023 third-round pick and a 2024 seventh-round pick to make him the Toronto Maple Leafs’ problem.
The best hockey move that Dorion has made was getting free agent Claude Giroux inked to a three-year contract. It was another offseason move that invigorated this city, but if I’m being honest, it was impossible to listen to Giroux’s introductory press and not arrive at the conclusion that, irrespective of the general manager or the state of the roster, it was Giroux’s ultimate desire to come home at this stage of his career. Dorion may have inked the contract, but the city and his family deserve an equal share of credit for bringing him home.
Unfortunately, in some instances where Dorion made strong moves - the futures he acquired failed to materialize into anything of significant value or worse, these assets were flipped in separate deals for a lesser value.
Even during the rebuild, Dorion did an exemplary job acquiring as many futures as he could. Granted, it does not take require a lot of creativity or skill to auction every talented player off a roster and bottom out. Selling off talent to the highest bidder for future assets is one of the easiest things a general manager can do and the Senators did it in waves. Through his seven years as general manager, he acquired 40 draft selections with almost half of them coming in the first or second round (six firsts, 13 seconds). It was a significant amount of incredibly valuable draft capital that the Senators added to their coffers. Unfortunately, like the Brassard and Dzingel trade returns, he undid some of the good by moving a staggering amount of draft capital of his own. Almost unbelievably, Dorion traded more draft picks (43, five firsts, 10 seconds) than he acquired during this same stretch of time.
Moving draft capital is fine on its own because not every draft pick can play for the organization, but it is a desirable currency the organization can use to bring inexpensive and young talent in or flip to bring in more talent. When the Senators chose the latter, the team often struggled in its player valuation (ie. Matt Murray and Derek Stepan). Or, it simply failed to recognize or care about the risks in moving significant opportunity costs for good players who did not offer much team control (ie. Matt Duchene, Alex DeBrincat).
Speaking of team control, I would be remiss if I did not mention Dorion’s almost manic ability to keep shuffling the deck. In his tenure, there have only been six players he has traded for who have spent more than two seasons with the organization: Mike Condon, Erik Brannstrom, Nikita Zaitsev, Connor Brown and Austin Watson. And, only two of these players are particularly good.
This same pattern extends to the goaltending position. The team’s talent valuation is principally focused on how well the goaltender played the season before. Mike Condon, Anders Nilsson, Filip Gustavsson all signed new contracts following a small sample size of success with the team and as soon as they struggled, they were gone. Even in Matt Murray’s time with the team, as soon as it became clear that he no longer resembled the goaltender from his first two years in the league, he was waived.
I certainly agree with the Dorion apologists who opine that the general manager worked under the most difficult of circumstances. He absolutely did. Working under Eugene Melnyk’s micromanaging and impulsive tendencies would be unenviable.
In saying that, Dorion knew exactly what he was signing up for when he took the position. To get the opportunity to work as the general manager of his hometown team, he leapt at the opportunity to take the reigns.
Melnyk’s impulsiveness can help explain how the Senators pivoted so quickly from going all-in on Duchene to rebuilding a few short months later. His presence and influence also explain why so many of Ottawa’s star players wanted out of town. Melnyk was a blight on this organization, but it is staggering to me how many fans are willing to whitewash all of Dorion’s missteps at the feet of his late boss.
It is a big brush that is conveniently used to explain away mistakes without demanding any accountability from the general manager at all.
In fairness, having small amateur and professional scouting staffs is a function of the budget, but there are mechanisms that can be used to properly vet the opinions of those individuals to help mitigate mistakes.
The Senators have never pursued that route. There is no in-house analytics team. Sure, they finally ponied up the cash to gain access to third-party services that every other organization in the league can have paid access to, but who is interpreting that data or developing models to identify inefficiencies that the organization can take advantage of from a player personnel perspective or a tactical coaching standpoint?
Is it fair to throw all the blame at Melnyk when management continues to make the same mistakes regardless of where the franchise is in its development curve?
It does not make sense.
And, to reiterate, Dorion has done some good, but his mistakes outmeasure and outweigh the good. Death by a thousand cuts has undermined some of that good and for the volume of picks and prospects that the Senators have acquired, the quality of depth on the parent roster and farm system should be way better than it currently is.
It could be argued that Dorion could do a better job once new ownership arrives and is willing to inject a lot of capital into the hockey ops department. But, what experience does he have building such a department and integrating it with the traditional scouting information?
As someone who has had a longer leash than any executive in the modern history of hockey, I can’t confidently say that he can. There are far more suitable candidates out there like Eric Tulsky or Alexandra Mandrycky who would be exceptional candidates to replace him — people who also aren’t part of the last traces of the Melnyk era.
Pierre Dorion has put some strong pieces in place, but the time has come to let someone more qualified come in and run this team.
This was certainly an exhaustive catalog of Dorion's moves, but I am left with the feeling that the conclusion was written first and the analysis was just an exercise in self-justification. That said, it was an interesting trip down memory lane, so thanks for that.
Good overall review, Graeme. I agree that new blood is needed with new ownership, and there seems to be some around with good qualifications as you say. If Formenton can be resurrected, the core will look formidable. Goaltending is another matter. Letting Gus go may prove costly, although I don't think he's top tier. Above average, yes. Right now that would be an upgrade.