GM DORION BLEW IT BY DEALING LAZAR

Young forward has character team will need when they’re contending in future

Pierre Dorion was 20 minutes from having himself a good trade deadline week. Then he moved Curtis Lazar. What the Senators GM retrieved from the Calgary Flames for the 17th overall pick in 2013 is a second-round selection in this spring’s terribly weak entry draft. Lazar also fetched him Jyrki Jokipakka, who will battle Fredrik Claesson for dibs on the job as Ottawa’s seventh defenceman.

Unfortunately, he was unable to get a bag of pucks thrown in so one day he may have something to show for the deal.

Yes, time will prove that on Wednesday, 20 minutes from 3 p.m. and his first NHL trade deadline, Dorion was hosed.

Forget that Lazar is having an awful season, with no goals and one assist in 33 games. Forget his lost confidence has turned him into a defensive zone liability. Dorion added enough in the last few days that Guy Boucher wouldn’t have had to use Lazar, who arrived at training camp with mononucleosis and, before he was dealt, joked the only way his season could get worse is if it ended with mumps.

Instead, remember this: character wins Cups.

At the start of the week Dorion traded a prospect for character when he added 35-year-old Alex Burrows. When the Senators are seriously ready to challenge for a championship, they will wish they had Lazar.

He was the captain of a Memorial Cup-winning team in Edmonton. He was the captain of a gold medal-winning team at the world junior championship. And one day, despite what’s happened this year, he surely will have regained some of the touch that saw him score 79 goals in his last 130 WHL games.

“Just watch,” Lazar said as he stepped off the ice from his final practice as a Senator, “five years from now ...”

Ten years from now, he probably would have been wearing the ‘C’ in Ottawa, even if it was as a 15-goal scorer.

Fed up with his lack of ice time, Lazar’s lack of maturity showed as he passed along a succinct message to Dorion through his power agent, J.P. Barry: Play me or trade me. Dorion could have replied, “I’m the boss and the kid is under our control.” Or, in a more polite way, he could have said, “Listen, let’s just shelf this season. We know what Curtis is and what he will be. He can start with a clean slate next September. Nobody is offering enough for him and besides, he’s a big part of our future. Character wins Cups.” Instead, he caved. Dorion did stay true to his mandate of winning now. He used sound logic when he faced the media after the trade, noting Jokipakka is a depth player and explaining that, in a conversation with Senators assistant coach Marc Crawford, he was reminded the Avalanche used “11 or 12 defencemen” in their playoff run a few years ago. So maybe Jokipakka will prove to be worth more than a bag of pucks.

But for Lazar, the demand should have been far greater.

Deserving the blame for the way the brief Lazar era ended in Ottawa is Boucher, who has excelled in his first year as Senators coach in every aspect except for his handling of this one player.

He refused to use Lazar with Mark Stone or on the power play for a couple of games, just enough to get the kid some points and kick-start his confidence. He said time and again a guy has to “earn” that shot by making sure he excels at the job he has, which in Lazar’s case was on the fourth line.

I get that. Boucher’s right, it’s not a “developmental” league. But had he helped Lazar get rolling early on, it would have been in the best long-term interests of both the player and the team.

Lazar should have never been rushed into the NHL by the Senators, who told everybody how great he was before he arrived. But in his first two years he was more than competent in every aspect of the NHL game except scoring.

This season, his inability to generate anything offensively weighed on him.

“It’s all confidence. It’s all mental,” Lazar said. “That’s the biggest thing. It has nothing to do with my mechanics as a player. I’ve been in such a tough place mentally. On a day-to-day basis, it’s really affected my game.

“I haven’t had a good season.

It’s all confidence. It’s all mental. That’s the biggest thing. It has nothing to do with my mechanics as a player.

I’m making mistakes on the ice that (are) uncharacteristic of myself. What’s frustrating is I know I’m better than what I’ve been showing. It all comes back to confidence. If you get a bounce here and the puck goes in the net, then all of a sudden you have that swagger. In the D-zone you trust your instincts a little more, instead of second-guess.

“In a lot of the games, I don’t get much ice time and when I’m out there it’s just survival mode. That’s a tough way to flourish.”

At least the Senators now have a first- and a second-round selection in the thin 2017 draft. Not that it matters. Since 2009, they have also now traded six firstround picks and four seconds.

That’s 10 top prospects who are 26 or younger, although to be fair they did get some keepers back.

They can only pray to have something to show for Lazar, but it’s much more likely they’ll live to regret giving him away.

And to think, Dorion was just 20 minutes from having himself a good week.