AXED PLAYOFFS MEANS MISSED OPPORTUNITY
Belleville coach understands what his team will lose if AHL scraps its post-season
Troy Mann is trying to stay busy and ready.
The head coach of the Ottawa Senators’ American Hockey League affiliate in Belleville remains hopeful his club will be able to get playoff experience, but he knows the chances of that happening are getting slimmer with each passing day during this pause in the schedule because of the novel coronavirus outbreak.
He spends his morning having coffee and working out in the basement of his Belleville home with his wife while the afternoons are filled with trying to find a task around the house that needs some attention.
Monday, for example, he was getting the snowblower ready for winter, but what Mann really longs for is the opportunity to see the Zamboni cleaning the snow off the ice at the CAA Arena in Belleville again.
“We’re just trying to get into a routine here,” Mann said Monday in a telephone interview. “It’s just trying to stay busy in the afternoon.”
The AHL went on pause on March 12, the same day the NHL made its decision to shut down to help prevent the spread of COVID-19. The expectation is the AHL’s board of governors will reconvene around May 1 to determine what’s next. The expectation is the playoffs will be cancelled because of the difficulty involved in the logistics of trying to host the post-season.
While the NHL can consider playing in empty rinks in the summer for television, that concept won’t work in the AHL because it’s a gate-driven league. Those teams don’t have a TV deal that pays them enough money to cover the costs of playing in empty rinks. That’s why it doesn’t make sense for AHL teams to play again unless there can be fans in the rink and that just seems highly unlikely at this juncture.
A cancellation of the post-season would be tough for Belleville to swallow and that’s what general manager Pierre Dorion noted in a conference call last week with reporters when he stated “it’s probably the thing that hurts us the most with this organization” because of the opportunity for the growth of the prospects.”
“The best way to categorize it is, it’s just a missed opportunity,” Mann said. “I thought Pierre said it best last week, in terms of what’s gone on and who it hurts the most in our organization and it’s got to be what’s happening in Belleville from a prospect perspective and even from an organizational (perspective) when you think about the Belleville Senators in the community.
“You know what playoff pushes and runs can do for a community as well. When you sit back and start thinking about it, it’s not only a missed opportunity, it’s frustrating and also borderline devastating from our perspective to put in all that hard work. Now, there’s probably a small glimmer of hope because they haven’t cancelled it from the AHL side of things, but I think with each passing day it’s slimmer and slimmer. I just hope we can play in October.”
Belleville was sitting in first place in the North Division with a 38-20-5 record and 81 points in 63 games. The club would likely have gone into the post-season as the top seed in the division and even though they’re the second-youngest team in the AHL along with San Jose’s affiliate, it was widely anticipated this group of Senators was poised to have playoff success.
That would have assisted the development of prospects like Josh Norris, Vitaly Abramov, Drake Batherson, Alex Formenton, Erik Brannstrom, Marcus Hogberg, Filip Gustavsson and Joey Daccord. Many of those players will push for spots in Ottawa next season and while they had an opportunity for development this season, the playoffs are a chance to take it to the next level.
Now, they may not get that chance and if you look at the roster of the 2011 Calder Cup champion Binghamton Senators, several players went on to have successful careers with Ottawa.
“It’s two-fold. Individually it makes them raise their game to a different level because that’s what happens in the playoffs, right?,” Mann said. “You have to raise your game to another level which ultimately helps you at the NHL level. Second, it’s just that team bonding and building that something like that does.
“I’ve been through it twice to the final, as a coach, one as an assistant, where we won the Calder Cup in 2010, and 10 or 11 guys went on to play in the NHL, not just for the parent team, and it was the same thing when I went to the final against Cleveland as a head coach in 2016. There’s several players that went on to the NHL and some won
(the Stanley Cup) with the Caps in 2018.
“It does a lot for that player and the organization, especially when the organization at the NHL level is in a different spot. It’s a shame that’s the way it’s going to play out.”
The issue for the Senators is if this group doesn’t get the chance to get together in Belleville then they’ll never know the kind of success they would have had because there will be changes next year.
“The beautiful thing about the American league, in a positive and negative way, is the turnover,” Mann said. “The turnover is usually greater than 50 per cent. So, what you can do as a team, if you go on a playoff run and let’s say you win the thing, the next year the turnover is so great. It makes me it even more special because of the turnover.
“When you look at our situation, that’s the frustrating part, guys are going to move on to free agency, three or four guys are going to end up in Ottawa, and the dynamics of the team just automatically change. Come October it’s a brand new year.
You don’t know what’s going to happen. Maybe we’re not going to be that good next year, maybe we won’t be in a playoff position. There’s just the unknown.” bgarrioch@postmedi.com
Twitter: @sungarrioch