Depth will be an essential piece of Sens' success, McGuire says
Pierre McGuire spent his first official day on the job with the Ottawa Senators working the phones and trying to get up to speed, with a busy part of the NHL's off-season schedule just around the corner.
As Postmedia was first to report Monday, McGuire is leaving the broadcast booth to accept a role as senior vice-president of player development with the Senators. The 59-year-old has been brought in by owner Eugene Melnyk to try to help the organization get to the next level by working with general manager Pierre Dorion.
McGuire is leaving the media world after 24 years, wrapping up his career with NBC Sports last Wednesday with Game 5 of the Stanley Cup final. He now looks forward to the challenge of trying to help the Senators win a Stanley Cup, and wants help them take the next step in that direction after missing the playoffs for four straight years.
The Senators have made no secret of the fact they want to acquire a defensive defenceman and a centre before next season gets underway. McGuire seemed to agree with that assessment.
It's a safe bet the Senators will spend the coming days examining the trade market and looking at who may be available in free agency to try to help this team make the post-season.
“The biggest thing to me is you can never have enough depth down the middle, and I know that's something (Dorion) and I have talked about,” McGuire said Monday. “I still think we're a little light on the back end, and that's something we need to talk about, and we have and it needs to be addressed.
“I'm excited about the goaltending pool they put together. It's phenomenal with the internal pieces they've put together. It's really positive in a lot of situations, but I'm not sure they're deep enough down the middle yet. That's something Pierre and I have talked about, along with some robust depth on defence.”
On the radio, McGuire has talked for years about a seven-player profile for building a Stanley Cup champion.
That's two elite centres, a power forward, a specialized forward, shutdown defenceman, an elite puck-moving defenceman, and a top starting goalie. McGuire believes the organization has four of those pieces in place already and may have the other ones within the organization. He doesn't believe this group is far away.
Naturally, Thomas Chabot and Brady Tkachuk are part of that group.
“We're probably three players away from that right now,” McGuire said. “Some of them will internally evolve and will be those players that fit into the seven-player profile. You build around those players and it can be very cap-friendly. That formula works with every market, not just big-market teams, not just small-market teams, but it works with any team.”
For the analytics crowd, McGuire called it another element that can be used. As he said, numbers can't measure the effort and the way players work.
“It's not that I hate analytics, but I believe in scouting,” McGuire said. “I believe that there has to be people that are boots on the ground, hardcore hockey people that can actually evaluate a player without utilizing numbers, and the player passes the eye test. I still don't know if there's an analytic equation for heart, for character, for hard work, for fearlessness, for determination, so that's part of the formula that hardcore, boots on the ground scouting has to be.
“I don't hate analytics. I think it's a tool that can be utilized in any kind of evaluation, but I'm a big believer in boots on the ground
scouting and I'll use Tampa Bay as an example — and I won't talk about players because it's a sensitive issue now. But if you look at Tampa and salute them as a Stanley Cup champion, but look at the depth players that Tampa had and the way they performed. It was phenomenal.”