Earlier start for many home games

Fans heading back to the Canadian Tire Centre this fall will need to arrive a little earlier.

The NHL has set its start times for the 2021-22 campaign, and the Ottawa Senators have moved several of their mid-week games up by 30 minutes to 7 p.m. starts.

While the Senators opted to schedule their games for 7:30 p.m. to give people more time to get to the rink in Kanata when the club moved midway through the 199596 season from the Civic Centre downtown, last season Ottawa played pretty much all of its midweek games with 7 p.m. starts in the empty rink.

Of the 23 home games released by the league Friday afternoon, 15 will be played at 7 p.m., while six are set to be played at 7:30 p.m. If you're wondering why there's a very rare 1 p.m. start on Jan. 25 on the schedule, that's because the Senators will try a School Day game and will release the details on that promotion later.

It should be noted the club also has a 1 p.m. start on New Year's Eve against Sidney Crosby and the Pittsburgh Penguins, but that's during the holiday season with the expectation Bell Capital Cup participants will also be in town.

Making a decision to go this route wasn't easy because there are a lot of factors involved. But after several discussions, owner Eugene Melnyk, Anthony LeBlanc, the club's president of business operations, and the marketing/sales staff felt the earlier starts may be more appealing to fans.

With the 7:30 p.m. starts, the puck isn't dropped until 7:38 p.m. after the introductions and the national anthems. No, that doesn't sound like a lot of time, but there were several nights where games weren't completed until just after 10 p.m. If it happened to go to overtime or a shootout, you're looking at 10:20 to 10:30 p.m. for the game to be completed.

Coupled with the fact everybody is leaving the rink at the same time, it can make for a late night when people have to work the next day. The earlier starts make sense on a lot of levels and Melnyk was all for the change.

“It's (7 p.m.) a start time in many markets,” LeBlanc told Postmedia in an email. “Internally, we preferred 7 p.m. start times, but we're cognizant of the fact that 7:30 p.m. was considered important for traffic management.”

Of course, the pandemic has changed all that. Yes, we'll have to see what the traffic patterns are like in September, but not everybody will be rushing back to their offices this winter. Many people will continue to work from home in the coming months and this is as good a time as any to see how this works.

“Based on the significant uptick in the number of people who will continue to work remotely, we felt this was a good season to test out the 7 p.m. start.”

An important factor in all of this is television, and TSN, the club's regional rights holder, has no issue with earlier start times. It allows the network to use That's Hockey as a pre-game show for its broadcasts of Ottawa games.

Not only does having That's Hockey help promote the game coming up on the network, it also has the unique ability to put a microphone on players live while they skate around in the warmup. Senators coach D.J. Smith has made a few appearances to update the lineup from the bench.

The club also has six afternoon games on weekends, plus three 5 p.m. starts on Sunday.

“We're happy with the number of afternoon games because that lets us focus on one of our key pillars from a marketing perspective, and that's our focus on families,” LeBlanc said.

As noted in this space earlier this week, the Senators and Toronto Maple Leafs are still waiting for word from the provincial government on whether they can have capacity in their rinks.