Senators need to clean house
It was a spectacular weekend for skating on the Rideau Canal in the nation’s capital. From families journeying the entire stretch of the famous waterway on blades to former NHLers enjoying some oldtimer’s shinny in the shadow of the Château Laurier, it was about as good as skating on the Rideau gets.
And that’s about it for the good on-ice news in Ottawa this season.
Actually, that’s not entirely true. The major junior 67s — only nine losses! — are having a heckuva season. But as far as the NHL Senators go, what started as a year filled with trepidation, and then for a time seemed like it might not be quite so bad after all, has now become a complete and utter nightmare.
The Senators are last in the 31-team NHL after two more losses this past weekend and, as has been discussed endlessly, they are without a firstround draft pick to ease their pain.
It’s nearly impossible to believe this is a hockey team that was one shot away from the Stanley Cup final just 19 months ago. But here is where the Sens are, awful and drawing fewer than 15,000 fans per game. So what to do with three weeks to go before the trade deadline?
Well, clean house of course. Ottawa could, and should, be the NHL’s busiest team over the next few weeks. This is not the time for the faint of heart.
Making it appear that you’re negotiating seriously with 27-year-old Matt Duchene and 26-year-old Mark Stone is good politics, particularly for an unpopular owner like Eugene Melnyk. But that’s the politics. The reality is Duchene and Stone need to move on because they are set to become unrestricted free agents and are precisely the players most capable of bringing back the kinds of assets Ottawa desperately needs.
If Jack Hughes was on the horizon, this might be different. But without their own first-rounder in June, this team is at least three and maybe five years away from getting back in the mix, and both Duchene and Stone will be past their prime by then.
If you weren’t going to keep Erik Karlsson, it’s hard to make a logical case to keep either Duchene or Stone. You’re building this team around Thomas Chabot and Brady Tkachuk.
Moreover, to keep either Duchene or Stone, you’d have to commit to a long-term deal with a cap hit of $8 million per season, and quite likely more. Let’s face it, Ottawa is a team that’s always going to have to pay a premium for elite players, as was the case with Bobby Ryan.
Those are monster contracts Ottawa just doesn’t need right now. Ryan’s deal — an annual $7.25-million cap hit with three more seasons to go (ouch) — is the only problematic multi-year entanglement they have, and they need to keep it that way. This team needs to have a nice, clean cap situation for when the day comes that they are competitive again.
Looking at the market as defined by the Jake Muzzin and Nick Bjugstad deals, the Senators stand to do very well in transactions involving Duchene and Stone.
Remember what the Leafs got for Phil Kessel? Toronto got Nick Spaling and Scott Harrington, but also Kasperi Kapanen and first- and thirdrounders in 2016. Ottawa might be able to net those kind of returns for both Duchene and Stone.
If your move gets two Kapanen-like prospects and a pair of first-round picks, well, that would be considered serious progress right now for GM Pierre Dorion, and the team would be much better situated for the future. Smart Sens fans know that’s a better strategy than re-signing Duchene and/ or Stone.
Forward Ryan Dzingel, who turns 27 next month and is having a career year, is also unsigned and set to become an unrestricted free agent in July. He’s ideal trade bait under the sell-high maxim.
As well, the name of 25-yearold defenceman Cody Ceci has been persistently included on trade lists, with the sense that Ottawa may not be included to give Ceci a raise on his $4.3million cap hit when he becomes a restricted free agent this summer. Presumably, he’s going to be aiming for something similar to what Jacob Trouba is going to want in Winnipeg.
So that’s four Senators who could be significant additions to playoff-bound teams. You can’t get that first round pick back — how unimaginably giddy are the folks in Denver? — but this repositions the team nicely for a top-three pick in 2020.
At this point, if you’re Dorion, the only one you have to think really hard about is Ceci because of his relative youth. He has good size, is a right-handed shot and is handling about 22 minutes a night, but there’s not a great deal of offensive upside. So there’s a limit on what you’re going to want to pay him, and the Sens are not going to get the same returns that L.A. got for Muzzin if they move Ceci. All the same, you have to wonder if he’s another Justin Schultz; likely to be a much better player for a better team than he is on Ottawa.
The Sens need picks and players and futures. It’s going to take time to fix this. Not as long as it’s apparently going to take to build a new downtown rink, but a significant period of time. Signing veterans to bigmoney contracts now would just be evidence that Melnyk and his management team are fooling themselves.