For years, the Ottawa Senators have been the NHL’s cautionary tale about the difficulty of rebuilding. They tried to do it the usual way – they tore down, stockpiled picks and prospects, and hoped to limit their mistakes. Under the old ownership and management, there was good and bad, but it was a long process that felt endless to a banged-up fan base desperate for something, anything, good to happen.
But after breaking through last season and ending an eight-year playoff drought, the Senators finally appear to be standing on the edge of something special. And if you’re looking for validation of that idea, it came Saturday morning from one of the league’s most respected voices.
Florida Panthers head coach Paul Maurice, whose club hosts the Senators tonight, spoke about how he sees parallels between the Senators and Panthers. When Maurice arrived in Florida three years ago, the Panthers were a coming-of-age team, and he guided them on a run of three Cup Final appearances and the past two Cup wins.
Asked what he notices about young teams like the Senators who make the playoffs and then come back the following year, Maurice didn’t hesitate.
“I think to get to the playoffs, you have to have a style of play,” Maurice told the media. “Everybody says ‘identity,’ that everybody understands – we’re going to play this way. So I don’t think you luck into the playoffs. I think you have to have played a certain way for a certain number of games to give yourself a chance. It’s very hard to get into the playoffs.
“So then (teams like the Sens) keep that identity. They get to keep that first bit of feel-good. I think Ottawa’s done a great job with it.”
Maurice pointed to last season’s matchups between the two teams — the Sens won the season series 2-1. The games were competitive, physical, and fast-paced.
“We had great games with them,” Maurice said. “We played game two last year. It was in Ottawa, we got beat 3-1, I think, maybe on an empty netter. It was a heck of a game. I mean, they had changed drastically in that kind of acceptance of this isn’t just a skill show. They played hard and played well. And I felt all our games — I think we play very similar styles of hockey. And I think our games have been really good. They’re hard. They’re heavy. But they’re fast. They’re skilled.”
Maurice went on to credit Ottawa’s head coach Travis Green, who enters his second season behind the Senators’ bench, for bringing structure and purpose to a group that once relied too heavily on raw talent.
“Travis, I think, is a fantastic coach. And I think he gets players to play with some passion and enjoy what they’re doing. So this will be a good one tonight.”
The Senators finished just one point behind the Panthers in last season’s standings — a razor-thin margin Maurice was quick to put in perspective.
“Yeah, we beat them by a point. Is that accurate? OK, well, that’s a point over 82 games. That’s a rounding error. So we had the same regular season that they did last year. Theirs was legit.”
Coming from a coach that’s three seasons away from passing Scotty Bowman for most career games coached in the NHL (he’s number two right now), that kind of endorsement carries weight. Maurice knows how small the margin can be between “almost there” and “arrived.”
“You get into the playoffs, you can lose in the first round, you can win the Stanley Cup, and almost play the exact same hockey. When we look back, we attach this brilliance to the team that won. Well, they won, and they get to do that. But then those other teams are right there. They’re just all right there.
“So there’s no easy first round. You can lose in the first round and be a really, really good team.”
As an aside, not many NHL coaches run a more thoughtful, interesting, and often entertaining media availability than Paul Maurice.
The Senators may now be entering the phase the Panthers once did, but capitalizing on their potential in the dramatic way Florida has is, quite frankly, an almost impossible task. The league just has so many great teams, and so many things would need to go their way.
But Sens fans can dream, hope springs eternal, and stranger things have happened.
Meanwhile, as we look ahead to Saturday night’s matchup, it will serve as a fantastic measuring stick for the Senators – a team on the rise, staring across at what it hopes to become.
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