Vintage Black Aces: Pierre McGuire Gets Canned In Hartford

This is a pretty wild read on Pierre McGuire (tweeted by Gare Joyce today), from all the way back in 1994 when he was fired as head coach of the Hartford Whalers. I remember some of the drama that was going on at the time but forgot how heated it really was.

If you think McGuire is an intense, polarizing character now, read the article. “When the hallway curtain opened after a loss in Boston, McGuire was found by the media wildly smashing sticks against the wall. When the door opened after a loss in Pittsburgh, McGuire was seen knocking furniture around the coach's room.”

It goes on to say that Jaromir Jagr felt his overtime goal against Hartford in a regular season game was the “biggest of his life” because it was against McGuire. Wow.

All Hell Breaks Loose In Kanata After Game 4 Collapse

There’s no disguising it. That was likely a fatal loss for the Senators in Game Four last night against the Penguins. Blown out, left for dead, vultures in the rafters.

An enraged Coach Paul MacLean pulled a John Tortorella after the game by throwing the game notes onto a podium and walking out of his press conference, presumably to go lay a cruel but necessary beating on assistant Dave Cameron behind closed doors. That was the kind of brutal night it was.

The fallout has been heavy -heavier than you’d think it would be considering how outmatched Ottawa is by their opponent - and the debris is collecting around three specific players. Namely Craig Anderson, Sergei Gonchar and Daniel Alfredsson.

Let’s quickly try to sort through it for the sake of everyone’s sanity so we can go enjoy that sunny weather here in Ottawa.

First, Craig Anderson.

He’s the best goalie in the league right now, but nobody can be expected to put up a wall against the best offense in the NHL. It’s just not possible over a series. You can do it in a single game and you can do it in individual periods, like Anderson did last night in the first, but they’ll always score on you eventually. That’s how the Penguins are built.

It doesn’t help that the Senators have been consistently sloppy in their own zone this series but the best defensive team would still be giving up 3 or 4 goals a game on most nights to this group. Momentum swings in the playoffs are sometimes unstoppable and that’s what happened last night to start the second period. If Anderson hadn’t played one of the best periods of any goalie in Senators history, it would have been 5-2 Pens to open the second, not 2-1 Ottawa.

Anderson is the Senators best weapon – and only real hope to make this a series. Unless MacLean has some wild scheme to radically change the chemistry and throw the Penguins off stride, I can’t see Robin Lehner starting in Game 5.

Secondly, Sergei Gonchar.

Rough, rough game for the vet. And whenever Gonchar gets a penalty or even stumbles on a word in an interview, the dyed-in-the-wool Gonchar haters come out and set fire to Twitter. He was as much a victim of bad calls as he was bad luck. The first penalty for interference was an early game call that wouldn’t have been made in the third. Every defenseman does that play a hundred times a game. It was a bad call. No harm, no foul – Ottawa scores short-handed.

The tough one to start the third, a high-sticking call on Matt Cooke that lead to a Pens goal, was a case of a defenseman battling a forward in front of the net. Cooke sold it pretty well but what was Gonchar supposed to do? If he’s not hard on Cooke in front of the net, the Pens score and he’s the one blamed. It’s all in the realm of acceptable battles but Gonchar got a little overzealous and hit a bent-over Cooke in the back of the head.

Yet he had some ugly defensive plays for sure and that’s hard to watch in such an important game. But like I said, momentum is a bitch and once the Penguins got rolling, all of the Senators defensemen were skating on cement. Jared Cowen had a similarly tough night with the speed of the Penguins.

Gonchar has been an invaluable presence on that blueline this year and has had a good run in these playoffs so far. To bury the guy for one bad game against an almost unstoppable offensive team is a bit rich. The future Hall Of Famer will bounce back like he always does. He’s too good not to.

Thirdly, Daniel Alfredsson.

I wish I didn't have to get into this one, but there’s no way to ignore it because it’s now a verified shit-storm of almost Bryzgalovian proportions.

You all know he said “Probably not” when asked if the Senators had a chance to come back and win three in a row.

He also said “But we've never quit, and we're not going to stop now. The odds are against us in every way. I don't think there's much going for us. Maybe that's the way we like it."

To me, this was a guy who was asked moments after a crushing loss when the emotions were still raw and unprocessed through the “don’t say something honest” filter that all NHL players have installed in their brains. I’m sure he regrets those two words now that he’s slept on it, but in context with the quote that followed it, it doesn’t sound like a guy throwing in the towel. It sounds like a captain who knows the odds are stacked against his team but is not about to say “die”. Just like the Senators have done all season long.

Some people will see it as heresy, but those people weren’t just humiliated on home ice in what could be the penultimate game of their entire career. You’d be emotional too. In fact, in the same situation, you might blurt out “We’re completely f***ed and I’m going to go out right now and get shitfaced. Thanks for coming.”

Think of it rationally for a minute. Do you really believe a guy like Alfie, with all that character and class, meant to say he was throwing in the towel on the team?

Come on. He shouldn’t have said it that way, but sometimes shit happens, as they say.

The Senators will move on and nobody will be playing harder than Alfredsson. Should be a good one Friday night.

Leader’s Clutch Goal Gives Chance For Teammates To Shine

Not a bad one-two punch for captain Daniel Alfredsson this weekend.

He somehow ties Game Three short-handed as the final minute ticked off, setting up Ottawa’s double-overtime win on Sunday night, and Monday morning he’s announced as one of three finalists for Mark Messier’s Leadership Award.

Not bad at all.

And he'll probably take home that trophy from Messier, and not just because they both share #11 in common. Messier knows that Alfie doesn’t have much time left to win anything, and the time is now, seeing the kind of near-absurd adversity this Senators team had to go through and the fact they’re playing in the second round when nobody this side of hell gave them a chance.

The other two nominees, Jonathan Toews and Dustin Brown are both deserving but neither had a job as monumental as Alfredsson’s. There’s also the cumulative effect of his whole career here, being the face of the franchise through bankruptcies, rebuilding, the Heatley and Yashin gong-shows as well as the good years where the Stanley Cup seemed within reach. Messier almost doesn’t have much choice but to give it to Alfie because any other decision would seem unusually cruel. Alfie has been through it all and is still coming up big when the time is right.

Even though I’ve seen the kind of drama we all saw in Game Three played out many times before, I wasn’t getting ready for overtime. As the minutes bled away in the third and that Penguins 1-0 lead feeling more like a 3-0 deficit, it became a sort of “drink your beers now because we’re all going home in 5 minutes” mentality. It just looked and felt like Ottawa’s season was winding down thanks to their one major weakness – an inabiliy to score goals. It’s been a bigger hassle than their all their injuries - and definitely related.

And then that Erik Karlsson penalty came with just under two minutes to go and you could hear the drunks singing “Good Night Irene” all the way from Renfrew. Luckily all Alfie could focus on was getting the puck into the Penguins end at least one more time and going to the net. The result was pretty stunning. The bolts rattled in the girders of the rink while all across Ottawa people threw out their backs jumping off couches and bar stools. Pets were permanently traumatized by the sudden screaming and toppling of coffee tables. Yet nobody was really surprised it was Alfie raising his stick. That sort of thing just seems to follow him around.

One of the great things about Alfredsson being so clutch is that it gives opportunities to other players to do the same. If Alfredsson doesn’t tie that game up, there’s no double-OT Colin Greening goal and that guy doesn’t get to experience that same feeling and all the confidence and glory that comes with it.

Craig Anderson gets to walk away from that game with a much needed boost of confidence after a rough Game Two. He earned it himself but he can’t score the goals. A one-goal loss would have been painful for Anderson after everything he’s done for this team. Jason Spezza gets to feel like he made a positive contribution after being away so long. The one thing a guy coming back from a long layoff wants to see is his team win so nobody can say you were a hindrance. All of these positives just flow from Alfie’s last-minute goal. And it’s not just Greening, Anderson and Spezza. It’s everyone watching that on the bench. You don’t necessarily need to play on the same line to make the players around you better. When you do your job, it gives everyone else an opportunity to excel at theirs.

Even if Ottawa never wins another game in this series, the young guys probably learned a hell of a lot about the NHL playoffs from that one Alfredsson goal. All it takes is one play to turn things around. You can’t quantify that with stats or analysis of systems. It comes down to character in the end, like so many things do in hockey at this time of year. That’s an old cliché but it’s a cliché because it’s always been true.

Down 2-1 in the series with at least one more game at home, Ottawa has a chance here and that’s more than most people thought for almost 9 periods when Ottawa couldn't even get a lead. Yet the Penguins are far from being devastated over that loss. They know they still have control of this series and will be coming for Ottawa in Game Four. The only difference is, thanks to Alfie – and now Greening – the Sens knows they can beat this team. And it can happen again.

So get your living room back in order and get your dogs calmed down. It’s only going to get more intense as we get into the core games of this series.

Goal-Challenged Sens Need To Get Flyers Ugly To Beat Pens

The Penguins are good. But you already knew that.

You have to go back to the 2002 Detroit Red Wings to find a similar collection of superstars all playing together in the same sweater. When Jarome Iginla and Sidney Crosby have a sub-par night and the Penguins still beat you 4-1, you’re going to have problems beating them four times in seven games.

Forgive me for being a tad fatalistic, but this reminds me a little of the old Winnipeg Jets when they were stuck in the same division as the Edmonton Oilers. The lost to Edmonton in the playoffs 6 times from 1983-1990, and that was a Jets team that had Dale Hawerchuk and a strong supporting cast of players that could have done a lot of damage if they played in any other division.

This is Ottawa’s fourth crack at the Penguins since 2007 and they have a respectable 1-2 series record, considering the upheaval Ottawa has been going through as the Penguins rose to dominance with Crosby and Malkin. Right now, things don’t look good for the Senators to even up that record but the same format that doomed the Jets will now work in Ottawa’s favour starting next year.

The switch to a divisional playoff format will be a boon to the Senators. Starting next season, Ottawa’s division will consist of Detroit, Boston, Toronto, Montreal, Buffalo, Florida and Tampa Bay. With apologies to Toronto fans, there’s not one team in that grouping that have the makings of a dominant power on the rise... other than Ottawa.

There are good teams with a bright future, like the Leafs and the Habs, a few teams like Boston and Detroit that are on a slow decline, and the rest are big question marks. It’s only Ottawa that has two number-one goalies, a Norris Trophy winner who hasn’t even hit his prime yet, and a crew of elite prospects that are the envy of the rest of the league. There won’t be a first or second round series that will seem unwinnable, even for Toronto fans who will likely be traumatized for a few more years.

All of which probably leads you to believe that I’m saying the Penguins are unbeatable right now and Ottawa has no chance, so “let’s wait for next season”.

Not really. I think Pittsburgh can be toppled – and the Islanders came close – but Ottawa is going to have to drastically improve offensively for it to happen. And they won’t be able to sacrifice what got them here in the first place, namely toughness, penalty-killing and great goaltending.

That’s going to be hard to do against a team that can score enough to cover up all their defensive mistakes. Just like the 80’s Edmonton Oilers who almost put every Winnipeg Jets coach in the nuthouse permanently.

Right now the best way of gaining some ground seems to be through the rattling of Tomas Vokoun but there’s no indication that’s going to happen anytime soon. He was strong coming in for poor bewildered Marc-Andre Fleury in the Islanders series and was solid in Game One against the Senators. For Ottawa to win this thing, it’s going to be by breaking the law a little, and Chris Neil will be at the centre of that.

Taking too many penalties will kill you against the Pens but the Senators will have to walk the line with the refs and cause mayhem for this Pittsburgh team to come unglued. They’re not going to beat them with their power-play, but they might have a chance by winning every other battle. All Ottawa has to do is look to the Flyers. The biggest pain for the Penguins has always been Philadelphia, who go out of their way to try and bully the Pens. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. But the fact that it works some of the time is enough, especially when you simply can’t compete offensively. Erik Karlsson is at half-speed. Jason Spezza may not be healthy enough to play. What else are you going to do?

This series doesn’t get truly out of reach until Ottawa loses at home. Even if they drop Game Two, it will be interesting to see how they respond in their own rink.

But it does seem like a bit of a letdown in atmosphere after that Montreal series, doesn’t it? It felt like that for me leading up to the game and in my feelings towards it after as well. The test for the coaching staff will be to get that first-round adrenalin going again for the players. The test for me will be to get that feeling back through beer.

Maybe somebody needs to get hit... and hit hard... for Ottawa to spring back to life. Keep your eyes on Neil.

The Melnyk Show Threatens To Cloud Sens/Pens Series

For everyone's sanity everywhere, let's hope this doesn't turn into the "Eugene Melnyk" show.

Round One for Ottawa was defined by Michel Therrien's "no respect" tirades,  (or "no rispeck" as they came to be known on Twitter) and it seemed to snowball into a lot of people having an easy laugh at the expense of the proud Montreal organization with the Habs melting down both on and off the ice. Brandon Prust and P.K. Subban followed the lead of their unhinged coach with bizarre statements to the press and screaming at teammates on the ice. Even poor Carey Price, a very likeable and elite athlete, remained in an almost terrorized emotional state after the series, telling the media "I don’t even go to the grocery store anymore. I hardly do anything anymore. I’m like a hobbit in a hole."

In short, it was endless distractions from within and without that prevented Montreal from getting back on track in that series. They probably wouldn't have beaten Ottawa anyways but it shouldn't have looked that bad.

Yet for Ottawa, the tables might be turning a little here as they enter Round Two against Pittsburgh. Suddenly the cameras and the microphones are rushing over to their side, almost entirely because Senators owner Eugene Melnyk has a "thing" with the Penguins.

Whenever Melnyk speaks, there's a fallout. He tried to ban Montreal and Toronto fans from the Ottawa rink and he was ridiculed everywhere. He's running some sort of secretive forensics investigation into Matt Cooke's accidental skate slash on Erik Karlsson's Achilles tendon - a story you all know too well for me to bother recounting here - and it's bringing Sens fans more grief from all corners.

Now he's attacking Penguins fans on Twitter with this beauty:

Now, I'm sure Melnyk is genuinely disgusted with the crap he gets in his Twitter feed. Anyone who's spent even 15 minutes on Twitter loses a little of their optimism for the human race. But Melnyk is just feeding the fire here, turning the focus onto him when he's got two perfectly capable hires in Bryan Murray and Paul MacLean who know what to say and when to say it during a playoff series.

This doesn't necessarily relate back to the Matt Cooke obsession he has, but it's all part of the same narrative. The conspiracy theory angle never works. Just ask the Vancouver Canucks how their never-ending beef with the officiating worked for them. Ask Michel Therrien how his "no respect" rants worked against his team. Playing the "eternal victim" is an unwinnable game.

The Senators story this season is incredible - overcoming injuries that would have destroyed most teams, and battling their way to the second round by taking down an original-six franchise that still has a huge grip on a large section of NHL fans in the capital city.

Ottawa players doesn't need Melnyk to come to their rescue right now. They don't need to talk about Matt Cooke after every game, every practice. They don't need it to be brought up. They have things under control.

Melnyk is a passionate, opinionated owner who's undoubtedly committed to NHL hockey in Ottawa. For that he gets everyone's eternal thanks. But there is a line that can be crossed where his intensity becomes a distraction.

Beating the Penguins will be tough enough for the Senators without Karlsson and Daniel Alfredsson having to answer questions about Melnyk after every game.

"Young Guns"

When you get NHL players in an acting situation, the result is usually a giant setback for the acting industry, and for our community as a whole. Here's the exception... four Ottawa Senators - Kyle Turris, Erik Condra, Zack Smith and Craig Anderson (plus a surprise guest for the punchline) really bring it for Napolis Café. Scenery is chewed. A must-see if you haven't somehow run into this on Twitter yet. Zack Smith is an absolute star here:



Which brings to mind the great Pittsburgh Penguins car commercial from a few years ago that includes current Sen Sergei Gonchar (who wisely skipped the Napolis spot). Let's just say Gonchar's performance here makes Dolph Lundgren in Rocky IV look like Laurence Olivier.



The Penguins have a history of doing ads. Mario Lemieux did a ton of them, often awkwardly:







Here's Marcel Dionne and Frank Mahovolich selling CCM equipment. Wait for the big laugh at the end. What we see is probably Take #35.

Black Aces Vintage: Classic Auctions Swag

If you've never had a chance to head over to ClassicAuctions.net, here's just a few samples of the many historical Ottawa Senators memorabilia pieces that have passed through their hands over the years. It's pretty amazing to go through their catalogue of closed lots and see what's out there, not just for Senators items but for anything NHL related. You could waste a day going through this stuff. And I have... today... trying to come down a little from the Senators absolute demolition of the Montreal Canadiens in Round One. Of particular note is that Pittsburgh vs. Ottawa program from 1927. Looks like the Senators staff will be printing off a few new copies sometime next week... See you then.

Sens Fans Suffer More Indignities Than Your Average Stooge

Worst case scenario happened last night for the Senators.

They lose another big game where they desperately needed two points and in the process managed to let Matt Cooke go untouched, allowing him to have a strong game and assist on the goal that buried them in the third period.

And the topper is the Winnipeg Jets beat the Sabres to move within one point of the Senators and Rangers.

Basically it couldn’t have gone any worse for Ottawa.

Fans were worried that the Senators would be too distracted by Cooke to focus on winning the hockey game, but that wasn’t the case at all. It all boiled down to Cooke’s first shift of the game where he declined a challenge from Chris Neil and took a mild but penalized hit from Eric Gryba, resulting in a power-play that the Senators killed off. That was pretty much it for dealing with Cooke. They lost the game because Craig Anderson was human and they can’t score goals to save their lives, especially on a power-play that’s one of the worst we’ve seen in Ottawa for many years.

Yet there’s still that lingering narrative out there today that somehow Ottawa blew this game because they were focused on Matt Cooke. I didn’t see that last night, but I did see a Senators team that gets tight when faced with an important game, much like they looked against the Leafs last Saturday and a few Saturday’s before that.

It just FEELS like this organization can’t win the games that are most important to the fans. For sure they’ve won huge games before... many of them. But the ones that hurt the most linger in the memory. And it’s usually against the Toronto Maple Leafs or against a team that has somehow done them physical harm (before the Penguins it was the Rangers).

It’s tough for fans to endure that kind of humiliation time after time. I’m sure it’s tough on the players too but they live in a bubble far removed from anything the fans can experience. We don’t truly know what it does to the players so let’s not even pretend. But we do know how the average fan feels.

They have to endure that co-worker who comes in the next day wearing a Leafs jersey with a shit-eating grin on his face. They have to walk to the parking lots out of SBP with Habs fans chanting “Ole, Ole” like marauding gangs of drunken idiots. They have to watch a guy like Cooke, protected by the instigator rule, wipe his dirty, muddy sneakers on the Senators living room carpet and walk away unharmed.

Oh, I realize every team’s fanbase goes through this from time to time, but it’s only in Ottawa that their beloved captain gets booed in his own rink. It’s only in Ottawa that a head coach openly jokes about scoring a goal early to “take the fans out of the game”.

And just when it seems there’s an opportunity to reclaim lost pride, to gain more respect from their fanbase, we see a game like we did on March 30 when the Senators don’t show up to play the Leafs in their own rink on a nationally televised game on Hockey Night In Canada. We see a game like last night where they can’t beat a Penguins team that has almost all their best players on the sidelines and more motivation than they’ll ever need in Matt Cooke and a playoff spot waiting to be clinched.

That’s a bit of a mean-spirited thing to say because the Senators did show up to play last night against Pittsburgh and were once again beaten by a better goalie. And they’ve proven themselves all season long by winning hockey games when injuries said they shouldn’t.

Yet, like I said, it’s those painful losses that leave the biggest impression, and Senators fans are as familiar with those as anyone.

A playoff spot awaits this team with games left against Washington, Philadelphia and Boston. Chances are the Senators will still pull this off. But it all loses a bit of luster when you enter the party through the back door. A big win against the Pens and a big hit on Matt Cooke would have been going through the front door, making an impression around the league. Instead we get hand-wringing and excuses.

As some would say, as long as you get to the party, anything can happen. So let’s see what happens this week.

***

You can argue both ways on that Eric Gryba interference penalty on Matt Cooke. You can say it was a battle for the puck and it shouldn’t have been called or you can say Cooke didn’t get a chance to battle for it and the right call was made. I don’t think it was either. To me, that was the refs telling the Senators that Cooke was off-limits. It was sending a message that the Senators weren’t about to turn this into a rodeo with Cooke as the clown. If this was a Columbus-Florida game, that call doesn’t get made. But the refs read the paper like everyone else and no doubt discussed the Cooke situation in their pre-game huddle. They were going to call the first contact with Cooke if it even looked slightly sideways and that’s what they did. Like it or not, the rules protect the weasels better than a tough guy can protect his star players in today’s NHL.... I totally get the Pens point of view that what Cooke did to Karlsson was an accident, so why should he have to fight? I don’t think Marian Hossa should have had to fight for accidentally swinging his stick into Bryan Berard’s eye many years ago. But everyone knows Hossa is a clean player who wouldn’t be able to defend himself in a scrap. Not so for Cooke. He’s known as a weasel (albeit a reformed weasel) who has the ability to fight but often won’t. When you take out a Norris Trophy winner, someone like Cooke has to expect to answer for it. He’s twice turned down Chris Neil for a fight. That’s just a complete lack of character on Cooke’s part. No sense in beating a dead horse here so let’s move on....

.... Despite the gloom on Tuesday, the Senators can look forward to having Erik Karlsson back in the lineup as early as Thursday against the Caps. If this team truly needs a breath of fresh air to blow away the stink of the last two games and the off-ice crap that came with it, Karlsson is the guy to do that. He’s only been in Ottawa a few years but already he has a sort of myth building around him. He’s always smiling and happy, but that smile has an air of cockiness that someone like Jarome Iginla doesn’t possess, the only other guy I can think of who can light up a room day after day. He’s got healing powers beyond even Alfie levels and he has the franchise on his shoulders right now.

Bring on the sunshine.

It’s Not One Or The Other - Sens Can Win AND Say Hello To Matt Cooke

A lot of leery Senators fans today, worried not only that coach Paul Maclean will dress the big bad Matt Kassian, but that Sens players will be so bent on revenge against Matt Cooke that they would gladly lose the game if it meant they could deliver a scalp to Erik Karlsson’s empty locker stall.

Many think the two concepts are mutually exclusive. Not so.

The Senators can challenge Matt Cooke to fight and still win the hockey game. There are fights every night in the NHL, many of them for much lesser transgressions than what Cooke did to Karlsson. It would even be weird for someone not to challenge Cooke.

I seem to remember that the last time someone stood up for Karlsson in a big way was Matt Carkner making an example of Brian Boyle in last year’s playoffs. That energized the Senators in a big way and they won that game, with most players citing Carkner’s efforts as a turning point.

Best case scenario for Ottawa fans tonight against Pittsburgh would be Chris Neil scrapping with Cooke at centre ice in front of 20,000 screaming fans and then Alfie scoring a couple of goals to put the Penguins away.

That’s what I’d call “entertainment”. Not sure why everyone thinks only one of these things can happen, to the exclusion of the other.

Of course it would be stupid for Ottawa to take countless penalties trying to get at Cooke. But they can hit him hard every shift and challenge him to go in the traditional hockey way without getting an instigator. If Cooke declines, that just looks bad on him and will further cloud his reputation. If he obliges, then we’ll see what happens.

Clearly, Ottawa needs to come out of this game with two points and if it means watching Cooke decline to defend himself, then the Sens just need to let it go for now. But to not challenge this guy would be a woefully inadequate, almost embarrassing response from the Senators players.

Sens Rolling The Dice With Rookie Defenders

For the Ottawa Senators, it’s nice to be on the other side of controversy right now. For all the goaltending doubts, the concern over the youth on defense and the standard opening night fears, the Senators calmed their fans down considerably with a lopsided victory in Winnipeg.

For Jets fans, their handwringing has only increased. According to Hockey Hall Of Fame writer Roy MacGregor, a lot of people in the ‘Peg already feel disillusioned – and that’s in a market where the honeymoon has just begun. Even the champagne is still bubbly.

With old pal Alexei Kovalev back in town with the rising Florida Panthers, some Senators fans may be reminded of some recent bad history and feel comforted that those days now seem so distant. For the most part, they are.

Yet the path to the Senators downfall is pretty clear, even to casual observers. And it’s not the goaltending (refreshingly).

It’s the defense – a top heavy group that’s thin and inexperienced once you get past the top four. What would happen if another D-man went down to injury? Or two? That’s not an unrealistic scenario. In fact, it’s likely, especially in a compressed schedule.

When you look at teams that have traditionally had success in the playoffs, they have depth and experience on defense, with people ready to step in when injuries strike.

Los Angeles refuted that theory last season when they had two greenhorns in Alec Martinez and Vyacheslav Voynov playing all 20 games in the Kings march to the Stanley Cup. Martinez wasn’t really a rookie, having played 60 games in 2011, but the point is made.

So it can be done, but you have to think Ottawa is going to address this issue with a trade before we get into the nitty gritty of the schedule in February.

Losing Jared Cowen was a big blow but the trade for Marc Methot looks to have filled that void in the short term. Methot is stable, experienced and big enough to protect his new partner Erik Karlsson. He’ll be a big part of this defense for years, especially with Sergei Gonchar likely leaving after this season.

The next pairing of Gonchar and Chris Phillips is a coach’s dream second duo. They’re both leaders and capable of playing big minutes in all situations.

Everything after that is a crapshoot – mind you sometimes a roll of the dice pays off handsomely. And it could again. But is Ottawa really going to contend with two rookies, Patrick Wiercioch and Mark Borowiecki, along with AHL journeyman Andre Benoit when games get ramped up and they have to battle the Penguins, Bruins, Rangers and the Flyers?

I have my doubts despite Wiercioch looking like he’s ready to play some games and Borowiecki on track to be a Chris Neil clone on defense. Mike Lundin may help when his finger heals but he doesn’t exactly have the reputation of being battle hardened veteran. Those Eastern Conference playoff rounds were tough, mean and bloody and they’ll get harder with Rick Nash barreling down the wing and Sidney Crosby and Nathan Horton seemingly healthy again. Despite the Flyers losing their first two games of the season, they look dangerous and well-rounded. The Rangers and Bruins play harder than anybody and the Penguins are lethal offensively.

The Senators just can’t match that pedigree despite having the reigning Norris Trophy winner and a deep crew of forwards who can score a lot of goals. That top-four on D looks good when healthy but breaking in two rookies could soon turn into three and it may not even stop there. There just doesn’t seem to be any insurance and that’s a dangerous way to drive.

Youth on a hockey club is great and exciting for the fans, but when it gets ugly out there – and it will – you win with veterans. You win with guys who send their dentists Christmas cards and can actually grow playoff beards.

Bryan Murray, an old vet himself, surely knows this and will move when the time is right.

Sens Forget What Got 'Em Here .... Plus Unpopped Popcorn Fuelled Game Notes

Toronto 5 Ottawa 0

Why is it when the bottom falls out for the Ottawa Senators, it always seems to be against the Toronto Maple Leafs?

Many people across the capital city on Sunday morning will be wondering how in the hell their Senators could have come out so emotionally flat in the Battle Of Ontario - something that has happened many times before - even while their comfortable playoff lead continues to get eaten away by hungrier teams below them in the standings.

There just doesn't seem to be much of an excuse for getting steamrolled by the hated Leafs in your own rink while failing to show even the slightest heartbeat until the embarrassing score on the scoreclock forced you to get angry enough to engage in a few hits.

The Senators became the league's surprise team partly because they had an emotional edge on other clubs in the first half of the season. They'd go and get kicked around in the first two periods like some kind of stray dog but keep scrapping through it until their legs outlasted their opponents in the third.

Frankly, the Senators are playing like a team that's lost their hunger and maybe felt like clinching the playoffs was just a coasted few weeks away from their All-Star break. They've gone from eating scraps in the alley to feasting on Alpo in front of the fireplace, even while the burglars rob the house blind.

Certainly the coaching staff is going to wake these guys up, either through the bag skate routine or with a garbage can or two hitting the walls in the dressing room, but once the tide turns against you, it can be hard to turn it around, even if you're heart is back in the right place. Six losses in a row has essentially wiped out the strong stretch they had in late December, early January which put them in the position to become lazy in the first place.

But that's just numbers. What's important is that the Senators have seemingly forgotten what it means to battle for goals and for a team that already gives up a lot in their own end, that's going to kill them if they can't get that bulldog mentality back.

When the Senators lost games in the first half of the season, they at least went down swinging and you rarely felt like they didn't leave it all on the ice. Now when they lose, there's a strange empty feeling where it seems like they didn't even give themselves a chance. It's not about working hard - that's a cliche that's used way too much - but it seems more like a mental fog has descended on these guys after revelling in all the great press they deserved up to this point. Now it's up to Paul MacLean and his staff to get these guys a little uglier again.

Black Aces Senators 3 Stars

1. Spartacat (kept the kids from crying too hard)
2. Beer vendors (kept the kids from getting too drunk)
3. The stairs (allowed people to leave the building)

NOTES

The big black shield the Senators have in the walkway to the ice still looks a little strange when you catch it on TV. Almost like a huge piece of hash stuck to the concrete wall with a circle of laurel leaf foil stuck into it. The shield might have been put there as a sort of touchstone or good luck charm for the players to tap with their gloves on the way out to the ice but only one or two guys ever do. Just aesthetically, it looks kind of ugly but at least it’s original. It would be cool if all the players punched it once before hitting the ice because after time it would become a tradition and new players would be tapping the same shield that guys like Daniel Alfredsson did. Think if a team like the Habs had something similar. Imagine tapping the same shield that guys like Rocket Richard and Jean Beliveau did? Not saying the Senators legends will ever be on par with that but that’s the kind of tradition you can build with a little foresight. Or, maybe some arena attendant gets an order to tear it down this summer and throw it in the dumpster out back. These things can go either way…. People like to take shots at the CBC and Hockey Night In Canada, but the fact is nobody does hockey better than HNIC. The pre-game Inside Hockey segment with Elliotte Friedman before tonight’s game that featured the struggles of ex-Senator Brian McGrattan and Jordin Tootoo with alcohol was HNIC at its best. The entire Saturday night production is seamless and nobody can touch what they do. Not TSN. Not ESPN. Sportsnet wouldn’t be able to put together 5 minutes of HNIC quality work. Clearly, it’s not just tradition keeping HNIC relevant……

..... Did you ever notice that when a team gets a goal scored on them, the players on the bench for that team almost all automatically grab a water bottle and take a big drink? It's instinctual, I guess. That's their subconscious way of putting the goal behind them and resetting the brain. Goalies in the net seem to do that too. What would Carl Jung say about it? We all know what Sig Freud would say - the bottle is a phallus or something like that..... I wonder why Saturday night against the Leafs wasn’t a Heritage jersey night for the Senators? Instead they wore their road whites at home. If there’s one Senators sweater that needs to be retired it’s their underwhelming, already dated Reebok Edge-era whites. A new road jersey with a couple of normal horizontal stripes at the waist would be a welcome addition to the wardrobe…… Somehow, the Senators still have 5 more back-to-back sets of games this season…. I actually think Dion Phaneuf is now somewhat underrated. I’d take him on my team anyday…. If Jacques Martin hadn’t been shitcanned by Pierre Gauthier at the first sign of trouble, I truly believe the Canadiens would be right there with Washington and the Leafs fighting for a playoff spot with Ottawa. Martin-coached teams always seem to even out with that consistent approach the veteran bench boss takes year after year.….. Geez, the shot that Kyle Turris heeled on the fresh wet ice of the second period reminded me of when you’re playing pool with your buds at the bar and wind up for the break but completely whiff on the cue ball while everyone laughs so hard that beer comes spraying out their nose. I’ve done that like twenty times in my life, usually a few pints in at the Dominion Tavern in the Market….

....Only being 3 games from his 1000th in a Senators uniform, you’d think Chris Phillips would be getting a little more press than he actually is right now. Barring injury, the Big Rig will play the milestone game in Ottawa Thursday night against the Nashville Predators. He would have gotten it done at home tonight against the Leafs if he hadn’t missed two games to injury. Ottawa’s been lucky to have a guy like Phillips over the years. Like I said before, he’s their Glen Wesley. Always under appreciated but one of the foundation pieces of the entire organization. Hopefully he gets his due from the fans when the time comes….. Jason Spezza, with 212 goals going into Saturday's game against the Leafs, is closing in on another Alexei Yashin mark, being only 6 markers behind the former franchise centre and #19 jersey wearer, who had 218 goals in 504 games. Once Spezza does that, he’ll be ahead of Yashin in all the main statistical categories. Some people have been waiting a long time to see Yashin’s name slowly removed from the leaderboards. It’s just about done…. Why is it that when you finish eating a bowl of popcorn you feel like you have to eat a few of those unpopped ones? All they do is break your teeth and taste like wood. But still, we perservere....

.... Jaromir Jagr, with 1,637 points, is closing in on Joe Sakic for 8th in NHL all-time scoring, needing just 5 more to put him right behind his former mentor and teammate Mario Lemieux who sits 7th with 1,723. Passing Mario might be tough but if Jagr plays another year for a good Philly team, he’ll have an outside chance (he’d likely need two more seasons). Pens fans will be pissed…. Jared Cowen has had a couple of games he’d like to forget, especially on Friday night against the Islanders. Yet Bryan Murray well knows you have to live with those stretches, even with a rookie who’s been as solid as Cowen. It always seems like a rookie defenseman is allowed fewer mistakes than a rookie forward, but the fact we’re even talking about this reminds you of how little we’ve had to point out Cowen’s faults. That’s a pretty good sign. If anything, it would be nice to see Cowen step up a little more in the offensive zone like he was doing a bit more in the months before Christmas. It reminds me of how Chris Phillips seems to find that extra gear whenever a game goes into overtime. You’ll almost never see Phillips take a chance during regulation but he gets goal hungry when it really matters. Cowen has a bit of that in him and might have better hands than Phillips if he chose to use them more.....

Remember when the Battle Of Ontario used to be like this?



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Sens Have A Night To Forget.... Diva Goalies.... The Boss.... Chomsky-esque Game Notes

Winnipeg 2 Ottawa 0

Sometimes teams get sick of winning.

Okay, that's completely untrue, but for fans it sometimes looks that way. Against the Winnipeg Jets on Monday night, the Senators barely had anything in the tank coming home from a mini-road trip and with a much bigger one probably looming on their minds.

They'll never use it as an excuse, but the Senators may have been looking ahead to Toronto on Tuesday and the scheduled full week away from home. And if they were going to offer up a clunker, Monday night was about the safest time they could do it.

Even after the loss, the Senators sit safely in 5th place in the East and the loss to the conference rival Jets doesn't immediately seem to pose a danger. There is still a 9 point gap there and the Jets were due for a win against Ottawa after dropping the first two of the season to the Senators.

All those games Ottawa won recently gave them a cushion exactly for nights like this in the dog-days of January when the bounces don't go their way, the legs seem like they're full of gravy and hands are dipped in cement.

It happens.

The only real emotion the Senators showed was when Erik Karlsson was elbowed by Evander Kane and Chris Neil had to jump in a few plays later to address the situation. Neil levelled Kane with a Flesherton handshake and all hell broke loose for a few minutes with Karlsson and all his teammates on the bench appreciating Neil's efforts. It was the absolute right thing to do for Neil - it was the only thing to do. If he doesn't let Kane know that elbowing Ottawa's best player is a punishable offense, then Neil isn't doing his job. Matt Carkner also got into the act by backing up Neil when the Jets fought back and the Senators gladly killed off the extra two-minutes. Those are the kinds of penalties any team will gladly take.

Yet the emotion from that scene didn't give either team momentum one way or the other. It was one of those nights where Bruce Springsteen and the whole E-Street Band could have personally ripped into Born To Run in the dressing room and the Sens would have been just as flat.

But the Leafs might have an angry Sens team on their hands on Tuesday night. Word is Eugene is personally flying in Bruce from Jersey for this one.

Black Aces Senators 3 Stars

Not much to pick from here but let's give it a shot....

1. Chris Neil (Stuck up for Karlsson, led team in hits with 5)
2. Sergei Gonchar (Led team in shots and blocked shots)
3. Craig Anderson (Solid outing with no goal support)

Goalies Still Have It Good....Too Good

It's a topic you don't hear much about anymore with the concussion issue taking precedence over everything. Yet, goalie equipment is still huge, scoring is trending downwards and nobody seems to know what to do about it, at least no one with any say on the matter. The guy responsible for enforcing the standards on goalie equipment size, Kay Whitmore, recently told the Hockey News that "Nothing is imminent...It’s always been a goal to find a way to get rid of the big catch glove without having sprained thumbs, torn ligaments and wrist injuries."  Please. The only thing those mitts protect is the net and everybody knows it.This doesn't inspire much confidence that change is on the way. The same article points out that "the league reduced goalie pads from 12 to 11 inches '05-06" but that goalie save percentages have risen during that time. Again, larger nets are being brought up as a possible solution. Pass the Gravol. Maybe the league should stop treating goalies like divas and just get the equipment shrunk drastically once and for all, just like they did so well with obstruction. We're talking about 60 guys in the NHLPA that will be upset and the rest will be high-fiving each other because more goals equals bigger contracts. The NHL has to make it so players can come over the blue line, take an unscreened shot and score a goal more than once a year. Half the goals in the NHL today are what we used to consider garbage goals, all within five feet of the net and off rebounds. Yes, the goalies are bigger, but the equipment is beyond being a joke. It was a joke in the 90's. Now everyone is just tired of talking about it and have accepted the one-inch change in '06 as the final say in the matter. Too bad. When it finally gets done, people will be wondering why it took them so long, just like obstruction.

NOTES

Now that we've already broached my least favourite subject - goalies - the Senators would have been smart to look at the Ducks Dan Ellis before he tore up his groin and went on the IR as an option to shore up their back-up slot. The guy is a UFA next season and actually has a pretty good save percentage on a brutal team. Clearly, Alex Auld is not getting the job done and that's not giving the Senators many options if they want to rest Craig Anderson.  Now that Ellis is likely off the table, there's no real obvious candidate for Ottawa to trade for. Maybe if the Jets plummet in the standings the Sens could try to get Chris Mason in a bargain. He's also UFA but the Jets may have ideas of re-signing him or extracting a good pick in return for his services....The Winnipeg Jets must have felt right at home going to the rink for today's game-day skate. It sure felt like Winnipeg out there after a fairly mild winter so far in Bytown.....I'm a long-john's kind of guy but I recently had a pal tell me I was crazy and that no one wears long-johns anymore. What? Is this true? I wouldn't be able to survive an Ottawa winter without those red-striped woolen socks and the johns. Or maybe he's the freak. That would explain a few things....It seems like every team in the East plays 90 percent of the game in the neutral zone this year with variations on the classic trap. And Ottawa has just played three of them in a row. The Sens might be happy for a trip to Toronto and out West if only for a chance to be able to skate again. Maybe the NHL should just put the nets at the bluelines and put expensive seats in the old offensive zones. That's a million dollar idea right there......I think Dave "The Voice" Schreiber is the only person left on earth who likes to exclaim "Kowabunga" after big goals, like he did on Alfredsson's shootout winning goal against Montreal on Saturday. The reason is that he's the only guy who still sounds good doing it. Seriously, Schreiber is the best in the business and it's a shame more people don't know about him......

.....Brendan Shanahan made the right call on the Vincent Lecavalier punch to Evgeni Malkin's grill. It was dirty, sure, but basically harmless. The guy most in trouble should be the linesman who supposedly had Lecavalier tied up. One of the linesman's main responsibilities in fights or major scrums is to make sure that no one gets in a free shot while the other guy is immobilized by the other linesman. That didn't happen here and Geno had to take one on the chin. I liked Malkin's response though. He took it, shrugged it off and left the game with 5 points, including a hat-trick. He's got no place fighting anyways, unlike Lecavalier who's been known to throw them once in a while. That's for Arron "The Sandman" Asham to take care of the next game.....Not many inspiring shifts by an Senators line but the fourth unit of Chris Neil, Zenon Konopka and Bobby Butler hit the post twice with about three minutes to go. Interesting that Paul MacLean would put those guys out at that time but he seems to have a good feel for the bench. It almost worked....

....A strange trend I've noticed across the league in the past couple of seasons is guys showing their frustration by raising their sticks in a chopping motion (usually with one hand) and starting to bring it down on the ice or the boards before pulling up and skating off the ice. Of course, that's always been around but I've really noticed it this year as a sort of standard show of emotion by younger players. I think it's a bit like the chewing of mouthguards or the hockey pant strings dangling you see a lot of. Weird, meaningless trends that catch on amongst young players and proliferate. It's nothing to get up in arms about, but it's a bad habit. You know the old maxim: "Never let them see you sweat." In the old days, the only time you'd see a player raise his stick in a chopping motion was when he was really going to bring it down on someones head or ankle. I guess this is better when you think of it in that way.....Ryan Miller is officially killing me in my hockey pool. This is a guy playing like he wants to be in Anaheim. Maybe he'll get his wish very soon.....

.....Hitting the mid-point of the season, every self-respecting blog has to hand out their own set of team awards, so in order to do the minimum expected of me, here's two random ones:

Most improved player: Obviously a lot of candidates for this one but I've got my eye on Nick Foligno. Sure, Filip Kuba and Sergei Gonchar have bounced back from tough years, but we all knew the level they could play at when at their best. Foligno is starting to show that he can make plays, score goals as well as be a bit of a shift disturber out there, as Sidney Crosby can now attest. In years past, Foligno looked like he was missing a cylinder. He could make the nice plays in his head, as shown by his numerous failed attempts to stickhandle into the offensive zone, but this year he's getting past the blueline with the puck still on his stick and he's starting to show some hands nobody knew were there. I wrote a piece on Foligno early in the year saying he had to accept his fate as a grinder and just go to the net instead of trying to stickhandle like Spezza. Looks like I was wrong. He's like a hybrid now. One minute he'll have three guys trying to punch him in the head for going hard to the net and the next he's deking those same players out of their jockstraps.

Best goal celebration: This is a tough one. It's hard not to like Jason Spezza's understated fist pump or Erik Karlsson's near Ovechkin-like joy when a teammate scores (ie. Alfie's 400th goal when Karlsson was jumping up and down like my sister at the New Kids On The Block concert in 1990). But I have to give the best goal celebration to Daniel Alfredsson who lately has taken to simply putting both hands straight in the air after a near two-second pause and staring down his teammates as if to say "Yup. That's how it's done, boys". This will surely go down as the classic Alfie pose, as he most famously did it in the 2007 Eastern final against the Sabres to send the Senators to the Stanley Cup final for the first time. It also helps that every time he seems to do it is because he just won the Senators the game. As the players pile on around him in celebration, the only thing you can see of Alfie is those two arms still in the air.

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Sens Show No Mercy In Steeltown .... Keep Kuba Revisited .... And A Set Of Cut-Rate Game Notes

Ottawa 5 Pittsburgh 1

You had to feel for the Pittsburgh Penguins going into this one. Minus Sidney Crosby, Jordan Staal, Kris Letang and Paul Martin, they didn't seem to have much of a chance, even with Sens whiz kid Erik Karlsson being a late scratch with an "upper body" injury.

The whole scenario reminded me of this dramatic scene from Norm Macdonald's 1998 masterpiece of cinema, "Dirty Work".



There's not much to learn from this game other than Ottawa went into another rink and got the two points from a team they couldn't afford to give mercy to. The Senators now (shockingly) sit 6 points up on the Pens in the East.

They just got 5 of a possible 6 points against the Flyers and Pens in the past four days and now they are closing the gap on the Bruins for first in the Northeast.

And it's not even cold this winter in Ottawa.

What the in the good name of hell is going on?

Black Aces Senators 3 Stars

1. Nick Foligno
2. Milan Michalek
3. Craig Anderson

Honourable Mentions: Jason Spezza, Colin Greening, Kyle Turris, Chris Neil and Filip Kuba.

Here's where everybody sits in the year long 3 Star contest:

Black Aces 3 Star Season Scorecard

1. Karlsson – 33
2. Anderson – 31
3. Spezza – 29
4. Alfredsson – 27
5. Michalek – 25
6. Neil – 16
7. Foligno – 15
8. Cowen – 13
9. Smith – 10
10. Greening – 7
11. Gonchar – 5
12. Kuba - 5
13. Da Costa – 4
14. Butler – 2
15. Phillips – 1
16. Winchester – 1
17. Condra – 1
18. Carkner – 1
19. Turris - 1


***

Keep Kuba Take Two

We’ve been over this terrain so many times now that we’ll have to re-pave it soon, but as long as the Senators remain in the playoff picture (and right now there’s no reason to think they won’t be unless the rest of January turns into the road trip from Hell), I don’t see any reason why they would trade Filip Kuba (a pending UFA), let alone Sergei Gonchar (as I already wrote about here). What they would get in return for Kuba is not even close to what they can gain by making the playoffs and possibly even winning a surprise round. Every playoff game is a cool million dollar profit for Eugene Melnyk and just dumping a defenseman like Kuba, who has taken on an important role alongside wonder kid Erik Karlsson, for a measly second rounder (but more likely a third) would be pointless. Both Ian Mendes and Graeme Nichols recently covered this story and it’s not going to go away until the trade deadline comes and goes. Like I said before, this isn’t the same situation as Ottawa letting Zdeno Chara and Anton Volchenkov walk for nothing. Those were two players in their prime getting their first crack at free agency who were foundation players on the Senators. Kuba is an older defenseman who is more of a component than a key cog, but a component who is working wonders for the team right now. Why mess with that? If he walks in the summer for nothing, the Senators save cap money, clear a roster space for Mark Borowiecki and possibly have a tidy little profit from a playoff run in their pocket. Not to mention the experience and intangible benefits that come from being a playoff team. The CBA rules flood the market with mid-tier UFA players even if the elite get locked up in multi-year contracts and never make it to July as free men. The Senators will have plenty of options in the summer. To me, it’s a no-brainer. Keep rolling. Keep Kuba.

NOTES

It’s not just Erik Karlsson chasing down Norm Maciver for a Senators milestone. Filip Kuba is only one point behind both MacIver and the late Karel Rachunek for 28th in all-time Senators scoring with 96 points. When Kuba breaks the 100 point mark this season, he’ll be the 7th defenseman to do so in a Senators uniform, on the list behind Wade Redden, Chris Phillips, Zdeno Chara, Jason York, Erik Karlsson and Andrej Meszaros….. Okay, time to re-do the math on Chris Phillips’ possible 1000th game. He was originally going to hit the magic number at home against the Leafs on Feb. 7 but since he missed a few with a concussion, that game is now scheduled for Feb. 9 at home against Nashville as long as he can stay healthy. Maybe they’ll have an appropriately themed Country Music night at the rink for the big Alberta boy. Maybe Big Rig will do the warm-ups wearing a Stetson. People would freak if he did that. Freak. Get your tickets folks….Good to see that Matt Carkner didn't let Matt Cooke out of the game without at least one punch in the face after the big hit on Sergei Gonchar. Carkner got his shot in as the whistle blew. Just doing his job, as was Cooke.....I bet Gonchar is okay with getting booed heartily in Steeltown as long as he's not getting booed in Kanata anymore.....A lot of Pens fans on Twitter getting upset that Gonchar was being booed in the building, including @Evil_Jagr who tweets "Please stop booing Gonchar. Breaking my heart. Genos not hurt and I'm sure he's still buddies with him. Why can't our fans leave him be"......

….After all these years it’s still mind-blowing to me that if you took away all of Wayne Gretzky’s 894 goals, he’d still be the NHL’s all-time points leader with just his assists. He has 1,963 helpers to Mark Messier’s 1,887 total points. And yet Gretzky is the NHL’s invisible man right now, nowhere to be seen except when his daughter is in the news. The first thing Gary Bettman needs to do when the Coyotes get sold is give Gretzky his damn money, re-name the Lady Byng trophy after him and put 99 on television with an NHL logo behind him whenever possible. There’s so much negativity around the league in the past couple of years and Gretzky is one of the only personalities who can make people forget about that for a few minutes when he’s talking. But right now, the silence is deafening…..Hey, it’s sort of the same deal with Chris Neil. Take away 1,000 of his PIM’s and he’d still be the all-time PIM guy on the Senators. Neiler has 1,763 going into tonight while the next guy on the list is Chris Phillips with 667. Come on Phillips, let’s get the misconducts going here…..Alfredsson‘s 459 career PIM’s are only 3 back of Andre Roy’s 462 for 8th on the Sens all-time list. Only on Black Aces will this impending milestone be celebrated…….

.... Hey, it's old-school hockey card time, featuring the Pittsburgh Penguins: Current CBC hockey personality Craig Simpson broke into the NHL with the Penguins before being packaged off to Edmonton (where he won two Stanley Cups) for Paul Coffey (who won his fourth Cup in Pittsburgh in 91 before rejoining Wayne Gretzky in L.A.). Recently fired Anaheim coach Randy Carlyle had a good run with the Penguins in the early 80's before becoming a fixture in Winnipeg (where he may one day return as coach). Senators fans might remember Phil Bourque who was a character guy in red and black for a couple of seasons in the mid-90's. But before that, he was rocking a classic Kentucky Waterfall in Pittsburgh while winning two Stanley Cups. Bob Errey shared those same two Stanley Cups and is now doing good work on Penguins television broadcasts. Some other old names from Penguins past: Jean Pronovost, Zarley Zalapski, Pierre Larouche,  German Titov, Syl Apps, Ulf Samuelsson, and Les Binkley. (Most of these images courtesy of Penguins-hockey-cards.com.).....

…. I just can’t seem to get too upset that the NHLPA grew a set of balls for the first time in years and rejected the NHL’s re-alignment plans that would see four uneven conferences and hopelessly skewed playoff races. The setup didn’t look right, like it was drawn up on a napkin after a couple of quarts down at the Dominion Tavern in the Market. For starters, it seems plain weird that Eastern teams in the other conference like Philly, NYR, Pitts etc will only play in Ottawa once a year under the new scenario. Sure, you get to see every team from the rest of the league at least once in your own building but for Ottawa to lose dates with Crosby, Ovechkin doesn’t seem worth a guaranteed Blue Jacket and Wild game in the middle of the winter. It’s the same for every team, East or West. For every star player guaranteed to come into your building, you lose a date with another. I agree with the players in that it’s unfair and harder to make the playoffs in the West than it is in the East. And let’s not forget that one of the reasons it changed to the current format is that fans were sick to death of seeing the same teams play against each other in the playoffs every single season in the 80’s. And the proposed set-up would also mean the end of the 8th place team upsetting the top seed, not to mention the wide open race to make the top eight that is one of the most exciting part of any NHL season. The first April after this goes into effect, fans will be the first to complain that a team made it to the playoffs in one conference with fewer points than their own team in another. And if you ask me, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the playoffs as they are right now. The first round is the best in all of sports. You’ve seen it since the lockout. Tell me when it’s ever been better? A couple of teams complaining about travel shouldn’t be enough to scrap a playoff format that’s working so well ......

……It's kind of uncomfortable for me but I completely agree with Brian Burke. He's right. This is the age of the rat in the NHL. There’s no fear anymore when you run another team’s star players. Nobody can touch you and neither can the league as long as you don’t hit them in the head. The only “tough guys” left are the players who don’t fake being hurt anytime they get hit along the boards. But it seems that’s what the fans want. So you’re going to get a steady diet of it until the pendulum swings back to where it should be. But hey, that’s just Old Man Milks yapping again. Take no heed….In case you missed it, Chris Stevenson reported on Saturday that hitting is significantly down in the NHL this season. Take from that what you will....

Okay, one last clip. I didn't want to, but you forced me.



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Alfredsson An Ottawa Institution

In glitzy Ottawa, a town so full of excitement it makes Paris, France look like Cornwall, Ontario, it’s easy to take Daniel Alfredsson for granted. Captain of the Senators since 1999, Alfie is a bit like the Parliament Buildings – always there through rain and snow – but sometimes falling apart on us.

Well, that’s a bit of a stretch. When the Parliament Buildings start to crumble, they throw up scaffolding and go to work for years. Alfie goes under the knife, tapes an aspirin to the bruise, and is usually good to go in the morning, or in about half the time it takes other athletes to recover. That’s the way he’s been throughout his career but he has fans worried with some of his recent injuries. He got over the bad back but now he’s out with a concussion and many fans are starting to prepare themselves for life without the captain in the future. With any luck, that might be a few seasons away, but we can all see the slow train coming up around the bend.

Alfredsson has 1030 points in 1066 games as a Senator.

Just how lucky are Ottawa fans to have had a player of this caliber donning the red and black since 1995?

Consider this: There are 7 NHL organizations, all of which started operations either before or during the Senators inaugural season of 1992-93, that have not had a player score 1000 points in their uniform. You may be surprised to see which high profile teams are on this list.

New Jersey Devils
Formed: 1974 (as Kansas City Scouts)
Points Leader: Patrick Elias – 825 points

Phoenix Coyotes
Formed: 1979 (as Winnipeg Jets)
Points Leader: Dale Hawerchuk – 929 points

San Jose Sharks
Formed: 1991
Points Leader: Patrick Marleau – 774 points

Tampa Bay Lightning
Formed: 1992
Points Leader: Vincent Lecavalier – 802 points

Toronto Maple Leafs
Formed: 1917 (as Toronto Arenas)
Points Leader: Mats Sundin – 987 points

Vancouver Canucks
Formed: 1970
Points Leader: Markus Naslund – 756 points

Washington Capitals
Formed: 1974
Points Leader: Peter Bondra – 825 points

In addition to the 1000 point threshold, the Ottawa Senators will welcome another lifelong player to the 1000 games played list this season as long as Chris Phillips stays healthy. Using the same 1992-93 cut off, four teams who started before the Senators don’t have a single player in franchise history to hit four digits in games.

Pittsburgh Penguins
Formed: 1967
Games Played Leader: Mario Lemieux – 915 games

St. Louis Blues
Formed: 1967
Games Played Leader: Bernie Federko – 927 games

Tampa Bay Lightning
Formed: 1992
Games Played Leader: Vincent Lecavalier – 946 games

Washington Capitals
Formed: 1974
Games Played Leader: Calle Johansson – 983 games

Numbers are numbers. You can attach any kind of significance to them you want. So what if Lemieux didn’t play 1000 games for the Penguins. That team wouldn’t be worth a capful of racoon shit if he hadn’t single-handedly filled the seats at Mellon Arena year after year.

What really matters is that a fan base has someone to identify with. They want a guy they can point to and say “that’s what Senators hockey is all about”, or Red Wings hockey or Flyers hockey. Mats Sundin may lead the Toronto Maple Leafs in a lot of statistical categories but most fans still hold guys like Wendel Clark and Doug Gilmour in higher esteem, if not in their heads, then certainly in their hearts.

And that’s what it’s all about anyways. Numbers are a fun distraction, but they’ll never be able to tell you about character and personality.

Luckily for Ottawa, Alfie’s got that in spades and the numbers to boot.

Do You Remember... Part 2: Tom Barrasso

It was the first playoff edition of the Battle Of Ontario and it was the year 2000.

The first goalie to flip out was the Leafs' Curtis Joseph in Game 3 when referee Mick McGeough failed to call an interference penalty on Sens winger Daniel Alfredsson as Rob Zamuner slipped the winning goal past a distracted Joseph. As the Senators celebrated, Joseph went ballistic and charged out of his crease, screaming and pointing towards a disbeleiving McGeough. It ended with Joseph bowling McGeough over and landing on top of the helmetless ref while stunned Ottawa fans watched in awe.

Turns out Joseph simply tripped and collided with McGeough (or so he claims). There was no suspension and Ottawa fans claimed it was the league taking it easy on the Leafs.



But then newly acquired Senators goalie Tom Barrasso stole the show from Joseph after a Game 4 win that tied the series, by going on live national television and telling CBC reporter Scott Oake that he "really couldn't give a shit what you people have to say." Cue the uproar.

He was, of course, referring to the media with which he had always had a combative relationship dating back to his days in Buffalo and Pittsburgh. He once admonished a reporter by snapping at a question with "What? You want me to stop the ones going wide too?"

 Clippings from the Ottawa Sun (Click on pictures for bigger size.)



Just as an aside, Barrasso and Joseph weren't the only goalies getting into trouble that year. Remember Dallas Star Eddie Belfour trying to bribe cops with a "a billion dollars" to let him go?

But let's get back to Barrasso for a minute. The Senators traded beloved goalie Ron Tugnutt and solid defenseman Janne Laukkanen to the Penguins in March 2000 for the two-time Stanley Cup winner in an effort to shake up the team and give it an edge going into the post-season. Barrasso was considered one of the grumpiest and non-communicative players in the entire NHL but Ottawa felt it was worth a gamble after getting beaten in their last two playoff series by elite goalies in Olaf Kolzig (Washington 1998) and Dominik Hasek (1999).

Barrasso had crossed paths with remaining Ottawa goalie Patrick Lalime when they were both in Pittsburgh in 1997, and if the caption in this clipping is accurate, their relationship was a tad icy.

The move didn't work out for the Senators. They met the Leafs in the first round, quickly went down two games in Toronto, stormed back to tie the series in Ottawa, watched Barrasso steal the spotlight by bringing a flame-thrower to a live interview, and then lost their next two games to start the summer early (and start a bad trend of losing to the Pat Quinn-era Leafs when it mattered the most).

Meanwhile, over in Pittsburgh, Ron Tugnutt turned into a hero as the Penguins beat the Washington Capitals in the first round. They lost to Philly in the second but Tugnutt was embraced by the fans in Steeltown and Janne Laukkanen stayed with the Penguins for another two and a half seasons before finishing his career with a brief sting in Tampa Bay.

Barrasso didn't re-sign with Ottawa in the summer of 2000. Instead the much friendlier Lalime took over the number one job and didn't relinquish it until .... well, you guessed it.... when he imploded against those very same Pat Quinn led Toronto Maple Leafs in a first round Game 7 in 2004.