Rather than dwell on the result following Ottawa’s 3-2 loss to the Buffalo Sabres on Tuesday night, the gnawing post-game comments made by Erik Karlsson and head coach Dave Cameron that have needled this fan base.
In addressing how his Senators squandered an opportunity to grab two points against an inferior Buffalo team, Karlsson disparaged the team’s performance by implying that the team’s style and effort are inadequate for “budget team”.
Karlsson’s comments are via the Ottawa Citizen:
“First off, we’re a budget team here,” Karlsson said. “We don’t have the same players as most teams do that are high-skilled and we’re not going to win games from a skill base. We’re not going to win games by scoring fancy goals and stuff like that. We have to realize we’re a grinding team. We’ve got to get back to that a little bit more. (Tuesday), we tried to do it a little bit fancy. We don’t have enough players to win us games like that.”
As much as I loathe Erik Karlsson dropping an internal budget comment and helping fuel some of the bitching and moaning that we’ve grown accustomed to.
This past December, I wrote about this development in a piece outlining why an improvement from the John Muckler era is no longer a good enough reason to justify keeping Bryan Murray in his general manager position.
“Ottawa’s middling status is the result of a combination of factors, but it has ushered in a resentful shift where fans started blaming the internal budget for the team’s inability to spend to contend.
There is no question that the team’s internal budget puts it at a competitive disadvantage and creates a situation in which it’s impossible for the organization to sweep its bad contracts and mistakes under the rug, but the reality of Ottawa’s situation is that the free spending days under Eugene Melnyk are over. Barring an ownership change or some unforeseen set of circumstances that sees the organization discover new revenue streams that can boost the team’s bottom line, this is the reality of Ottawa’s situation. Complaining about it is fruitless because fans should be emphasizing the importance of player evaluation, lineup optimization, scouting and analytics – you know, things that the organization actually has some control over.”
Regardless of what you think about Ottawa’s stance on having to make dollar-in and dollar-out trades, it’s not a situation that is unique to them. It’s a construct of the salary cap system and afflicts every team within the league.
It’s not like the National Hockey League is Major League Baseball. The Senators aren’t like the Oakland Athletics who have to compete against the New York Yankees’ limitless coffer. Thanks to a salary cap that mitigates some of the competitive advantages big market clubs have over the less fortunate, Ottawa’s not that relatively far removed from the big spenders. Per HockeysCap.com, they are currently approximately $7.5-million below the imposed $71.4-million cap ceiling.
Of course it would be ideal for the Senators to have the financial capacity to bury bad contracts or buy out mistakes after they’re made, but with the exception of a Colin Greening or even a David Legwand, it’s not like there’s a realistic chance the organization would have bought out a Milan Michalek, a Chris Neil or even a Jared Cowen. The organization has repeatedly proven that it values the intangibles that veterans bring, even if they come at the cost of diminished returns. And thanks to the injuries and projected upside that the Senators believed Cowen could reach, they wanted to give him every opportunity to prove he doesn’t belong.
Moreover, some fans believe that having a few extra million to kick around means that the organization could address some of its glaring weaknesses, but it’s a false equivalency. Whether it’s through free agency or the trade market, good players have to become available.
The Senators can’t spend for the sake of spending. Due diligence and proper player valuations still have to be made so that the organization spends efficiently.
Being a small budget organization should never preclude it from having skill. It just places an emphasis on player valuation and drafting and developing talent that can be promoted from within or parlayed as quantity to get higher quality talents in return.
Having more money to spend on payroll will help mitigate management’s mistakes, but shouldn’t the ultimate goal be to improve player valuations, employ market principles, exploit market inefficiencies and mitigate the risks so these mistakes happen less frequently?
It is what I would emphasize, but hey, I’m not the one trying to sway the public into getting behind my IllumiNATION proposal for LeBreton Flats by stating that a downtown arena would allow me to spend more on payroll.
Erik Karlsson wasn’t alone in discussing the Senators’ skill level, head coach Dave Cameron questioned whether or not members of the roster had it in them to be regulars at the NHL level.
Cameron’s comment are via Sportsnet:
“For me it’s almost like it’s too hard for some guys to play the right way every night,” he said. “And we’re 50-some games into this year… and we said at the start of the year we’ll know what we are in terms of players and right now, when you drop off like that and that’s not the first time we’ve done it, I’m starting to think it might be too hard for guys to be able to play in the National Hockey League at a high level.”
It’s always easier for a coach or a player to criticize work ethic and compete levels because those are things that can be controlled at the individual level. It’s not like Cameron can come out and throw management under the bus for not acquiring, drafting or developing enough talent.
What’s frustrating is that this team continues to lose playing a lineup that is littered with character guys and players who simply cannot play with the puck and do it with pace.
Throughout the course of the season, more skilled players Chris Wideman and Shane Prince have taken back seats to less talented alternatives.
Looking at the lineups that get pencilled in, it’s pretty transparent as to what kind of player Dave Cameron tends to favour. More importantly, the Senators aren’t having a ton of success icing these lineups, so you can’t help but wonder when players like Prince will get a bigger opportunity to showcase what they can do because right now, it’s not working.
When Cameron stated, “Guys can come up and do it short term. That’s what last year was, it was short term,” when describing how the team had success down the stretch last season, it makes it seem like he didn’t learn from the experience.
Injuries to inconsequential players helped the Senators and provided opportunities for the young players to step in without fear of losing their spots.
Prince should get that opportunity to play a bigger role because if anything, they’re not successful and it’s an internal move that has positive upside. If he can remedy the third line and help drive possession like Erik Condra did last season, it might restore some balance to Ottawa’s lines.
At this point of the season, there’s nothing to lose.
Melnyk/Peritz Media Tour
Senators owner Eugene Melnyk and Daniel Peritz, vice-president of Canderel who is part of the DCDLS group, participated in a media blitz yesterday appearing together on a number of radio programs to educate and promote their respective LeBreton Flats redevelopment proposals.
On CBC Morning, host Robyn Bresnahan asked Peritz a series of questions pertaining to the inclusion of an NHL arena in his group’s prosposal which ultimately led to Peritz questioning whether Melnyk was being sincere when he states that he will never sell the Ottawa Senators.
On why DCDLS would include an arena as part of its proposal…
“Listening to the public, there’s no question there seems to be an enormous amount of support for the Senators to be playing in the downtown (core). It would have been foolish for us to look at a site of this size – probably the only location for the ability to relocate an arena into the downtown core – and ignore that fact. So our attitude was, it was almost an imperative that we include it in our plan.”
On the inclusion of an NHL arena being a problem if there’s no team to play in it…
“Of course and that’s something that we think that this comes back to the NCC has got to make a decision on who is going to have control of the land. And we think that once that decision has been (made), the dynamics of what happens with the team possibly changes.”
On Eugene Melnyk publicly stating that he’s not going to sell…
“If I were Mr. Melnyk, I would be saying the exact same thing.”
On him thinking that Eugene Melnyk is bluffing…
“In a competitive situation (Melnyk would be looking to say anything that creates leverage for his group).”
On how necessary it is to have a hockey team for DCDLS’ bid to work…
“The thing about our plan is that the arena is important, but not central to our plan. So our attitude is: we have all of the building blocks, we have a project which we’d like to start building as early as 2017 if we can get all of the things in order, the Canadensis walk – which is a 2 km long botanical garden which is the backbone of our entire plan – is something that we want to start right away. And many of the pavilions and residential components in the mixed-use district, we would start immediately. We have people interested and we want to start as quickly as we can.”
Peritz and Melnyk’s interviews can be streamed below.
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/244036908″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”450″ iframe=”true” /] [soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/244037399″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”450″ iframe=”true” /]Other News and Notes:
– Chris Phillips isn’t ready to throw in the towel on playing this season, but the odds of him coming back are long.
– Apparently the Ottawa Chamber of Commerce has released a statement saying that it has “identified the RendezVous LeBreton Group proposal as the most viable and likely to be realized.”
– If you haven’t already, read John Scott’s piece on The Players’ Tribune detailing how he has handled and endured the All-Star voting process these past few weeks. It’s impossible not to come away pulling for Scott and although I never intended on watching this year’s iteration of the game, I won’t miss it now.
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