The Ottawa Senators Have A Bright Future. But Will Anyone Care?
Some time in the future, professional sports will return. The various major sports leagues have all been on an indefinite hold thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, but all seem to be working on plans to resume in some form in the future, without fans to begin with. The PGA Tour announced its first post-COVID tournament for mid-June, without spectators. And all-time hockey great Wayne Gretzky expressed his optimism that the NHL could itself resume play this summer.
If the NHL does resume for its playoffs, the Ottawa Senators will not be one of the participants in the contest for the Stanley Cup. Mired in a rebuild that has seen them near the bottom of the league ranks, the team from Canada’s capital city is nonethless well positioned to build a championship-worthy core of young talent. But it may be hard to sell the team’s traumatized fanbase on such promise.
Despite their poor record this season, the Senators do boast a collection of impressive young players already on their roster. Forward Anthony Duclair was considered a talented underachiever, bouncing around five teams before his twenty-fourth birthday, before breaking out this season and leading the team in goals in the first half. Young winger Brady Tkachuk, not even twenty-one years old, earned his first NHL All Star selection this year. And Thomas Chabot had a breakout season where he established himself as a potential no.1 defender.
The Senators also have a wealth of prospects and future draft picks to add to the core already on the NHL team. In a recent ranking of the NHL’s top 100 prospects, the Senators boasted seven prospects, and will be bolstering those numbers at the upcoming NHL Draft (whenever it is rescheduled for after being postponed due to COVID-19). The Senators have two picks that are projected to be in the top five of the first round (pending a lottery), their own and that of the San Jose Sharks, the latter of which they received when they traded San Jose their superstar defenseman Erik Karlsson. They also have a pick projected to be later in the first round from the New York Islanders, acquired by trading center Jean-Gabriel Pageau at this year’s trade deadline.
Ottawa Senators fans should, by all accounts, feel optimistic about their team returning to its former glory. But the fanbase seems to be the most downtrodden and dejected in all of hockey. That is largely due to their frustration with owner Eugene Melnyk, who has been called the worst sports owner in North America. Derided not only for his unwillingness to spend on the team, but also for his volatility (even creating an army of online bots to harass his critics), Melnyk is so despised that fans even paid for multiple billboards calling for him to sell the team.
As a byproduct of Melnyk’s stinginess, the team has, in recent years, failed to hold onto its star players that fans grew to know and love, players who were the stars of Ottawa’s miraculous run to the Eastern Conference Finals in 2017.The trade of Erik Karlsson to the Sharks may bear rich rewards in the draft, but losing a player like that will never be easy for a fanbase to handle.
Perhaps even harsher for fans was the trade of winger Mark Stone to the Vegas Golden Knights. Stone was not only one of Ottawa’s best players, but seemed to love the fans as much as they loved him. The bond between player and fanbase was so strong that Stone was brought to the brink of tears on a press call following the trade- not only did he want to stay in Ottawa, but had dreams of becoming the team’s next captain as well.
As if to add insult to injury, Stone has put up career numbers since joining Vegas, showing his former team just what it is that they are missing. And unlike the thirty-year old Karlsson, Stone is only twenty-seven, still in his prime. He could have served as a mentor and leader to the next generation of Senators players as they made their way up through the ranks of the organization, and given the fans a valuable sense of continuity through the team’s transition period.
When such a strong bond between player and fanbase is broken, it is hard to ask fans to take such a chance again. Why should get emotionally invested in the likes of Brady Tkachuk or Thomas Chabot, when they might just be traded away in a few years? Let alone become financially invested, by buying jerseys, or better yet (from a business perspective) investing in a season ticket package? Such an endeavor comes to seem pointless in light of all that has happened in Ottawa over the past several years.
Ottawa’s attendance record stands as a final verdict on all of the damage that has been done to the team’s fanbase over the past few years. In 2019–20, it stood at dead last out of all of the NHL’s thirty-one teams. The fact that a team playing its home games in the capital of one of the biggest hockey nations in the world is failing to outdraw the likes of the Florida Panthers and Arizona Coyotes boggles the mind.
Senators management does seem to have at least some awareness of what they need to do to begin making amends with their fanbase. A key first step to making things right was made in September of 2019, when the team signed Thomas Chabot to an eight- year contract extension. But unless the team shows similar commitment to keeping its young players around for the long haul, then all of the potential that they have assembled in their young players will be for naught. The sad truth is, as long as the poor ownership situation in Ottawa persists, then the team will have an uphill battle in rebuilding the loyalty of its dedicated fanbase.
