Five Thoughts for a Friday: Bring on the Bad Teams

Well they haven't exactly made it easy to stomach the first leg of the season, but at least we get to roll into the weekend feeling slightly better about the Ottawa Senators and their place in the NHL's eastern Conference. To reiterate what Nate said in the recap, we have Thomas Chabot. We have Josh Norris. We have Linus Ullmark. I feel grateful for all of them. Also we have Stützle, Tkachuk, and Giroux. The team has tread water on many nights without Zub and without Sanderson on top of his game. This team has a really good core. Don't let it go to waste.

Canadian National Garbage Program

I have no idea what it will take to get everyone to come around and join me in my disdain for Hockey Canada. Even before the program got into this habit of drawing bad publicity, I could never stand the Canadian national team. And yes I realize the vast majority of people have a sense of patriotism that I lack. Nonetheless, coming from an underdog city like Ottawa, I could never convince myself to cheer for the equivalent of the Canadiens or Yankees of international hockey. Give me Kazakhstan every day of the week. If all of the genuinely reprehensible things that have come to light in recent years and the more harmless boneheaded roster announcements from earlier this week haven't converted at least a few more people to boo hockey Canada then I dunno what else to say.

Youth Centre

After years of waiting for all of Ottawa's core centres to finally all get healthy simultaneously, I regret to say that the results of having all of Tim Stützle, Josh Norris, Shane Pinto, and Ridley Greig in the lineup together haven't exactly lived up to the hype (over heart). And I realize I say this at the risk of sounding like I take all of this talent for granted. I feel very fortunate to see all of these players on the Senators’ roster and I can't sufficiently express my gratitude for their health. As we’ve discussed at length this season, it just feels like Ottawa's third and fourth centres haven't yet had the breakouts we anticipated and in my mind I always circle back to the option of having someone like Claude Giroux at centre to help move things along. I love everything that Giroux has contributed to the Senators and I don't necessarily think the team can ask much more of someone at his age (spoiler alert, he and I are the same age). It just seems like a squandered opportunity to have someone with a billion hockey IQ not mentoring some younger linemates like Pinto or Greig until the role of NHL centre clicks for those younger teammates.

Pretenders and Contenders

Kurt Vonnegut has this quote (actually he has thousands of them) that always sticks with me, in the introduction to Mother Night when he said that, “We are what we pretend to be.”* And in the context of the Ottawa Senators I often ask myself where we draw the line in terms of their badness. When playing against teams like the Sharks and the Ducks I tell myself that those teams actually stink and that the Sens have just had a hard time getting into gear. Fans of other teams would probably just say Ottawa stinks too. And looking at the standings they have a valid point. I imagine even fans of the worst teams would argue that their team just needs a few lucky bounces to get back in the playoff picture. Are the Sens pretending to be a non-playoff team or are they just a non-playoff team? Are they pretending to contend or contending among pretenders? Everyone contends. Everyone pretends. Welcome to the postmodern condition.

*Author's note: I realize that Mother Night deals with the very serious subject of Nazism and that I don't have anything that grave to discuss and I don't want the reference to come across in bad taste

What did I miss?

I ask this with the utmost sincerity: When did the Senators become a good defensive team? Based purely on the results, I really thought this team seemed like a carbon copy of previous years (average on-ice trends and comically unlucky goaltending). Putting my eye test against the mathematical genius's data (Micah Blake McCurdy in this case) Travis Green might have actually made some progress with the defensive corps. I consider myself as sceptical as the next fan, and damn, this floored me to see:

PDO, yes or no?

I think given the occasional struggles of Linus Ullmark and Anton Forsberg this season and the scoring slumps from a couple of Ottawa's higher-profile forwards, I have gotten into the habit of once again writing off the Senators' November struggles to good old fashioned bad luck. After all, the heat map above suggests the Sens have learned to play well enough to win. At the same time, the last two games I've covered, against the Sharks and not-Coyotes, featured some all-time PDOing in favour of the Senators. I would argue a 2-1 win like last night's, even when outshooting the opponent takes a lot of luck. I don't know that I have a point to make here except that at this point I still have no idea where to pin this team on the XY axes of good-bad and lucky-unlucky. Hang on to your daipies, babies. It's only December.