Five Thoughts for Friday: Early Season Trends, Cap Machinations, and More!

With the month of October now officially behind us, we're getting into the meat of the NHL season. You can't win the Stanley Cup in November but, as the Ottawa Senators have shown us on far too many occasions in recent years, you can lose it. How does the team look going into this critical month? I've got a few thoughts on their play on the ice, as well as a couple of items off the ice.

The Finishing Has Been Elite

If it feels like the Sens have been scoring on something like every other shot they've been taking, that's because they have. As of Thursday evening, the Sens had been converting on 13.48% of their shots on net – fourth highest in the entire league. If you look through the lens of expected goals, Ottawa's notched 37 on 23.8 xG. Here's what that looks like:

This has been especially true on the power play, where Ottawa is scoring on an unbelievable 42.9% of their chances. Tim Stützle, who couldn't score to save his life last season, has five goals already in just nine games – a 31.3 shooting percentage will help with that.

You probably already know were this is going. Are the Sens on a bit of a heater? Yes. They're not going to keep burying their chances like this, and it'd be foolish not to expect a cold streak or two as the year goes on. When the shooting luck dries up, they'll need to find new ways to win. That'll be the true test of the new look squad.

Noah Gregor Skates Very Fast

When the Sens signed Noah Gregor this off-season, my expectation was that he'd be a mainstay of the fourth line whose main attribute was strong skating and not much beyond that. So far in his nine games with Ottawa I haven't seen much to change my mind about his role on the team, but I must say that he's an even better skater than I expected. It's not hard to see how he continues to get NHL playing time without a lot of scoring or particularly strong underlying shot metrics: he can absolutely burn, and he's got a half-decent shot to boot. When Gregor gets going in open ice, he can turn a defender just by taking them wide; there's not a lot of guys that can do that in the NHL.

Now, I've also seen him nearly skate headlong into the end boards a couple times when the defender was able to cut off his net drive so there are limitations to his offensive repertoire, but his speed is an omnipresent threat. The Sens have been getting cooked when he's been on the ice so far (just 39.37 xGF% at 5v5) – will that change? Or is he just another guy who can skate fast and not much else?

The Boston Bruins Might Finally Be Done

I feel like I've been writing various versions of this Thought for several years, but now, at long last, I think the Boston Bruins are actually cooked. They're off to a 4-6-1 record, and they have looked terrible in the process. This isn't a team that's getting the better of the play and just having the bounces go against them: they're getting outshot, and out-chanced on the regular. With Linus Ullmark famously departed, they've lost half of the duo that cleaned up the breakdowns too. As a Sens fan, this couldn't have happened at a better time with the Florida Panthers, Toronto Maple Leafs, and Tampa Bay Lightning all looking like strong squads. The Sens' path to the play-offs is likely through the wild card, and it would be a lot better for my personal well-being if Boston wasn't a team they have to claw past.

Cap Machinations

Only the real sickos probably noticed, but the Sens sent Adam Gaudette and Zack Ostapchuk down to the minors on Wednesday

Then they recalled them on Thursday:

Why are they doing this? To create cap space. Gaudette and Ostapchuk don't require waivers (in Gaudette's case for now, anyways), and every day that they are in the AHL instead of the NHL their cap hit is lessened because a player's cap hit is accrued on a daily basis. The NHL season is 203 days long (if I counted right) and so the Sens are saving roughly $8k a day against the cap every time they send both players down for a day. There aren't a lot of pure days off over the course of an NHL season before the trade deadline, I'd guess 30 or so, which means the Sens could open up maybe $240k in space if they maximized this tactic. That $240k is worth something like $1MM at the deadline. Is it nothing? No. Is it a whole hell of a lot? Also no.

It's important to note here that the Sens took Wednesday off completely, no practice, which is why they were able to pull off the paper transactions. In order for a player to practice, like Ostapchuk and Gaudette did on Thursday, they need to be rostered with the NHL team. The thinking basically goes: if you are doing NHL duties then you need to be on the NHL roster. Seems reasonable enough to me.

Besides creating cap space, though, having the players on the AHL roster instead of the NHL roster also means that they get paid at their AHL rate. For both Gaudette and Ostapchuk that's a meaningful difference: Gaudette earns $775k a year in the NHL and $450k a year in the AHL, so his AHL daily rate is just less than 60% of his NHL daily rate. Ostapchuk's delta is much more pronounced as he earns just $80k a year in the AHL compared to $775k a year in the NHL, so effectively a 90% cut on his daily rate.

The fact of not paying the players at their owed rate as NHLers rubs me the wrong way. I know why the Sens are doing this, they are giving themselves every competitive edge they possibly can, and they are far from the only team to be engaging in these paper transactions. This isn't a complaint specifically about the Sens. For someone like Ostapchuk, in particular, who is far from established and hasn't earned any real money from pro hockey yet, that difference in day-to-day funds could very well be noticeable. The Sens are using him as an NHL player, that's why he's playing the games and practicing with the team, but they aren't paying him his full due by papering him back to the AHL where they can. As long as the CBA is written as it is, teams are going to repeat this strategy. It's a loophole I'd very much like to see closed because players deserve to be paid fairly for their service.

Ian Mendes Helps Out

Friend of the site and all-around good guy Ian Mendes was one of Ottawa's big off-season additions. Anyone who has been following the Sens for any length of time knows Ian from his time covering the team. And if there's anything that you can say for sure about Ian, it's that he tries to help out where he can. So earlier this week, when he noticed that a lot of Sens fans seemed to be experiencing technical challenges watching the games, Ian sprung into action.

It's a little thing, but it's refreshing to see a senior team executive who is really thinking of the fan experience and taking concrete action. When Michael Andlauer took over he promised a "best-in-class" organization. There might be some ways to go on the ice, but off the ice it's been nothing but a success – and having quality people who care about the fans is a huge part of that.