Sterling Predictions Revisited, Part 1

With the Ottawa Senators in the midst of a two week hiatus, now seems as good a time as any to revisit our pre-season predictions. As I've written many times before, this is both a) important to hold yourself accountable and b)a fun exercise!

In Part 1 of our Sterling Predictions feature, I asked the staff the following:

In his first off-season as GM of the Ottawa Senators, Steve Staios made significant changes to the roster. Linus Ullmark, David Perron, Nick Jensen, and Michael Amadio all figure to play prominent roles during the 2024-25 campaign. How will each of them fare?

To kick things off, the consensus was that Ullmark would be very good, and in that regard we have been proven correct. It must be noted that Ullmark has missed time with injury, but when he's played his .915 all-situations SV% and GSAA/60 both rank 7th in the league. He's been everything we could have expected. Now just don't get injured in an international competition, Linus!

The staff was a lot more mixed on Perron, with some hopeful he'd be a helpful if minor contributor while others were skeptical he'd achieve even that. Given his start to the year and his struggle with injuries I'm going to give Perron an incomplete grade. That said I don't think his performance in the games he's played has been what Staios and co. hoped it would be, and we weren't wrong to be mostly skeptical of him.

The staff's view of Amadio was that he wouldn't bring much offensively but that he'd be a useful play-driver on the third line and that has mostly been true. I'd feel a bit better if he had more than five goals at this juncture, but expecting anything more than 15 was setting unrealistically high expectations in the first place. He's been given tough deployment in a checking role where the main expectation is that the other team won't generate offense. Against that, Amadio's been fine.

Lastly, I'd say we were at least partially wrong about Jensen...but in a good way. While the staff as a group believed Jensen would be serviceable, I'd say he's been actually pretty good – certainly better than I expected. That said, I do feel like this part of my prediction has basically come 100% true:

 Jensen will be fine, which will be more than enough thanks to a return to health from Chabot and Jake Sanderson and Artem Zub handling a lot of tough match-ups. The pair will post very strong numbers, and Jensen will get an oversized amount of credit for "stabilizing" Chabot.

Given how often I get things wrong, it's nice to remember that I also sometimes get things right.

On a scale of 1-10 for accuracy, I'd give the staff a solid 7 for our efforts in Part 1. We were pretty much bang on for Ullmark, pretty close on both Amadio and Perron, and directionally correct, if a bit too pessimistic on Jensen.

How about you? Did you make a prediction in the comments section? Have the newcomers played out the way you expected?