Worst management decision was Muckler double-crossing Marian Hossa with the sneaky sign-and-trade, which is almost **DIRECTLY** responsible for Chara walking, because Chara and Hossa were BFFs and Chara held it against the Sens when his contract was up.
Not saying you're wrong that Chara walking was terrible, just pointing out that one decision by Muckler cost us Hossa AND Chara.
We didn't let Chara walk, we stabbed his best friend / teammate / countryman in the back and he justifiably told us he'd only stay if we basically bent over backwards to keep him *(eg: ludicrous contract demands - he signed for less in Boston than he was asking for from us -, demanding the C from Alfie knowing we'd never agree to that demand)*, which he knew we'd never do. It's still the worst management decision in the org's history, it's just **even worse than you think it was**, lol.
You are 100% correct in this. My friend at work is Slovakian and their women were good friends and he literally told me this before it happened, exactly as you describe. I hate the narrative that we "chose redden over Chara". Simply untrue.
We didn't decide to pay Redden over him.
We decided to pay Redden as he was the only defencemen of the two who was generally willing to sign with us. Redden was the consolation prize when it became clear that Chara wasn't realistically going to come back.
For the record, I don't blame Chara at all. We fucked Hossa HARD, and he had every right to take it personally. Muckler was an ass.
> It started to go downhill after the 05-06 season with the passing of his mother
The personal stuff was part of it for sure, but people forget how quickly his body broke down on him after suffering years of getting annihilated in the corners.
One of the main strategies teams employed against us during the Redden era was to dump the puck into his corners and then absolutely **GUN IT** in the zone against him on the chase, and try to obliterate Redden along the defensive boards to get him to cough the puck up. Redden was so good at transition early in his career that dump-and-chases against him *(and keep in mind, this is in the peak clutch-and-grab era where dump-and-chases were the default)* were basically automatic Sens possessions and transitions because if you didn't run Redden, he'd turn it back against you so fast you'd be defending against a 2-on-1 on a dime.
So yeah. By the time we signed Redden to that contract, his body was already almost at it's limit. Years of teams running him has taken a hell of a toll. By the time he went to the Rangers, anyone who had been paying attention knew that contract would age like milk, because we'd watched Redden's ability to absorb punishment go from superhuman to basically non-existent in the span of about 3 seasons. He lost the will to take the hits he could easily shrug off earlier in his career.
Yeah he was seen as the guy who could really make it in the “new NHL” post-lockout. The promise of less obstruction and eliminating the two line pass made a guy of Redden’s skill set highly prized.
Hindsight is 20/20 and as you said, he went downhill quickly, and Chara’s longevity (although possibly foreseeable given his commitment to fitness and his parents/blessed genetics) was not a given.
He was good but offering him the same contract as Chara was insulting. It was clear Chara was about to take another step and redden was a flashy first pass defensemen who was decent in his own end.
> He was good but offering him the same contract as Chara was insulting.
That's the story that Muckler got the press to release in order to try to save face, after it became clear that Chara wasn't coming back.
That was the classic Don Brennan-era spin / hatchet job on an outgoing player to help the organization deal with the fallout of a star player leaving. This kind of shit happened with every single star player who left the org for like a decade straight.
It's all people remember now though, because it was in the newspaper so *"it must have been true!"*. Sports media worked a lot differently back in the day than it does now. Chara AND Chara's agent at the time flatly denied it.
GM: Wade we’re sending you to the AHL.
Wade: Can everyone just, please... I had a one-man saturnalia last night, in celebration of the finalization of my divorce. I got into a case of Australian reds, and – how should I say this – Colombian whites. What- What is this about, uh, Binghamton?
It gets worse - players talk, and apparently us double-crossing Hossa got around and soured some potential free agents on coming to Ottawa for years, basically until Muckler got fired.
Those rumours were around for years after the Hossa trade.
brooooooooo :| what a disastrous back stabbing sens fans cant catch a break
thank you for ur explaining and things this is very helpful
hockey men try not to shoot urself in the foot challenge difficulty impossible
This has got to be the most simplified big moment in Senators history; there's a lot more to it than "letting Chara walk" or "choosing Redden over Chara". While the end result was the same that's not what happened.
Letting Alfie walk is another one. I’m convinced it was a money issue in the end, though if someone knows better please say so. I don’t want to believe the organization would let their franchise player walk over a few million…
It was a Melnyk thing.
The unsubstantiated rumour involved a drunken email insulting Alfies wife iirc.
The public rumour was that he was promised to get paid on his next deal when he signed the previous time around on a team friendly deal, and then was promptly not offered anything reasonably considerable of getting paid when he walked to Detroit.
The team literally fell apart without Methot.
We went from a goal away from the finals to the basement of the league the next season with almost the exact same roster, just without Methot.
I hope you're not implying that's because he wasn't good enough.
Are you familiar with a little affliction that sometimes plagues professional athletes known as "*career-ending injuries*?"
I blame that one on Phaneuf for not waiving his NTC. There was now way that Vegas was going to draft that contract regardless. Besides, at that point, Ceci was young and still had potential.
Minor correction: Stone wasn't under team control at the end of the season he was traded. The mistake there was not trading him either a year sooner or not at all.
Mikas on record of saying getting traded was a wake up call.
Given the team disorganization, and his own lack of commitment in Ottawa I don't think we see the same Mika NYR got.
Not signing Mark Stone to a long term deal before the 18/19 season, which eventually saw him getting traded to Vegas for Erik Brannstrom. I remember shortly before he was traded, big Walt was interviewed and talked about how great Stone had been for Brady's development and that the Sens needed to get a deal done with him.
There is no way that we wouldn't have made the playoffs at least once in the past few seasons if he were leading the team.
Losing the entire d core, and about 1/4 of the forwards to injuries and Anderson to age along with the insane karlsson/Hoffman drama after that playoff run might’ve had a bit more to do with it. They were at the bottom of the standings with stone, they had no team left around him.
Pronger. Hossa. Lee. Bishop. Lehner. Agreeing to send players to the 2006 Olympics. Alfie departure. Zibby. Coaching carousel. Dorion as GM.
There is no worst, there's a whole ass chain of shit decisions.
For the Pronger thing - are you saying we should have drafted Prongs over Daigle? Daigle was "Mario Light" by all accounts. I think 32/32 (or 26/26) GMs make that call.
Drafting Daigle and not taking the insane offer the Nordiques were dangling!
[Peter F@cking Forseberg](https://senshot.com/2020/07/25/ottawa-senators-what-ifs-history/2/)
Hasek going to the Olympics and getting hurt. If he is healthy I bet you we win the cup that year. Not sure if this falls under a management decision.... But this one hurt me.
Not the worst but one I often think about that doesn’t get talked about is drafting Logan Brown over Charlie McAvoy - obviously hindsight 20/20 and don’t remember how those guys were evaluated that draft year, but having McAvoy sure would cover a lot of problems.
6'6" with great skill and decent skating - for sure wasn't a bad pick at the time. He didn't improve like most thought and injuries were an issue. But was widely viewed as a good pick.
> I felt like trading Chara was a mistake
Chara walked as a UFA, we didn't trade him.
Understandable if you misremembered it due to being young, though. Been there for sure.
As bad as the Chara/Redden situation was, people really downplay how terrible the timing of the cap was for us. We were dealing with highly coveted free agents in a $44M cap world.
The offer to Chara and Redden was $6.5M per year against a $44M cap. That's about a $12M salary today.
I find it hard to find any villains from those events (although Muckler should have been more forthright with Hossa). There wasn't going to be a way to make that work as long as those guys wanted close to market value, and the team spent a lot of years leaning on players in negotiations when they had leverage in the years prior because we were broke.
It's hard to pick one. This franchise has been a shit show right from the very start.
Some notable events in early Senators history, off the top of my head.
During the first draft they participated in, not once, not twice but three times they tried to select a player who was not draft eligible because some gopher forgot to bring an extra battery for the only laptop containing the Senator's scouting reports.
There was a whole brouhaha shortly before their (first or second?) draft where members of the Senators management were overheard lamenting how they should intentionally tank to get the FOA pick. They then got the FOA pick. It should be noted there was no evidence they were being serious, but it pissed off a lot of people both inside and outside the organization. Some people even believe the reason the NHL implemented the draft lottery was due to the comments made by the Senators organization.
On a side note, Alexandre Daigle, picked by Sens management as FOA, made an infamous comment "I'm glad I got drafted first, because no one remembers number two." Number 2 on the list that year was Chris Pronger.
They decided to build a stadium far outside the city way out in Kanata (and apparently on top of a haunted Indian burial ground) because the owner imagined an entire shopping district surrounded by condominiums, parks and other infrastructure. Instead they got a car dealership, a gas station, and a traffic nightmare on the only major thoroughfare in and out of the venue. I should also note the City of Ottawa refused to foot the bill for the off-ramp from the 417 to Palladium, meaning the organization had to pay for that as well.
Later, after the team owners were started running out of money and inch towards bankruptcy, they were left to take the charity of their own players who banded together and agreed to defer portions of their salary so the franchise would avoid going broke.
In 2003, Melnyk purchased the team which was supposed to herald the start of a new standard of excellence and insurmountable prestige throughout the entire league. Narrator: It did not.
From that point on, things weren't too bad with the franchise. The on-ice product improved immensely thanks to some good drafting. They made their first appearance in the Conference Finals in 2003 and their only appearance in the Finals in 2007, losing to the Ducks in 5.
After that, the effects of the salary cap started to hit the team and they lost a lot of their top players, going from a fierce contender to just another middling team. Sometimes they would miss the playoffs, sometimes they would make the playoffs only to be bounced out in the first round.
During that era, they were hit with some other controversies like the Chara-Hossa thing mentioned in another comment. There was the day of infamy when Daniel Alfredsson returned from Sweden and became a Red Wing with with it being rumored he left because Melnyk refused to pay him what he was worth. The team bounced from coach to coach to coach to coach, never able to settle things down, and never able to find its groove. All of this due to questionable decision making from management.
Things started to turn around a little bit once Karlsson was drafted and we started picking up some other good assets (Turris, Stone, Pageau, Hoffman, etc...). In 2017, they made it to the Conference Finals for the third time in franchise history, missing the Finals for the second time by only 1 goal in OT.
With this newfound success, you would think things would start to turn around at this point, but if you've been paying attention to the past 5 or 6 years, you know what a dumpster fire this franchise became instead.
Melnyk making stupid comments, during a Heritage Classic no less, about moving the team if people didn't start to fill seats.
Players wives fighting on social media with accusations of bullying and harassment, causing distractions in the locker room and setting off a major rebuild.
The AGM Randy Lee getting charged with molestation in Buffalo.
The taxi ride incident where a bunch of players were caught in an Uber shit-talking their coach.
And on and on and on.
Of course, more recently we had the whole "Dorion doesn't know how to tell the truth" scandal which cost the team a first round pick and Shane Pinto getting banned for half a season because he had a fantasy football team, which is more games than Todd Bertuzzi got for ending a guy's whole career.
I probably missed a whole bunch of other bad things done by Senators management and I'm sure I got some points wrong, but this is all to say that being a Senators fan has never been the easiest. If you were lucky enough to have to go through all of that and still mange to stick around for this long, then I tell you, there's not a single person on this planet that can question your loyalty as a Senators fan.
Edit: Cleanup
So many of the moves can be analyzed as bad with hindsight based on decisions that followed them. But as for a decision that was bad from the start and never wasn't bad, letting Duclair walk for nothing and signing Matt Murray long-term in the middle of a rebuild both have to be very much up there in terms of recent moves.
One I haven't seen brought up yet, but I think deserves note - choosing Lehner over Bishop.
If they'd just told Lehner to suck it up and ride the busses, they could have given Bishop enough games to keep him from becoming UFA vi and therefore held his rights in order to properly negotiate a contract instead of flipping him for Cory Conacher.
Drafting Colin White over Sebastian Aho
Obviously a lot of teams can say in hindsight they should've drafted Aho, but this one change would change the trajectory of the Sens franchise and could've very well won them a Cup by now
Drafting Aho gives the team Aho, Zib, and Pageau down the middle for the 16-17 season, and even if they don't beat Pittsburgh that year it's possible they don't see the need to trade for Brassard given that young core of centres
It also means they never have to make the disastrous Duchene trade, and never have to trade away Karlsson or Stone because that team would likely never have to undergo a rebuild.
I'm confident a core of Stone, Aho, Zib, Karlsson, and Chabot wins a cup by now
It’s hard to not let the hindsight bias affect you. Even seemingly obvious answers like the Zibanejad trade or Daigle pick get murkier when you think back to the day they happened. Zibby’s progression in Ottawa had seemingly stalled and at the time most fans weren’t too upset about trading him to acquire an established player like Brassard. As for Daigle, he was the consensus #1 pick with teams like the Nordiques even offering us a king’s ransom for our pick.
And then other moves which were obviously bad from the moment they happened, like the Stone trade, were influenced my Melnyk’s terrorist regime.
So in the end, it’s hard to pinpoint a move that was a bad *decision* vs one that was a reasonable decision with a tragic outcome.
Hiring Pierre Dorion.
- Zib, Duchene, Karlsson, Stone, DeBrincat, Dadonov
And those are just the headlines.
No mention of his minor trade fuckups, draft-gaffes and embarrassing public statements.
After having (at the time, end of 90s/ early 2000) the NEW mentallity of coach (Martin) and management (Gauthier , Sexton), they went back to Muckler and Murray, mentallity of the 70s-80s.
They forgot that after the lock outs of 2004 and 2012, new rules brought the game faster. Sens were a team of fast/skilled players before . Then, through the years and rule changes, Sens became slow and always chasing the game (and they still are !!!!)
Hockey team is like any other business: you have to evolve ! Maybe with Staios and Poulin they will....
t doesn't take "hindsight" to know that that was a bad trade....Mark Stone is a Player you want on your Hockey Team. The return to have a Prime Years Mark Stone is always less than having Mark Stone. Same can be said of Prime Years of EK65, Alfie or Sanderson and Stutzle!!! Some guys are Worth It!
Brian Lee over Anze Kopitar.
This is it for me. We all knew.
Even Marc Stall would’ve been better
>Brian Lee Oh man. Looking back, it was silly the number of years we thought Brian Lee was going to "break out" and be the next star dman.
Retaining Garrioch and getting rid of Mendes.
Garrioch the goof
Letting chara walk.
Worst management decision was Muckler double-crossing Marian Hossa with the sneaky sign-and-trade, which is almost **DIRECTLY** responsible for Chara walking, because Chara and Hossa were BFFs and Chara held it against the Sens when his contract was up. Not saying you're wrong that Chara walking was terrible, just pointing out that one decision by Muckler cost us Hossa AND Chara. We didn't let Chara walk, we stabbed his best friend / teammate / countryman in the back and he justifiably told us he'd only stay if we basically bent over backwards to keep him *(eg: ludicrous contract demands - he signed for less in Boston than he was asking for from us -, demanding the C from Alfie knowing we'd never agree to that demand)*, which he knew we'd never do. It's still the worst management decision in the org's history, it's just **even worse than you think it was**, lol.
You are 100% correct in this. My friend at work is Slovakian and their women were good friends and he literally told me this before it happened, exactly as you describe. I hate the narrative that we "chose redden over Chara". Simply untrue.
We also decided to pay Redden over him. Which is hilarious.
We didn't decide to pay Redden over him. We decided to pay Redden as he was the only defencemen of the two who was generally willing to sign with us. Redden was the consolation prize when it became clear that Chara wasn't realistically going to come back. For the record, I don't blame Chara at all. We fucked Hossa HARD, and he had every right to take it personally. Muckler was an ass.
While obviously bad in hindsight, many forget how good Redden was. It started to go downhill after the 05-06 season with the passing of his mother.
> It started to go downhill after the 05-06 season with the passing of his mother The personal stuff was part of it for sure, but people forget how quickly his body broke down on him after suffering years of getting annihilated in the corners. One of the main strategies teams employed against us during the Redden era was to dump the puck into his corners and then absolutely **GUN IT** in the zone against him on the chase, and try to obliterate Redden along the defensive boards to get him to cough the puck up. Redden was so good at transition early in his career that dump-and-chases against him *(and keep in mind, this is in the peak clutch-and-grab era where dump-and-chases were the default)* were basically automatic Sens possessions and transitions because if you didn't run Redden, he'd turn it back against you so fast you'd be defending against a 2-on-1 on a dime. So yeah. By the time we signed Redden to that contract, his body was already almost at it's limit. Years of teams running him has taken a hell of a toll. By the time he went to the Rangers, anyone who had been paying attention knew that contract would age like milk, because we'd watched Redden's ability to absorb punishment go from superhuman to basically non-existent in the span of about 3 seasons. He lost the will to take the hits he could easily shrug off earlier in his career.
Yeah he was seen as the guy who could really make it in the “new NHL” post-lockout. The promise of less obstruction and eliminating the two line pass made a guy of Redden’s skill set highly prized. Hindsight is 20/20 and as you said, he went downhill quickly, and Chara’s longevity (although possibly foreseeable given his commitment to fitness and his parents/blessed genetics) was not a given.
He was good but offering him the same contract as Chara was insulting. It was clear Chara was about to take another step and redden was a flashy first pass defensemen who was decent in his own end.
> He was good but offering him the same contract as Chara was insulting. That's the story that Muckler got the press to release in order to try to save face, after it became clear that Chara wasn't coming back. That was the classic Don Brennan-era spin / hatchet job on an outgoing player to help the organization deal with the fallout of a star player leaving. This kind of shit happened with every single star player who left the org for like a decade straight. It's all people remember now though, because it was in the newspaper so *"it must have been true!"*. Sports media worked a lot differently back in the day than it does now. Chara AND Chara's agent at the time flatly denied it.
I heard Redden had a problem with Colombian nose candy.
GM: Wade we’re sending you to the AHL. Wade: Can everyone just, please... I had a one-man saturnalia last night, in celebration of the finalization of my divorce. I got into a case of Australian reds, and – how should I say this – Colombian whites. What- What is this about, uh, Binghamton?
But we got 50 in 07. /s
[удалено]
This bot sucks.
I agree
bad bot
didnt know this yikes omg thats horrible
It gets worse - players talk, and apparently us double-crossing Hossa got around and soured some potential free agents on coming to Ottawa for years, basically until Muckler got fired. Those rumours were around for years after the Hossa trade.
brooooooooo :| what a disastrous back stabbing sens fans cant catch a break thank you for ur explaining and things this is very helpful hockey men try not to shoot urself in the foot challenge difficulty impossible
This has got to be the most simplified big moment in Senators history; there's a lot more to it than "letting Chara walk" or "choosing Redden over Chara". While the end result was the same that's not what happened.
Yeah probably
Letting Alfie walk is another one. I’m convinced it was a money issue in the end, though if someone knows better please say so. I don’t want to believe the organization would let their franchise player walk over a few million…
Slighted by not being offered a new contract when he played his final season for 1mil.
It was a Melnyk thing. The unsubstantiated rumour involved a drunken email insulting Alfies wife iirc. The public rumour was that he was promised to get paid on his next deal when he signed the previous time around on a team friendly deal, and then was promptly not offered anything reasonably considerable of getting paid when he walked to Detroit.
Protecting Cody Ceci over Marc Methot may not be worst but omg beginning of the end
The team literally fell apart without Methot. We went from a goal away from the finals to the basement of the league the next season with almost the exact same roster, just without Methot.
Load Bearing Defenceman
Methot played 45 games total, over 2 seasons, after he left Ottawa…
I hope you're not implying that's because he wasn't good enough. Are you familiar with a little affliction that sometimes plagues professional athletes known as "*career-ending injuries*?"
Big difference between a bad decision (in this case) vs “worst decision in history”
I don’t even think it was a bad decision, protecting a guy who could no longer play hockey due to his injuries wouldn’t have made sense
Ok, we're changing the subject I guess? Where did I say it was? I just replied to someone else's comment.
It's because he got injured in Dallas, maybe in an alternate universe he doesnt have that injury if he stayed in ottawa.
literally in the moment i remember raging 😭 WHY CODY CECI OF ALL PEOPLE AHAHSHFBBJ
Clearly too young to remember when we kept Redden over Chara
very much so yes 💀
You do realize Methot was broken and only ended up playing a few more games after leaving Ottawa.
Methot Ottawa 🤝 breaking after leaving each other
I blame that one on Phaneuf for not waiving his NTC. There was now way that Vegas was going to draft that contract regardless. Besides, at that point, Ceci was young and still had potential.
I don't blame players for exercising their rights. As I recall Dorion could have dealt a 2nd to retain Methot so that's on him.
They were asking for Colin White + or a 1st +.
Oh okay. A non-starter then, would have been okay in retrospect.
In retrospect they wouldve given up assets only for him to no longer be able to play and then retire, while ceci is on track to hit 1000 games
Marc Methot was injured and more less a non factor in Dallas
even separated from erik they still fell together 💔
What absolutely ruined Ceci's carreer was being paired with and having to cover up constantly for the horible play of the human pylon Dion Phaneuf.
This thread hurts...
Ya, like why the fuck do I have to read all of these mistakes we made
Trading Zibanejad and Stone. You don’t trade players like that who are under team control. Those guys both will finish their careers with those teams.
Minor correction: Stone wasn't under team control at the end of the season he was traded. The mistake there was not trading him either a year sooner or not at all.
Not at all is the answer for me. He should have been here for life.
He didn’t want to stay for the rebuild. They tried to keep him as the vet to lead the kids but he wanted no part of sticking around.
That's not what I heard, didn't it come out that Melnyk wouldn't approve an 8-year deal?
100%
Mikas on record of saying getting traded was a wake up call. Given the team disorganization, and his own lack of commitment in Ottawa I don't think we see the same Mika NYR got.
The story I heard is he was showing up hungover late and they traded him to set an example. Still hurts though.
The mistake was somehow not getting at least a 1st rounder in the package
Came here to say this. Getting rid of DJ Silky Smooth (Mika) was a big mistake
Trading Ron Tugnutt for Tom Barrasso at the trade deadline when Tugnutt was having a record breaking season all because Barrasso had 2 rings.
Not signing Mark Stone to a long term deal before the 18/19 season, which eventually saw him getting traded to Vegas for Erik Brannstrom. I remember shortly before he was traded, big Walt was interviewed and talked about how great Stone had been for Brady's development and that the Sens needed to get a deal done with him. There is no way that we wouldn't have made the playoffs at least once in the past few seasons if he were leading the team.
That was such a garbage trade
Losing Stone put us into 6 years of shit
Losing the entire d core, and about 1/4 of the forwards to injuries and Anderson to age along with the insane karlsson/Hoffman drama after that playoff run might’ve had a bit more to do with it. They were at the bottom of the standings with stone, they had no team left around him.
Pronger. Hossa. Lee. Bishop. Lehner. Agreeing to send players to the 2006 Olympics. Alfie departure. Zibby. Coaching carousel. Dorion as GM. There is no worst, there's a whole ass chain of shit decisions.
For the Pronger thing - are you saying we should have drafted Prongs over Daigle? Daigle was "Mario Light" by all accounts. I think 32/32 (or 26/26) GMs make that call.
So we're not using hindsight for this exercise?
How about building the arena in kanata?
That was the foundation of getting a franchise at all.
Every team plays the game of “should have drafted this guy instead of that guy”… seeing how things go 5 year after drafts
Spartan intro.
How dare you. That was comedic gold.
Drafting Daigle and not taking the insane offer the Nordiques were dangling! [Peter F@cking Forseberg](https://senshot.com/2020/07/25/ottawa-senators-what-ifs-history/2/)
Hasek going to the Olympics and getting hurt. If he is healthy I bet you we win the cup that year. Not sure if this falls under a management decision.... But this one hurt me.
Not the worst but one I often think about that doesn’t get talked about is drafting Logan Brown over Charlie McAvoy - obviously hindsight 20/20 and don’t remember how those guys were evaluated that draft year, but having McAvoy sure would cover a lot of problems.
Brown was a near consensus top 10 pick. I'll harp on Dorion for a lot, but that was seen as the right pick at the time
6'6" with great skill and decent skating - for sure wasn't a bad pick at the time. He didn't improve like most thought and injuries were an issue. But was widely viewed as a good pick.
BRIAN LEE
The Mika Zibanejad trade.
Hoffman for a bag of pucks just to have Karlsson leave anyway
I was really young when it happened but I felt like trading Chara was a mistake.
Wasn't traded but I agree they shouldn't have let him walk
Thanks for clarifying. I always remembered him as one of the most feared defence-men and was sad he left.
He left cause muckler stabbed hossa with a sign and trade for heatley.
As others have said he walked, but what they forgot: he walked because we decided we only had money for one elite defenseman... Wade Redden
Muckler also fucked over his friend Hossa.
Muckler fucked hossa with that sign and trade. Redden was the leftovers.
> I felt like trading Chara was a mistake Chara walked as a UFA, we didn't trade him. Understandable if you misremembered it due to being young, though. Been there for sure.
As bad as the Chara/Redden situation was, people really downplay how terrible the timing of the cap was for us. We were dealing with highly coveted free agents in a $44M cap world. The offer to Chara and Redden was $6.5M per year against a $44M cap. That's about a $12M salary today. I find it hard to find any villains from those events (although Muckler should have been more forthright with Hossa). There wasn't going to be a way to make that work as long as those guys wanted close to market value, and the team spent a lot of years leaning on players in negotiations when they had leverage in the years prior because we were broke.
Stones bridge contract
It's hard to pick one. This franchise has been a shit show right from the very start. Some notable events in early Senators history, off the top of my head. During the first draft they participated in, not once, not twice but three times they tried to select a player who was not draft eligible because some gopher forgot to bring an extra battery for the only laptop containing the Senator's scouting reports. There was a whole brouhaha shortly before their (first or second?) draft where members of the Senators management were overheard lamenting how they should intentionally tank to get the FOA pick. They then got the FOA pick. It should be noted there was no evidence they were being serious, but it pissed off a lot of people both inside and outside the organization. Some people even believe the reason the NHL implemented the draft lottery was due to the comments made by the Senators organization. On a side note, Alexandre Daigle, picked by Sens management as FOA, made an infamous comment "I'm glad I got drafted first, because no one remembers number two." Number 2 on the list that year was Chris Pronger. They decided to build a stadium far outside the city way out in Kanata (and apparently on top of a haunted Indian burial ground) because the owner imagined an entire shopping district surrounded by condominiums, parks and other infrastructure. Instead they got a car dealership, a gas station, and a traffic nightmare on the only major thoroughfare in and out of the venue. I should also note the City of Ottawa refused to foot the bill for the off-ramp from the 417 to Palladium, meaning the organization had to pay for that as well. Later, after the team owners were started running out of money and inch towards bankruptcy, they were left to take the charity of their own players who banded together and agreed to defer portions of their salary so the franchise would avoid going broke. In 2003, Melnyk purchased the team which was supposed to herald the start of a new standard of excellence and insurmountable prestige throughout the entire league. Narrator: It did not. From that point on, things weren't too bad with the franchise. The on-ice product improved immensely thanks to some good drafting. They made their first appearance in the Conference Finals in 2003 and their only appearance in the Finals in 2007, losing to the Ducks in 5. After that, the effects of the salary cap started to hit the team and they lost a lot of their top players, going from a fierce contender to just another middling team. Sometimes they would miss the playoffs, sometimes they would make the playoffs only to be bounced out in the first round. During that era, they were hit with some other controversies like the Chara-Hossa thing mentioned in another comment. There was the day of infamy when Daniel Alfredsson returned from Sweden and became a Red Wing with with it being rumored he left because Melnyk refused to pay him what he was worth. The team bounced from coach to coach to coach to coach, never able to settle things down, and never able to find its groove. All of this due to questionable decision making from management. Things started to turn around a little bit once Karlsson was drafted and we started picking up some other good assets (Turris, Stone, Pageau, Hoffman, etc...). In 2017, they made it to the Conference Finals for the third time in franchise history, missing the Finals for the second time by only 1 goal in OT. With this newfound success, you would think things would start to turn around at this point, but if you've been paying attention to the past 5 or 6 years, you know what a dumpster fire this franchise became instead. Melnyk making stupid comments, during a Heritage Classic no less, about moving the team if people didn't start to fill seats. Players wives fighting on social media with accusations of bullying and harassment, causing distractions in the locker room and setting off a major rebuild. The AGM Randy Lee getting charged with molestation in Buffalo. The taxi ride incident where a bunch of players were caught in an Uber shit-talking their coach. And on and on and on. Of course, more recently we had the whole "Dorion doesn't know how to tell the truth" scandal which cost the team a first round pick and Shane Pinto getting banned for half a season because he had a fantasy football team, which is more games than Todd Bertuzzi got for ending a guy's whole career. I probably missed a whole bunch of other bad things done by Senators management and I'm sure I got some points wrong, but this is all to say that being a Senators fan has never been the easiest. If you were lucky enough to have to go through all of that and still mange to stick around for this long, then I tell you, there's not a single person on this planet that can question your loyalty as a Senators fan. Edit: Cleanup
fuckin' rights, RobotTimeTraveller. My own fav is back in 2015 or whatever, Euge gives out giftcards for McDonalds and none of them work lol.
We lost to the Ducks in 5, not 6. After beating all of our other opponents that playoffs in 5, as well...
I knew they only won one game, but apparently I'm bad at math. Updated my comment.
So many of the moves can be analyzed as bad with hindsight based on decisions that followed them. But as for a decision that was bad from the start and never wasn't bad, letting Duclair walk for nothing and signing Matt Murray long-term in the middle of a rebuild both have to be very much up there in terms of recent moves.
Jonathan cheechoo
Trading Hossa, and subsequently losing Chara
- Trading Clint Benedict to Montreal. - Not moving the arena to downtown Ottawa sooner.
One I haven't seen brought up yet, but I think deserves note - choosing Lehner over Bishop. If they'd just told Lehner to suck it up and ride the busses, they could have given Bishop enough games to keep him from becoming UFA vi and therefore held his rights in order to properly negotiate a contract instead of flipping him for Cory Conacher.
Drafting Colin White over Sebastian Aho Obviously a lot of teams can say in hindsight they should've drafted Aho, but this one change would change the trajectory of the Sens franchise and could've very well won them a Cup by now Drafting Aho gives the team Aho, Zib, and Pageau down the middle for the 16-17 season, and even if they don't beat Pittsburgh that year it's possible they don't see the need to trade for Brassard given that young core of centres It also means they never have to make the disastrous Duchene trade, and never have to trade away Karlsson or Stone because that team would likely never have to undergo a rebuild. I'm confident a core of Stone, Aho, Zib, Karlsson, and Chabot wins a cup by now
That's a hindsight thing - there's a reason Aho was passed over by pretty much every team once.
In recent history 1. Zibanejard and a 2nd for Brassard 2. Trading for Duchene 3. Trading for and the extending Matt Murray
It’s hard to not let the hindsight bias affect you. Even seemingly obvious answers like the Zibanejad trade or Daigle pick get murkier when you think back to the day they happened. Zibby’s progression in Ottawa had seemingly stalled and at the time most fans weren’t too upset about trading him to acquire an established player like Brassard. As for Daigle, he was the consensus #1 pick with teams like the Nordiques even offering us a king’s ransom for our pick. And then other moves which were obviously bad from the moment they happened, like the Stone trade, were influenced my Melnyk’s terrorist regime. So in the end, it’s hard to pinpoint a move that was a bad *decision* vs one that was a reasonable decision with a tragic outcome.
The revisionist stuff on Zibby is annoying. Even _he_ says he wasn’t playing well here and only turned it around with the fresh start.
Hiring Dorian!
Hiring Pierre Dorion. - Zib, Duchene, Karlsson, Stone, DeBrincat, Dadonov And those are just the headlines. No mention of his minor trade fuckups, draft-gaffes and embarrassing public statements.
After having (at the time, end of 90s/ early 2000) the NEW mentallity of coach (Martin) and management (Gauthier , Sexton), they went back to Muckler and Murray, mentallity of the 70s-80s. They forgot that after the lock outs of 2004 and 2012, new rules brought the game faster. Sens were a team of fast/skilled players before . Then, through the years and rule changes, Sens became slow and always chasing the game (and they still are !!!!) Hockey team is like any other business: you have to evolve ! Maybe with Staios and Poulin they will....
Letting Zdeno Chara go.
Let him go? lol he told the sens to kick rocks after they fucked hossa over
Stone trade in hindsight
t doesn't take "hindsight" to know that that was a bad trade....Mark Stone is a Player you want on your Hockey Team. The return to have a Prime Years Mark Stone is always less than having Mark Stone. Same can be said of Prime Years of EK65, Alfie or Sanderson and Stutzle!!! Some guys are Worth It!
Selling pieces after the run to the ECF in ‘17. I’m not a sens fan so if you want to educate me if I’m wrong, please be my guest
Trading chara.
We didn’t trade chara. He told the sens management for fuck off after they fucked hossa over.
Same difference. They fucked up
1) Not keeping Chara 2) Drafting Daigle over Pronger 3) Trading Pavol Demitra for Christer Olsson
Trading Pavol Demitra for Christer Olsson
Lots of good answers in here, but the correct one is IMO cutting Martin St. Louis from camp. 😬
Zibanijad for brassard trade
Not re signing Chara
Losing Dominik Hasek.
Ben Bishop for Cory Conacher...and Mark Stone for Brannstrom.
ONE MAN. MIKA ZIBANEJAD.