Daily Faceoff Youtube: Frank Seravalli and Tyler Yaremchuk on Daily Faceoff Live on the Ottawa Senators, their season and what might be in store for them.
** NHLRumors.com transcription
Yaremchuk: “We’ve known for a while that it was not going to be the year that the Senators are taking a step forward and stepping out of their rebuild. Frank, they have a new regime in charge though. Steve Staios is going to be heading into his first summer at the helm.
Ottawa has tried some kind of different approaches over the last couple of years trying to get out of this rebuild. They have a young corps in place. They have the bulk of that young corps signed and extended for the next seven, eight years as you can see here.
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Norris, Tkachuk, Stutzle, Chabot, Sanderson, all these guys are locked up long-term and as you see by the cap percentage column, I know the cap will continue to go up, but they’re spending close to 50% of their cap space on these five players.
Is this summer going to be for Staios, in his first summer as GM, is it going to be more about trusting the process, sticking with the process, and giving this Corp more help? Or could we see a summer of shakeups in Ottawa?”
Seravalli: “I would tend to lean more towards the latter, that there’s going to be some significant change. And I think what’s interesting about that take is that basically what we’ve seen from Ottawa so far is not much action.
Steve Staios took over, obviously there was the GM change, and he now holds both titles as president and GM. They made a coaching change. But we’ve mostly seen, I don’t think it’s fair to say complacency, but certainly not much by way of making changes.
There’s been a lot of examination and studying and I think that’s appropriate to a certain extent. It’s also hard to make trades during the season. But it’s fact, not opinion, that the Ottawa Senators have had the most disappointing season in the NHL of all 32 teams.
And I’d be real curious to see how aggressive Steve Staios is in his nature and trying to make some significant changes. We talked about Jacob Chychrun around the trade deadline. How he’s ultimately going to need a new contract extension. You can’t commit $24 million to just the left side of your defense. That’s, it’s not going to work. So they’re going to need to do something on that front.
And I can’t stress enough how critical this coaching hire is. Jacques Martin comes in, and I think that’s one of the real mistakes that they’ve made. You know if you want to, you know, get DJ Smith out and have a temporary solution takeover for a long period of time to close out the year, to try and install some better fundamentals, I guess.
But I think we’ve seen enough evidence from some other coaching changes and I look right at Rick Tocchet in Vancouver. He comes in last season, sets the record straight for this team and every single guy that returned knew exactly what they would be getting from Rick Tocchet once they set foot in training camp.
I thought they could have done a much better job of getting someone in place with some really qualified candidates out there. Whether it’s Todd McClellan or Craig Berube or whoever you know, Lindy Ruff, go down the list. There’s a million guys. Jay Woodcroft. They’re all sitting there available. The coaching, you know, pool isn’t going to change. Bring someone in to close out the year so that you can help get the ball rolling for next year.
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And I’ll tell you one more thing. It’ll be real interesting to see how much of that core, depending on how long this frustration continues on, will there be any changes of heart. Will anyone raise their hand at some point and say, ‘Hey, I’ve had enough. We need to go in a different direction. I’d like to be traded.’ I don’t think you can rule that part out either.”
Yaremchuk: “It be very interesting summer in Canada’s Capital.”