Pittsburg on the road. The Blues on the road in the second of back-to-back games. Buffalo at home. Boston on the road. Then the Olympic break.

If everything unfolds the way you’d expect it to, Ottawa could conceivably head into the break 25-24-10. This would drop their playoff odds to low-single-digit probability with only 23 games remaining.

March isn’t going to be much easier; the Senators start the post-break period with a Western Conference road swing—and hey look, TWO afternoon games, where Ottawa has established themselves as a hot bag of diapers—and there are only a few games left against the teams they’re chasing in the standings.

In other words, and in the parlance of talking heads everywhere, Ottawa doesn’t really control their own destiny at this point. I’m reminded of the whole “run the table” moment a few years back; Ottawa needs to be dominant against teams they haven’t traditionally been dominant against, and needs the other teams in the Atlantic to basically have epic collapses.

The Winnipeg Jets are a pretty good cautionary tale about getting one’s hopes up. Since Paul Maurice took over the head coaching job they’re something like 9-2. Their playoff odds are all the way up to 11%.

All of this to say that I’m all for Hail Mary passes if they double as opportunities for player development. Why, for example, would the team continue to turn to Anderson at this point in the season? Why not give Lehner a string of games and see if he can steal one or two of them? The worst that could happen is that you get an extended look at what, exactly, you have on your hands. Especially if you intend to hand him the starting position at this point next year. (Cynical question: are they keeping him out of the crease in order to lessen his bargaining power, as he’s due a new contract in the off season?)

Why not call up a Mike Hoffman and give him more than seven minutes? You can play him where Neil usually plays. Oh, and you can scratch Neil. Just drop him off on the Airport Parkway with a paper bag lunch and thank him for his contributions. If that seems mean, then promote him to Chief Pump Up Artist and put him on staff. Just keep him off the ice. (Yes, I know he had two goals against the Leafs, which brings his numbers up to ‘atrocious.’)

The point being that last year Ottawa had a reputation as a pesky, young team who played every night as if to prove that they belonged in this league. That was no surprise; they were playing for their jobs. In some cases, it worked. (Cough, cough, Colin Greening’s new contract.) We’ve been hearing all week about all of this NHL talent Ottawa has down in Bingo. Let’s see it. What do we have to lose?

Murray said it himself this past weekend. “We are what we are.” And after this week, what Ottawa may be may be is free to experiment. Because the season is looking increasingly cooked.

If you haven’t had a chance to see the following video, courtesy of Travis Yost, it’s as good a place as any to start:

Jeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeezus.

Yost ably breaks it down, but it’s about what you’d expect: a greatest hits of Senators duds for the season.

Chris Neil, fresh back in the lineup after a glorious few games off with a lower body injury (in which Ottawa won most of its games – post hoc ergo propter hoc?) is his usual self, which is to say a total disaster. I’ll say it again: for a guy who takes more penalties than he draws, can’t drive possession, and doesn’t put up points, if you’re not setting an example by working hard, then why are you even out there?

Jared Cowen continues to steer like a battleship and, somehow, lose his stick about 45% of the time. Someone needs to develop a metric for amount of time spent playing without a stick. Cowen has to be top ten in the league at this point.

Greening shouldn’t have to show offensive upside to justify his presence on this team. His value should start with plugging and anything extra is gravy. But he continues to demonstrate that in the absence of scoring, these occasional gaffes and lost battles start to weigh the team down; you feel like there’s nothing balancing out the negative side of the ledger.

Lehner, haven not been given a chance to play in weeks, is thrown to the wolves for a midday game, and looked awful. Unlike Anderson, he’ll probably not receive any benefit of the doubt and a start next game. Like most of us, he’s probably just looking ahead to next season.

The result: the Carolina Hurricanes – the 20th best team in the league and 23rd in the league in team possession – make the Ottawa Senators look like an OHL team. This was a painful game to watch.

Ultimately, I’m fine with players having down seasons. It happens. The key is to recognize the underlying value of the player, adapt their ice time and zone starts to account for their tough go, not overreact and give away the farm in an attempt to salvage the season, and just work away at it. The very good teams have the depth to plug those holes. Ottawa doesn’t. But it can limit exposure to, at least, those players who continuously demonstrate themselves to be possession black holes and defensive liabilities. When, week after week, month after month, the same players are sent over the boards to make the same mistakes…the seasons starts to become a bit of a grind. When Bobby Ryan gets 16 minutes of ice time and Milan Michalek gets 17, or Chris Neil is a “core” player, well, you start to wonder.

I don’t mind MacLean giving Anderson and Spezza the time they need to recover, because they have a ceiling the other players don’t. On a poor team without a lot of depth, you have to get these guys going if you’re going to compete. But there doesn’t seem to be much excuse for using Jared Cowen as a first pairing defensemen at this point in the season, even if his numbers have recovered somewhat. There doesn’t seem to be much excuse to bury Methot on the depth chart, or scratch Wiercioch so much.

And there really, really isn’t any excuse at all to be playing Chris Neil, a complete boat anchor in terms of everything except, we’re told, intangibles.

At this point in the season, the number of players who you have to think Ottawa would be glad to get any return for is growing. My own personal Shit List, in descending order of least favorite players, and keeping their contract cost in mind, is: Neil, Michalek, Greening, Phillips, Cowen, Spezza, Concacher. For those first three, at the deadline I’d be happy to see Ottawa get anything back, from replacement level NHL players to picks to longshot prospects.

Ottawa is in a fairly unique situation among NHL teams, in that they’re (occasionally) competitive, with loads of cap room, and the prospects to upgrade. Really, the only other team in this situation is Colorado, maybe the Rangers. But I see on various blogs (and not just the Ottawa-centric ones) how Ottawa is a team that could make some noise if they went out and got that extra piece at the deadline. They’re having their occasionally dominates stretches of possession. Their goaltending, though still all over the place some nights, can lock it down and frustrate opponents, seemingly out of nowhere. It’s all hearsay and speculation, but when fans of other teams start really paying attention to Ottawa, I think it’s mildly indicative. It’s at least exciting.

Leaving aside where Ottawa would actually get the cash from, let’s look at some of the expiring contracts for 2014 and 2015, which could represent trade targets. I’ve only taken wingers because 1) that’s what Murray is rumoured to be looking for, and 2) when you take a look at the pending UFA defencemen, you’ll see it’s not even worth writing about. Unless you think Henrik Tallinder is an upgrade on Chris Phillips.

Oh, and I’ve only looked at teams who could be sellers. Sure, Thornton and Marleau are pending UFAs, but I don’t see San Jose packing it in this season.

Here’s what we’ve got.

Some interesting options in there, but let’s start with what would easily be the most intriguing: Daniel Alfredsson.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say he’s got some comfort with the market. There’s probably not a lot to worry about when it comes to chemistry. Would it be awkward? For a minute or two, then we’d all dig our Alfredsson jerseys out from the bottom of the trunk where we buried them, and get ready to chant his name at 11:11. He thought Detroit would give him a better chance to win. Well, maybe they still do. But as of right now Detroit is not in a playoff spot.

Now, if Daniel Alfredsson is going to be traded at the deadline, it would likely be to an honest-to-goodness contender. San Jose or Los Angeles or something. (Imagine, for a moment, if Alfredsson was traded to the league-leading Ducks – the franchise that beat his Senators in the Final in 2007, and now including former Senator Jakob Silfverberg. Would you cheer for them in the playoffs? Talk about being conflicted.) But if it’s a comfort thing – somewhere where his family will be familiar and somewhere where he will be appreciated – well, I can think of no better destination.

I put both Callahan and Dubinsky on the list, even though New York and Columbus are both pretty close to a playoff spot and probably won’t be sellers, but those are the type of guys who you know managers salivate over adding to a playoff-bound team. They produce points, their possession stats are respectable, and they have all of those delicious intangible bullshitty things like handshakedness and stick-to-it-iveness that coaches and GMs love.

I don’t see Jagr being traded, and if he is I don’t see him being traded to Ottawa. But how amazing would it be if Jaromir Fucking Jagr played for Ottawa, even if only for a couple of months.

For basically any of these guys I think Ottawa would have to trade one of their better prospects – a Puempal, maybe even a Lazar (though we hear he’s untouchable). Mark Stone seems pretty entrenched where he is, but I imagine he’s got a few GMs’ attention at this point. And then there are several second tier prospects who are performing well in the AHL, but who may never be NHL players – your Shane Princes and Mike Hoffmans. All of them, along with a second round pick, would surely be up for grabs for the players on this list.

Sound off in the comments: should Ottawa be looking to buy? If so, who should they target?

I don’t mean just this season, though this season’s been plenty weird. This season was weird before it even started, right around the time people starting picking Ottawa as a Stanley Cup contender. Since that time it’s been an acid trip for Sens fans, from Spezza on the third line with Chris Neil to now Cody Ceci is a 20-minute-a-night guy to Ottawa’s weirdly putrid home record to the fact that every game Ottawa plays is at 2pm. It’s a polar vortex of emotions.

But if you think we’re in uncharted waters right now, get ready. We’re about to enter the lost world.

There’s a tendency to treat changes in management as state-of-the-union, “what does it all mean?” moments. We might look back at the loss of Assistant GM Peter Chiarelli to Boston as one such moment. Shortly after Chiarelli’s departure, Zdeno Chara signed in Boston, and shortly after that Boston won some trophy.

If the rumours are true, and heir apparent Tim Murray is also fleeing Ottawa for the balmy beaches of division rival Buffalo and Terry Pegula’s unlimited budget, then we’re about to head into another period of soul searching.

After all, we were talking about Bryan Murray being too old to stay on, or him not being the real brain behind the solid scouting and overperforming Sens, the LAST time he was extended. Now, at 71, Murray will likely be extended again—if only because what else do you do when your entire secession plan is pulled out from under your feet?

This should probably be a pretty big deal. Not because we can’t handle another year of Murray doing his competent, respected GM thing. But because when Murray finally does go in a year or two, there’s a greater risk of losing the structure and personnel that have made Ottawa a first class organization. If Tim had stuck around we’d know that from Pierre Doiron and his team on down, the strategy, outlook, and expectations would probably remain the same. But if a whole new GM comes in he’ll want to bring in his guys—his assistant GM, his scouts, maybe even his coaches. A team with its share of ups and downs over the last half-decade could enter another period of instability.

And once again it has to do with money. Eugene Melnyk’s shaky finances may have led to the loss of the most beloved player in franchise history, and now is leading to the loss of the candidate they’d been grooming for years to take over the role. Ottawa has expiring contracts for three top six forwards, one top two defensemen, and a starting goaltender all happening at the same time. Maybe they love it here and will re-sign regardless the situation, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a franchise in flux that’s been able to attract and keep core pieces. Whether rightly or wrongly, stability is seen as key to contention.

THEN there’s the arena. Hoooooboy, the arena. With all the hand-wringing about money, and Melnyk’s propensity for playing with the sentiment of fans to pressure city council, I am not looking forward to a prolonged—years-long, potentially—debate with my city councillor, my mayor, my family, my boss, my girlfriend, my colleagues, James’ dog, etc. about the role of the sports franchise as a public institution and its right (or lack thereof) to public funding. Personally, I tend to fall on the side of “a few tax breaks” rather than “tens or hundreds of millions in public dollars,” but I think the latter is where we’re headed. That’s the precedent, and Melnyk will say “me too” when the time is right. Fair-weather fan Ottawa will slap on the chastity belt, and the debate will go on for-fucking-ever.

All this to say that I would love it if sports franchises did as organizations tend to and make public a five year plan: when do we plan to contend; what major investment milestones are coming up; who’s driving the boat? What is this team’s identity? Am I being naive to think that the Ottawa Senators, being a low-payroll, small market team with a caustic owner, would benefit from providing a little clarity in uncertain times?

Because here’s a scary thought: the only constant over the next few years might be Eugene Melnyk.

Let me be clear: I am not a Jason Spezza hater.

Rather, I think he’s a sublime offensive player whose long tenure in Ottawa has led to his skills being taken for granted; a lightning rod for Ottawa’s inconsistent play in a post-Alfie world; and an easy target for the character-and-grit brigade in Ottawa. (Just yesterday The Ottawa Sun’s Don Brennan called for Ottawa to claim Zenon Konopka off of waivers. That should give you an idea of the mindset.) With every drop pass to nobody, Spezza earns another round of tongue clucking from a group that thinks that every complex problem can be reduced to common sense and hard work. I am not one of these people.

I am, however, a dork for asset management, and Jason Spezza presents an interesting case study in whether or not the time is right to maximize one’s return on an expensive and elite player. Finding a partner with cap space, cash, and the fact that Spezza has a no trade clause makes all of this highly unlikely. But even considering trading Spezza opens up a number of interesting possibilities, questions about the identity of this team, and the best way to build a winner.

First, Jay-Jay’s Production

Spezza, for all of his highly visible mistakes (which, I maintain, are a byproduct of his being a creative playmaker), is a productive center. His 30 points in 39 games is respectable; his career production is even higher; his possession statistics are positive, if not astounding (and nowhere near the best on the team at even strength); up until this year he drew more penalties than he took. He’s produced despite playing with a rotating cast of wingers, including noted offensive powerhouses Eric Condra and Chris Neil. He’s not entirely sheltered, playing against the opposition’s weaker lines, but being deployed in all three zones by virtue of his ability to win faceoffs.

He’s been playing long enough to get a clear picture of what you can expect: a consistent offensive producer, if one with defensive deficiencies and an injury history. You could argue he’s one of the ten best playmakers in the league, depending on the type of team and how they use him. He is, however, having a bit of a down season. The team scores about 12.2% more of the time without him on the ice.

Put another way: in a down year, Jason Spezza still puts up 30 points in 39 games. He’s only 30 years old.

His Contract Looks Great

Spezza’s production is well established, but he’s also on the kind of contract that GMs drool over. First, he’s not on an expiring deal, meaning that a team wouldn’t need to give up assets for what could turn out to be a rental. Second, the real money on his contract is only $5MM this year and $4MM next—which is insane value put next to other players in his strata. (Ryan Getzlaf’s salary goes up to almost $9MM next year.) There’s not much on the free agent market for those who miss out on Joe Thornton, unless you consider Paul Stastny or David Legwand legit top line centers. And finally, with the salary cap going up next year, there should be a number of teams who can make room for Spezza’s $7MM cap hit.

His Role on This Team

Jason Spezza is a better offensive option for the Ottawa Senators than Kyle Turris or Mika Zibanejad. (Analysis!) And therein lies the question of what kind of team Ottawa wants to be. Right now they’re offensively potent and defensively porous, relying on engines Spezza and Karlsson to outscore the competition. If the team rolled four lines and traded Spezza for a defenseman and/or a well-rounded power forward, does that mean they could provide a more balanced attack?

Interestingly, with Spezza’s injury over the past few games, we’ve had a look at what Ottawa would look like with Turris and Zibanejad as their 1A and 1B centers. While it’s a miniscule sample size, the results have been encouraging. Zibanejad remains Ottawa’s best possession forward, and has clicked well with Cory Conacher and Milan Michalek (neither of whom have seemed to click well with anyone this season), and the Turris-MacArthur-Ryan line has been Ottawa’s best all season long. Zack Smith is an effective 3rd line center with great faceoff skills. I don’t know where you slot Jason Spezza in when he returns from injury.

The Bobby Ryan Conundrum

From the day Bobby Ryan was brought in from Anaheim, there were visions of Spezza and Ryan recreating 2006 / 2007 levels of offense. The approaching Armageddon of negotiating a contract for both your top center and winger was still two years off. In the meantime we were told to sit back and watch the fireworks.

That Ryan hasn’t really meshed with Spezza (not that they’ve played very much together) could be a blessing in disguise. As Bobby Ryan produces on a line with high value / low cost players like Turris and MacArthur, the emphasis might shift from having to absolutely re-sign both players to simply ensuring that Ryan stays in the fold. (Along with Methot, MacArthur, and possibly Anderson.) Ryan has demonstrated an underrated playmaker’s ability to go along with his scoring and possession. Suddenly, Spezza and Ryan no longer come as a unit.

What could you get?

This is always hard to predict, but if Ottawa gave up a young roster player, a good prospect, and a 1^st round pick for Bobby Ryan, and if you consider Spezza to be a player on the same level as Ryan—albeit a different kind of player, older, and at a higher cap hit—then you might expect that Ottawa could get a good roster player and a good prospect for Spezza, or perhaps a very good roster player in a one-for-one swap.

So, would you do it?

At the end of the day…I don’t know. Spezza isn’t just a good player; he’s an elite talent, and extremely difficult to replace. You don’t find a player who’s top ten in his category without drafting him in the top five and developing him for years, as Ottawa has done here. I certainly wouldn’t make the trade except for a similarly skilled player with a different set of tools.

What do you think?

WAIT WAIT WAIT: before you click away, this isn’t an article in which I try to quantify compete level.

I think that trying to quantify “effort” in pro sports is a game of diminishing returns—if you’re looking to consistently gain advantage over another group of pro athletes, “trying harder” or raising your “compete level” probably isn’t the way to do it. Some teams or players have lazy moments, but I would wager those are extremely insignificant outliers on an overall level of competition that, to us mere mortals, is unfathomable. Everybody tries hard. 

I suspect that when I hear “effort,” like when I hear “focus” or “leadership” or “grit,” what I’m actually hearing is an easy substitution for any number of more nuanced and complex reasons for why a team might stink. Effort is always unquantifiable, so, there can always be more of it. What’s worrisome is that you hear these platitudes the most from Paul MacLean.

Now, MacLean isn’t exactly going to get up in front of the media and outline the Xs and Os of his playbook for all the world to see. What else is he going to say other than, “We need to get ready for the next game, prepare properly, and raise our compete level”? But I’m telling you—if this is what the players are getting in the dressing room, I don’t know how mad we can be about the Sens’ current record. After almost half a season of hearing about compete level, it’s starting to sound obnoxiously disconnected from the real world.

Saddled with one of the lowest payrolls in the league, the team is still top 10 in offense—and that’s with Michalek, Conacher and Greening all disappearing from view. The goalies are facing more shots than normal; if you told Lehner he didn’t compete he’d bite you on the face. Even the much maligned defense has a guy like Karlsson, who plays 30 minutes a game and last night skated end-to-end and back on a single shift about six times that I counted.

I’ve already written about how if the team’s PK picks up even a little bit, or if they take fewer penalties, they’ll be in a good spot. Their possession stats are trending in the right direction. So how can you look at all of this and conclude that they should just “try harder”?

Defensive coverage and a stinky PK seem to be the problem, and really, they’ve been a problem all season. Are special teams not assistant coach Dave Cameron’s area? Oh, and did you see Cameron screaming at Spezza from the bench last night after another blown play? Something isn’t right in his shop.

We don’t have access to the dressing room, or to the coach’s thoughts or strategies, but there’s a worrisome disconnect between the stats and the grizzled-leader stuff MacLean gives us whenever he’s asked for an explanation for his team’s poor play.

Stuff like this:

“We’re an inconsistent group. We can’t get the puck out of our zone. We play good against good teams. We play bad against teams below us. That’s just a lack of focus, a lack of leadership and that’s a lack of us wanting to play in the National Hockey League and be an elite team. We are a long, long way from being an elite team.”

So, when asked for a reason why the team is good against good teams and bad against bad teams, MacLean offers that we’re bad because we’re bad, and if we wanted to not be bad, we would be good. The reason we don’t want to be good? We don’t actually want to play in the NHL.

This stuff is maddening to hear night-in and night-out. And as frustrating as it is for us, you’ve got to really feel for the team if those are their marching orders.

There isn’t one thing you can point to to explain why this year’s Ottawa Senators have underperformed. Bad goaltending. Lack of secondary scoring. A sudden inability to transition the puck out of their own zone. An allergy to home ice and afternoon games. Daniel Alfredsson was actually a pretty useful player. The Western Conference in general. The list goes on.

Despite all of these shortcomings, it’s not as if the team has fallen off a cliff. As of today their playoff chances sit at about 20%, and they’re five points out of a wild card spot with underwhelming division rivals like the Toronto Maple Leafs and Detroit Red Wings hanging on by the skin of their teeth. They’re not going on extended losing streaks, or being blown out. Fix just one or two small things and maybe you see this team on the other side of the bubble.

The question is which of the many broken things you concentrate on when every loss makes recovery exponentially more difficult. MacLean has shown a remarkable faith in Craig Anderson, given that his play has sometimes ended the game by the first intermission, but it’s too easy to say “goaltending” when the trade market is frozen up due to lack of cap space or cash. Odds are this team ends the season with their $3.5MM starting goaltender. In other words, simply having a different team is not a solution to this team stinking.

However, there is one deficiency that seems a constant this year: Ottawa’s penalty kill is 24^th in the league at about 79%, and they are the most penalized team in the league, having been shorthanded 141 times. (To contrast, San Jose, the least penalized team, has been shorthanded just 90 times.) These two stats may be related; your penalty kill will lag when it’s constantly out there.

So the question is whether to work on the penalty kill—which, in the absence of a trade market or a sudden strategic epiphany, seems unlikely to work—or to have the team actively try to take less penalties.

Perhaps surprisingly, Ottawa’s ratio of PK time to PP time is not too bad. They’re 21^st in the league in that regard, which means they’re still drawing penalties, and their powerplay, at 13^th in the league, is humming along. But that only reinforces the point that only a few less penalties and this team is in a much more favorable position to win games.

I imagine the most effective way to do this (outside of simply procuring additional skilled players) is to target players whose ratio of penalties-taken-to-penalties-drawn is particularly egregious, and to look a little more closely at how team behaviour drives penalty taking.

I’ve already written about how Chris Neil’s P-to-PD is a career worst–and, also, almost league worst. He takes 2.8 penalties per 60 minutes of play to only 0.3 penalties drawn. That’s horrendous. He’s second in the league in minor penalties—not the stuff you associate with enforcers, but the really boneheaded stuff like impeding a player with your stick or body.

To contrast, Zack Smith is also in the top ten in the league in minor penalties taken, but his penalties-drawn is slightly higher—he might cause some goals against, but with a good powerplay, you might still score more goals with Zack Smith on the team than not. He’s not a part of the problem.

The next closest Ottawa player is Jason Spezza, way down at 66^th in the league. Interestingly, Spezza’s penalties drawn per 60 is 0.0, obviously lower than his penalties taken. That’s a weird stat for someone who’s supposed to be your most skilled player. Chris Phillips also takes more penalties than he draws. So, what you have is this team’s core consistently taking more penalties than it draws.

Does this speak to a leadership problem in Ottawa? Purely for fun, let’s look at Daniel Alfredsson’s P-to-PD…oh look, he draws more penalties than he takes, 0.9 per 60 to 0.4. Nothing to see here.

Still–how do you fix this? Many minor penalties are taken because the player is out of position, is being outworked, or isn’t skilled enough to strip the puck without impeding play. How do you fix this without resorting to “get a different team”-style solutions?

Which brings me to the second thing I noticed, and what the coaching staff might actually be in a position to affect. Ottawa is one of the “hittingest” teams in the league. I know the way that hits are tracked is not exactly scientific, but individual stats will serve our purpose here as a rough measure.

Tyler Dellow over at MC79 has written extensively about whether there’s any correlation between hitting and scoring. In a nutshell: teams that outhit seem to score less than teams that are outhit, in part because you usually don’t have the puck if you’re trying to hit, and in part because of the type of players you’re putting out on the ice in order to be a team that outhits. Going out of your way to hit or be a team that hits doesn’t necessarily make you a harder team to play against.

Ottawa has five players in the top 27 in the league in hitting: Colin Greening (3^rd) Chris Neil (4^th) Zack Smith (21^st) Jared Cowen (24^th) and Marc Methot (27^th). (Chris Phillips is next at 68^th, and Bobby Ryan – swoon—is 78th. Is there anything he can’t do?) Of these players, Greening and Smith are the only ones who draw more penalties than they take, though it’s slight in both cases. Every other player on this list, outside of Bobby Ryan, who’s not really in the hitting conversation so low down on the list, take more penalties than they draw. (And in the case of Chris Neil it’s a huge, huge disparity.)

Given that the club’s hit leaders are also some of their most penalized players, there may be something to the argument that a hit thrown leads to a player out of position, or an unnecessary roughing penalty. Someone with more access and skill than I—say, someone inside the Senators organization with time and resources on their hands—may wish to look at how often a minor penalty is incurred in the seconds following a hit. If there’s a trend there, asking that these specific players—Neil, Cowen and Methot—no longer try to hit everything in sight may be one small step towards righting the ship.

(I’m not even getting into the fact that Cowen’s dangerous hit on Buffalo’s Zemgus Girgensons led to a two game suspension and left the team low on defensive depth–a much more straightforward example of how hitting has a higher cost than benefit.)

What we might also learn from the hitting and penalty-ratio statistics is which players are making smart hits. Perhaps we can take a moment here to appreciate Colin Greening, who hits like an animal and doesn’t seem to get excessively penalized for it. Or Bobby Ryan, who seems to hit a lot for a scorer but obviously not at the expense of his scoring. If there is a correlation between hitting and minor penalties, then we can learn which players are hitting for hitting’s sake. They might be hitting because it makes them look good, but it’s actually hurting the team.

And if that’s the case, then benching or scratching Chris Neil to send a message about responsible play might be a start. It’s not as if Ottawa is lacking a fighter, or will miss Neil’s offensive production. But something has to be done for this team to understand that throwing more of the same hits at skilled teams only lands you back in the penalty box.

Combine fewer penalties with Anderson’s game recovering even a little bit and the team learning to score in the shootout and there might be hope for this season yet.