Interesting little slide show over on Forbes about ticket prices throughout the NHL. A few observations:

1) Ottawa is right smack in the middle of the league, with a 15th highest average ticket price of $137.82. That’s less than the average ticket price for a non-traditional market like San Jose ($150.65) and teams who’ve been mediocre for a while, like the Islanders ($150.60) Wild ($153.82) and Sabres ($139.53).

2) There’s a pretty big drop between the top ten highest average ticket prices and 11 on. Number ten is Pittsburgh at $203.93, and 11 is the Wild–almost fifty bucks cheaper.

3) The Kings, Caps and Flyers are a surprisingly cheap ticket, considering their respective payrolls and the Kings’ recent success.

4) Is there better value in the league than a Colorado ticket right now? They’re 29th at $86.40, and you get to see Duchene, MacKinnon, and any day now Patrick Roy doing something insane.

5) The most expensive ticket is Toronto at $368.60. Obviously.

What makes this interesting for Ottawa fans is that we just emerged from a summer of reporting on the team’s financial woes. Melnyk (who is scheduled to appear on the radio later today…I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that he’ll say something dumbfoundingly ridiculous and contradictory) said the team loses staggering amounts of money, doesn’t have much in the way of secondary revenue streams, etc.

I’m sure the team has reliable market data that tells them precisely the point at which raising ticket prices will result in a drop-off in attendance, but I was surprised by how low Ottawa’s ticket prices are. Especially considering that all of the other Canadian teams were in the top seven in ticket prices. Montreal is the next cheapest at $257.06–over a hundred  bucks more per ticket than Ottawa. (Though surprisingly they’re a cheaper ticket than Calgary and Edmonton. Also cheaper than Winnipeg, though given the small size of their arena, I suppose that makes sense.)

There’s a lot we don’t know here. For instance, does this average include corporate suites? What about ticket packages that drive down the average but increase stability for a team that needs a reliable revenue stream? Does the location of those other teams’ arenas increase walk-up purchases of pricier tickets? But just on the face of it, it looks like Ottawa could include a sizeable increase in ticket prices and they wouldn’t be out of line with the trends in the NHL. This, even with ticket prices having gone up by 6% over last year.

But would Ottawans be willing to pay more? I think the Sens have been really proactive about their outreach to fans, and I recall a poll performed in the last few years that showed that ticket prices were a concern. We also all know about how difficult it can be to get out to games. (Something they’re trying to alleviate by paying for additional ramps for buses to the arena from the highway.) With so many options to watch the game downtown and spend that ticket money on beer and food instead, would a sizeable increase really damage the underlying number of people who would be willing to chant Pageau’s name on the bus for 40 minutes?

Like anything, I assume you’d have to see the money reflected in the quality of the product. While it’s nice that Ottawa has affordable tickets, they don’t spend much in the way of salary, spending less than all but four other teams. It seems to me that Ottawa is running a pretty bare-bones operation: low salary, not much in the way of fan giveaways, none of the razzle-dazzle you see in big markets like Chicago with red-carpet openings and flashy free agent acquisitions. But on the other hand it’s cheap. We’re like No Name brand pancake mix.

[UPDATE: I got an email about the home opener today – there IS a red carpet event! Touch me, Stephan Da Costa! TOUCH ME.]

Remember also that this is the average ticket price, and there really isn’t a bad seat in the house. I don’t think I’ve paid more than $60 for a ticket unless it was to a playoff game. I’ll be at the home opener on Thursday and my ticket was $45.

So, what say you? If you knew that Ottawa was going to go from 25th in league spending on payroll to, say 15th (which is Chicago), would you pony up for it?

As we approach the start of the 2013-2014 season, I’ve been thinking about our current edition of the Ottawa Senators and fumbling toward making some kind of prediction. Looking up and down the lineup, you can get a pretty good sense of what to expect out of almost everyone. Some players are well-established in terms of the data available on their play, allowing you to modulate your predictions accordingly. The really young guys, like Mika Zibanejad, are still on their very affordable ELCs, so even if they have a bum season, and even if that bum season is the start of a trend, the risk to the club is mitigated somewhat by how little their inclusion in the lineup keeps someone else out of it financially. In other words, I can look up and down the lineup and still feel like Jason Spezza, if healthy, will contribute well relative to his salary. I can still feel like Chris Neil will take more penalties than he draws and just generally be an overpaid agitator. I feel like the young guys with a lot of variability in their game (or at least in our predictions of their game) but don’t cost too much–you can healthy scratch them, or send them to the minors if something drastic happens. Status quo, in other words. The Senators are a team getting all sorts of value up and down the lineup.

The big exception for me is Jared Cowen, who just earned a shiny new contract, and on whom the organization will be heavily relying to linchpin their second pairing. Part of the problem, and the big difference between Cowen and the other youngins, is that usually someone with such a small sample size either gets a bridge contract, or was so ridiculously good in that small sample size that their teams felt comfortable predicting more greatness. Cowen’s only played one full season in the NHL, and a combined eight games outside of that, not including playoffs. His numbers aren’t exactly pretty–not horrific, just not pretty–even in that tiny window. In his one full season Cowen played mostly on the third pairing, against weak competition, and received a large number of favorable zone starts. You could charitably say that he didn’t lose Ottawa any games–which isn’t as backhanded a compliment as it sounds (this is a tough league), but then, he was on his cheap ELC at the time. The risk-reward factor is always going to be high on a player making so little.

My main contention here isn’t that Jared Cowen is secretly terrible. It’s that there’s very little we can actually tell about him, or his future in the NHL, based on what we’ve seen so far, and that makes management’s decision to give him $12.4 million over four years an interesting one.

It‘s clear what the organization thinks of him: that four year, $3.1 million AAV is actually the conservative contract Cowen ended up with. Rumors were flying around in the off season that Cowen received an eight-year, $28 million offer. In both of these deals, we can glean that management assumes Cowen will be a top four defenseman for many years to come. Not spectacular, but someone in the Chris Phillips mold, who plays solid NHL hockey, provides up to 20 minutes a night, and around whom you can reliably plan your hockey team.

That’s a hell of an assumption. They’re betting, basically, that a player who’s experienced several major surgeries, missed all of last season, and has never really been leaned on quite so heavily, is ready to take a big, big step. It’s a calculated risk–the kind of thing you have to do in the NHL, no doubt, and especially the kind of thing that a poor team like Ottawa has to do to provide value down the line. But there’s little denying that Cowen is being paid in advance of proving he can fill the role the team needs him to.

It’s worth noting that the practice of giving your premier RFAs big deals up front isn’t exactly novel. Edmonton just gave Ryan Nugent-Hopkins $6 million a year, for example. The question, it seems to me, is whether you can include Cowen in the group of RFAs who have a ton of bargaining power, who might actually generate an offer sheet, and whose skill is so evident you have less of a problem assigning a lot of financial risk to them. He may very well be; I just don’t see how that assessment is being made.

Compare Cowen’s deal with, say, Cody Franson, who received a one year bridge, “prove it” contract from Toronto for $2 million. The Leafs may have to pay more for Franson in the future, but the point is that they’ll know more in the future. If your players turns out to be really great, I think you have to not mind paying him really great money. Paying someone what they’re worth seems less disastrous to me than paying someone less, and then they may not even be worth that. People are giving Montreal shit because they’ll have to give Subban the moon on his next contract, but I have to think that any GM in the league will take a Norris trophy winner on their team at market value. On the other hand, Ottawa has put themselves in a position where Cowen absolutely has to pan out as he’s projected to for that deal to provide value.

Ultimately, I think Ottawa’s deal with Cowen is a much larger risk than the sort of deals we usually jump up and down on management for. Sure, Alex Kovalev made $5 million a season, didn’t seem like he wanted to be here, and played poorly–but on a two year deal, and with a huge body of data with which to assess him, that’s a risk I can understand taking. The same can be said for signing Clarke MacArthur to a two year deal this past summer. There’s enough data there to justify it. If it doesn’t turn out, that doesn’t mean that the risk wasn’t justifiable at the time you took it. It means you misused them or had bad luck, or both. You can understand where the mistake came from by discounting your risk assessment.

With Cowen, you’re basically in a void. You look at his size and think, “I like big tough players.” You look at where he was drafted and think, “This guy has pedigree.” You watch video of him beating the shit out of Ryan White in the playoffs and think, “This guy has grit.” But there’s really nothing to point to that says that he’ll be a reliable second pairing shutdown guy for you for years and years to come. It’s a risk, especially for a team with an owner who is perpetually moaning about being over-budget and totally broke.

If I’m Cowen, I would have jumped at the stability of an eight year deal over the chance to make many more dollars at a theoretical future point in my career when I’m a dominant force in the NHL. If I’m Cowen I look at my own numbers, my injuries, and the apparent luster management perceives on my abilities, and I take the career deal for fear of that luster wearing off. Everyone, including Cowen, is assuming he’s going to be an upper-tier player in this league, if not a star. He may very well turn out to be, but if it does, let’s not pretend it was anything more than guesswork and luck. If there’s one thing we know, it’s that it can’t be the evidence. There isn’t any.

NHL preseason: the stuff of legendary performances by players who will soon be waived for cap space, quixotic line combinations involving guys who don’t even show up when you google them, and coverage so comprehensive it borders on claustrophobic. Want all 20 TSN analysts to tweet line combinations at you, and then analyze those combinations, and then do pre- and post- game coverage about something that is by its very definition meaningless? Lucky for you, we have two solid weeks of that!

You’ve also got trolling sportscasters telling fans of all teams that the way these guys are playing today means even the remotest thing about the season. Caveat: I’ve watched about fifteen minutes of preseason hockey total, mostly because I already think the regular season, let alone the preseason, is too long. But I check in. I read about Spezza’s twitchy groin, and how a defence that includes Michael Sdao barely held up against the Icelandic team from D2. I’m human. And I worry.

So, with that set-up, let me ask you: are you concerned at all about this?

Small sample size, weird defense, they played the Islanders in two separate games simultaneously, yadda yadda. I get it. It doesn’t mean anything. But on the surface of things? Holy hell have these two guys looked brutal.

Someone smarter than me should do an analysis of how accurate preseason is as an indicator of how players will perform when the season starts. We can all remember the big exceptions, like Brandon Bochenski lighting it up and then disappearing immediately. But what’s the norm, obscured from the naked eye by its perpetuity? What does the data say? It strikes me as odd to discount on the basis of the exception. It’s like looking at Alexandre Daigle and concluding that first overall picks are worthless.

All I’m really prepared for is conjecture at a glance. Looking at the Time On Ice leaders for goalies in the preseason, you do see a few things that are totally expected.

Cam Ward: plays a ton of minutes, totally stinks. Verifiable starters like Carey Price and Kari Lehtonen putting up league average numbers. Jonathan Quick and Tuukka Rask being absolutely dominant.

Go down the list and it plays out pretty much as expected. In other words, everyone who you would expect to suck pretty much sucks, and everyone you’d expect to play well is playing well. Craig Anderson and Robin Lehner may be outliers here. We better hope they are.

Because this is a team who allowed a lot of shots against last year, and will now have a second pairing of Jared Cowen and Patrick Wiercioch. Without at least league average goaltending, you could see this team struggle out of the gate, and even with the benefit of a full season ahead of them, we know how hard it is to play catch-up in this league.

Having said all of that: play ball already.

I have one rule about EA’s NHL series of video games: do not buy it every year. I used to do that, way back in the early naughts, but the changes were so incremental—”now with broken sticks!”—that I found the action of buying the new game akin to saying “I haven’t bought myself anything nice in a while.” So my rule is Only Every Other Year… At Most. And it’s that year! So, each WTYKY writer is going to review a different component of the game.

With me being the guy on the blog who writes about profitability and uses too many words to say something sort of simple and dumb, I’m going to review my favorite game mode: Be a GM. James, being a lot more fun than me in every conceivable way, will review the 20^th anniversary re-release of NHL 94, and Steve will do the Be a Pro mode, now called Live the Life.

My usual approach to Be a GM is to substitute some non-NHL team for the Phoenix Coyotes and do a ground-up rebuild. This year I’m playing as Dusseldorf EG, whose uniforms (in yellow) are something else. (Aside: Corey Locke!) We won 9 games in our first season, traded the first overall pick for Nail Yakupov, signed $50 million in free agents the next year, and made the playoffs in year two. Authentic!

Sports games allow the gamer the unique opportunity to see gradually improved iterations every year. Imagine the Uncharted games coming out every few years. Now imagine if they released the Beta version of each Uncharted and just fixed as they went along. That’s the NHL series in a nutshell.

My gripe is that upgrades simply don’t happen fast enough, and this is especially true of Be a Gm mode. Be a GM is essentially a series of menus—you can play the games themselves, but it seems beside the point if you’re building a team on a five year plan—and what you’d think would be easy fixes, or subtle tweaks in simulation algorithms, often go unfixed or unrefined.

For example, in the last few editions I’ve noticed that computer-controlled GMs would draft prospects but then, for no reason at all, they wouldn’t sign them. You could go to the free agent market every year, sort the menu to see the players with the highest potential, and find all of that year’s draftees just sitting there without deals. You could then sign the first overall draft pick to an ELC, without offering any compensation to anyone. Knowing that, I’d trade all of my draft picks for veteran NHLers, ransack the free agent market for unsigned prospects, and build a dynasty instantly. My point is that it’s fun to discover these loopholes, but once you do, the game is basically over.

I’m happy to say that in some regards, like the example I’ve given, there have been fixes. In others, quirks and gaps that make the simulation unbelievable persist.

Weird UI

Number one among those persistent issues is that the buttons across menus don’t map in a consistent way. The “accept” button on one screen might be the “back” button on another. This leads, occasionally, to rejecting a deal you would have liked to have accepted, or vice-versa. Elsewhere, EA tries to incorporate a cell phone quick menu into every screen, so by simply pushing a button you’ll bring up your GM’s phone and, using it as a sort of master menu, can jump from one sub-menu into a whole other menu tree. It’s sort of like a ‘home’ button. This mostly works, except when they abandon it altogether and the button you usually use to bring up your phone becomes the button you use to change the display between the NHL and AHL, or counter-offer a trade, or zoom in on a player’s details.

What you’re getting with this kind of inconsistency is an amalgam of changes over several years, without anyone doing a ground-up redesign of the Be a GM user interface. You have to wonder why EA would pour resources into completely redesigning their physics engine or fighting, and not dedicate a small fraction of those resources to doing a usability test on menus. I suspect it’s because I’m the only one playing it, and that’s fair.

Likewise, across game menus there’s a general lack of explanation contrasted with unused screen space. Go to the home menu screen: in a small column on the left are a few unexplained options. You have no idea what half of them are without clicking on them and mucking around for a bit until you find out. The other 80% of the screen is taken up with a picture of a television, which is playing a loop of things that are too small to see.

It’s totally bizarre that a franchise that has been around for 20 years would have such terrible, unintuitive design principles. You basically have to start a game mode and play around with it for a few minutes before you even figure out what the object of that game mode is. Every year they’ll put a new sheen on it, but at no point do they seem to put themselves in the shoes of a casual gamer.

Likewise, the value of a player is expressed in several interesting, though unhelpful ways. Each player has a five star potential system, but it’s not clear whether the stars designate where the player will be when they reach their potential, or how much potential they have left. To make matters worse, the stars are color coded. Because games don’t come with manuals anymore, you don’t know what any of this means unless you get a little interstitial loading screen that happens to randomly explain…and even then, you only have about four seconds to read this explanation before the loading is done.

It’s all surreal. In a game mode that is basically about reading information, that you can’t understand the information you’re given or navigate menus effortlessly is a major hurdle to enjoyment of the game.

Weird messaging

One of the game’s other big quirks is that the messaging you receive from other GMs and owners doesn’t ever quite correspond to your actions. You can sign the biggest UFA in the pool, trade for a star, buy-out a player, and move up in the draft, only to have your owner say “Your actions (or lack thereof) surprised me…you better know what you’re doing.” Or your owner can tell you he expects you to get 36 wins in a season, good for 72 points, and then tell you he expects you to make the playoffs, which doesn’t really seem possible with that number of wins. And—my personal favorite—a rival GM can offer you a deal, which you accidentally reject because of the inconsistent button overlay, and when you propose the exact same deal back to him he might say “My fans would drive me out of town if I accepted this! Are you crazy?” It’s bizarre, and it also makes the whole make-believe aspect of a simulation impossible to sustain.

…but it has gotten much, much better than it used to be. GMs provide more nuanced information about what they want. The trading block feature is much more detailed, allowing you to construct packages of players that will actually go through as opposed to constantly guessing what your trading partner needs. You can retain salary cap hits when you trade a player, or ask a trading partner to retain cap hits. When they reject a deal, they say why, say what they like about your offer, and tell you to try again. It’s all much more informative than in previous years, when to pull off a deal you basically had to throw everything and the kitchen sink at a GM, and even then, they probably didn’t have the cap space to accept it.

No Coach, No System

What I find the absolute weirdest about this hockey simulator is the lack of a coach in the whole mix. At no point can you choose what kind of coach you want to hire, and build a team around that. It doesn’t have to be complex—pick a defensive specialist, complement him with defensive players, and the team gets a performance boost. Fire your underperforming coach and see if the team performs differently. Hire an established guy and see it hurt your bottom line in the short term. Go cheaper and take a risk your team underperforms.

With a coach, you can also make the ‘assistant coach’ metric mean something. Right now it’s something you build up with experience points, RPG style, and he feeds you information which, to be honest with you, I’ve never felt I needed to read in the first place. (It’s also surreal to have an assistant coach who answers to you, and no coach…) In any case, it’s a big omission in what claims to be a realistic hockey simulator.

Which brings me to…

Auto line changes and the idiot assistant coach

This problem seems to date back to time immemorial. Let’s say you have a bona fide top line center, rated at 87. Your second line center is an 82. Your third line center is an 80, and your fourth is a 75. Your top line center is hurt early on in a sequence where you’re simming a batch of about ten games. What does your assistant coach do? Well, without the simulation stopping, and without you knowing that he’s hurt, your assistant coach subs in a scratched prospect, rated at about 61, to be your new top line center. From where you’re watching, the team’s sudden tailspin, losing ten in a row, is inexplicable. You check the stats when the sim is done; who is that guy? He’s a -15 with no points in ten games, and played about 25 minutes a night. And, with that, your season is shot. (Go with your gut, assistant coach!)

This gets at the crux of the game’s weirdness. While some aspects will be unbelievably intuitive, something as elementary as line changes that will pair complementary players with one another are clunky, happening without your control, and turn the entire season around on a dime. Some events, like your scout needing a new assignment, will interrupt a sim, which means you have to start a new sim from the point of interruption (very annoying if you’re trying to sim a batch of 40 games and the longest scout assignment is six weeks). Other events, like a star player being injured, you won’t even be notified of.

Injury frequency

There are actually very few things you can do to improve your club outside of free agency. You can improve your amateur scouting, and you can improve your pro scouting, but neither of these make huge differences in the game because even with all of the available information, a prospect is still years away from contributing. You can improve the information you get from your assistant coach, which you won’t read. And finally, you can try to reduce injuries, which would be HUGE—but doesn’t seem to work.

I remember in previous iterations of the game you weren’t just able to turn injuries on and off—you could also set the frequency of their occurrence. That was great, because injuries in NHL 14 are rampant. At one point in a recent season, every single one of my top six forwards and my starting goalie was out for at least three months, even though I’d spent all of my experience points making sure my injury prevention and rehab was maxed out. It didn’t make any sense. The game doesn’t have long term injury reserve cap relief either, and you can’t trade injured players, which means there’s nothing you can do except stink. Which we did. Dusseldorf EG had a tough season.

Dependency on free agency

Because of the fact that you’re not rewarded for getting value out of your lineup—finding deals, producing a contender on a budget, etc.—you can spend whatever you need to spend to win, and you won’t go anywhere unless you do. So, when you think about it, the game comes down to signing the top 2-3 free agents every year, and simming the season to see what happens. If you don’t, the cap just keeps escalating, and you won’t be able to keep up with the joneses.

This removes the whole aspect of having a Be a GM mode that would make it not only rewarding for those who try to put ourselves in the shoes of both the GM with the infinite budget, and the GM who can barely afford the salary floor…it also removes the aspect of the game that might teach a gamer a little bit about how the league works. Why not give teams an internal budget, and make sure the owner’s expectations correlate? That way, the player has to decide—just like real players and GMs have to decide—whether they want to go to the city with the huge budget and all the expectations of a shorter timeline, or to go to the tiny backwater and try to do something special. Between this and the coaching omission, Be a GM mode seems pretty outdated.

Chaos theory

What the NHL games ultimately get right—even if they’re not trying to get it right, and it’s all coincidence—is their ability to simulate the utter chaos and unpredictability of this league. If I were simming a few seasons and saw Montreal finish third last one season and then win the east the next, I’d probably think there was a problem with the algorithms. But that’s hockey for you. And ultimately that’s EA’s Be a GM mode. It’s still addictive as hell, even if I would much rather play a no-frills, all-text simulator that truly puts you in the tough spots GMs face every day.

In conclusion, Be a GM Mode is a deeply stupid simulator. It’s fun, accessible, and very cartoony–just like everything else EA produces. But a cursory look around on the internet will reveal a whole host of much more thoughtful, deep, and comprehensive simulators available to you.

Lost amid the hubbub of hacked posts by “random useless bloggers,” acrimonious casino negotiations with the city, and the ongoing and totally unnecessary row over Alfredsson’s departure is the fact that ten years ago Saturday, Eugene Melnyk took over the Ottawa Senators.

It’s just as well that what might have been an occasion for celebration was quietly observed by a few and ignored by most. In the last decade, Melnyk has managed to significantly damage his standing among some hockey fans–or, at the very least, to damage his public image. In his frequent radio and newspaper interviews, he’s prone to utter one after another sensationalist quote, often contradicting himself in a way that seems totally disconnected from how the world sees him and his small market franchise. The interviews are mostly harmless–even entertaining. But if the first nine years of the Melnyk regime were marked by his gradual descent from saviour billionaire to buffoonish personality, then the last year has marked a further fall towards the caricature of a comic book villain, more in line with a Daryl Katz or Jeremy Jacobs.

It’s not just that he’s taken his penchant for bullish overstatement from the realm of sports talk to city council, where he’s thrown his weight around in an attempt to slide the council’s deliberations in his favor. It’s that he, like so many NHL owners, is more than happy to play with the heartstrings of hockey fans to get what he wants. In that he’s not at all unique; he’s not even as bad as some. I’m accustomed to his annual interviews about the possibilities of relocation without strong fan support, conveniently on the eve of season ticket sales. I’m left to conclude that what Ottawa has in Eugene Melnyk is the sort of ego required to amass a $1.5 billion pharmaceutical fortune in the first place.

Melnyk is just another obscenely rich person among many. Give me that kind of money and then tell me I can’t get my way, and I’ll probably seem a bit tone deaf too. But what we’ve observed over these months may be symptomatic of the NHL’s tendency to rely on these billionaire saviours in the first place–these men riding high on whatever entrepreneurial success they may currently be experiencing–over much safer options.

For every Ed Snider and Mike Illitch, there’s a “Boots” Del Biaggio, or Oren Koules and Len Barrie. For every stable fortune, there’s a fortune balancing precariously on a bubble. And so goes the future of each franchise–all of their eggs in one basket, praying the real estate market doesn’t collapse, or the tech surge fade. In some cases, this arrangement ensures years of futility and wasted potential, such as with the Islanders, who are one of the league’s most storied franchises and whose fate is tied perpetually to owner Charles Wang like a drowning man to an anchor.

Perhaps it’s naive of me to suggest, but should the NHL not be doing more to matchmake between diverse groups of investors, those who might not be able to afford a franchise on their own, but who might band together to cover or refinance the weaker links in their network in the event of failure?

I’ve written pretty extensively about how inaccurate I feel the reports are of hockey’s supposed inviability as a product. To reiterate: I think operational “losses” should be thought of as operational costs in light of the underlying value of the investment going up; I think there are multiple, non-hockey related revenues that are only possible because of team ownership, and that these revenues can go unreported; and I think cash flow problems are unrelated to Ottawa as a market so much as liquidity problems in the economy as a whole and Melnyk’s finances in particular. But because we rely on men with big personalities and complex financial problems and aspirations, fans are left to wait for the problems of individuals to be resolved rather than the responsible machinations of investment networks with plenty of checks and balances. It’s no wonder we have so many lockouts.

(And here’s a sobering thought: if the life of the Canadian Tire Center is 30 years, and we’re at about 20, that means opening up negotiations with the city on a new arena in the next few years.)

After all this, I’m left to think about what 10 years of Eugene Melnyk means for Ottawa Senators fans. When he bought the team (and the arena, for a paltry $120 million. The franchise is now worth closer to $300 million), he was effectively saving it from bankruptcy. In a city that has (repeatedly) lost its CFL franchise due to shady ownership, Melnyk signified a new era of credibility. Here was a self-made man ready and willing to buy into our little market, not because franchise ownership was something that self-important billionaires did, but because he believed it was a solid investment. Melnyk has invested in the city of Ottawa, both through charitable deeds and his efforts to rally the charity of others.

At least…that was the image. Ten years later, with all of those deeds thrown back in the city’s face as an increasingly desperate-seeming Melnyk pushes for concessions from city hall, I’m not so sure that narrative is believable anymore. And the next 10 years, if they too belong to Melnyk, could be a lot less rosy than the first.

How can Melnyk fix his image with the public? Staying out of the media would be a good start. He might harbor ridiculous beliefs, like the Senators being the second largest employer in Ottawa, and he’s more than welcome to those beliefs so long as he keeps them to himself. Secondly, Melnyk can embark on a transparent, open dialogue with both city hall and the constituents it represents, rather than throwing barbs around in the papers about the city seeming like a third world country. Thirdly, if he just can’t resist answering Don Brennan and Bruce Garrioch’s emails, he can at least be honest about the money–are we only spending about $50 million on player salaries because that’s the smart thing to do, or because times are tight? Why is the Senators’ debt ratio one of the highest in the league?

Finally: when in doubt, be gracious. Nobody ever faults a person for being polite and professional, even when they’re hiding something. When Alfie leaves town, take out a full-page ad in the Citizen thanking him and every time somebody asks about the circumstances of his departure, simply wish him luck. When someone wants to talk finances, thank the fans for making all of this possible. Maybe don’t hack people’s blogs, if that’s a thing you’re considering doing.

More and more, the sports franchise is becoming a public institution. Quite literally so, now that new arenas are being built with public money. And if that’s the case, it means winning the hearts and minds of us little people, us “random useless bloggers” who also happen to give free publicity and pour thousands of words out about the team we love. Melnyk needs to scrub up, pay a PR person, and win back some of the good faith he started out with ten years ago.

(Watch a video of Melnyk’s first presser as Sens owner here.)