It’s the first night of the NHL playoffs, and the day after the draft lottery. It’s time for us to check in with our feelings and decide, once and for all, if Brady Tkachuk is our Supervisor. (He is.) We also talk about the New Jersey Devils, Carolina Hurricanes, Brian Gibbons and Alex Ovechkin, who are roughly as good as one another, Logan Brown’s dad, and tailgating at a Lions game.
I’m going to try something on for size, here: optimism. I won’t go over all of the ways in which this is not an intuitive or realistic stance to take. You know them. But as I shift from Actually Watching Games to the hockey equivalent of playing Settlers of Catan, I can’t help but feel like there’s some hope that we can successfully bargain for some wheat. Not enough hope to buy a hockey ticket, of course. But reason to keep talking about the Ottawa Senators online.
Here’s what I’ve got. Do with it what you will:
The Moment Karlsson Was Gone, a Rebuild Was the Right Call
Ottawa was uniquely dependent on Erik Karlsson to drive their entire system. He played in all situations, he played half the game, he made every player on the team better, and outside of Mark Stone was the only player on the team who could hold his own against the best competition in the league. Ottawa without Erik Karlsson simply wasn’t Ottawa. They were barely an NHL team.
Ottawa wasn’t very good in Karlsson’s last season with the team, finishing second last. One could reasonably argue that the moment he was gone – ignoring how much of a cluster-fuck it is to let a player like that go under any circumstances – the team had to rebuild. A team so dependent on Erik Karlsson, even with Mark Stone, Matt Duchene, Thomas Chabot, and Mike Hoffman, wasn’t going anywhere without him.
Yes, having Mark Stone to build around is also a good option. I’m just saying that if you squint and look sideways, in a way Dorion is giving the We Should Have Gone Full Rebuild in 2011 crowd what they’ve always wanted.
Ottawa Started Their Rebuild With a Respectable Base of Prospects
Before the great sell-off began with Karlsson, Ottawa had an intriguing mix of players: long-shots with high ceilings, tools-y players that projected as depth, and a ton of wild cards. But for a team that hadn’t drafted anywhere near the top five since taking Mika Zibanejad sixth overall in 2011, Ottawa could do much worse than Thomas Chabot, Colin White, Drake Batherson, Logan Brown, Alex Formenton, Filip Chlapik, Christian Wolanin and Filip Gustavsson, to say nothing of stealth players on the farm like Maxime Lajoie.
In what’s become a bit of a habit, Ottawa made the most out of late round picks and their trade of Brassard to form a decent baseline of prospects. They added Brady Tkachuk to that baseline last year. That’s not one of the better prospect pipelines in the league – there’s a conspicuous lack of blue-chippers outside of Chabot and Tkachuk – but being in the middle-third of prospect systems without very high picks is not so bad given the circumstances.
They added to that baseline with the trades to come. While the only blue-chip prospect Ottawa got back in the trades of Karlsson, Stone, Duchene, Dzingel, and Hoffman was Erik Brannstrom, they also added to their intriguing mix: Rudolph Balcers, Josh Norris, Vitaly Abramov, and Johan Davidsson.
Three blue-chippers and a whole lot of upside isn’t a bad place to start one’s build.
The Only Thing Ottawa is Good at is Drafting, and They Have a Ton of Picks
I mostly agree with the notion that the only way to get true needle-movers, meaning players that significantly improve your chances of competing for a Cup, is to capitalize on other team’s mistakes or dire circumstances (as Vegas just did with us and Mark Stone) or to draft them. In the absence of very high draft picks, teams, especially teams whose strength is drafting, should get as many chances at drafting super-secret future needle-movers as possible.
As Dellow wrote about over on The Athletic, Ottawa has a near-historic number of picks over the next three years:
Ottawa’s currently sitting on 15 picks in the first three rounds over the next three years, with a possibility of getting up to 17 as things stand. The final draft of the Original 21 era took place in 1990. There have been 757 potential three-year windows for teams since then. Only one team – the 2000-02 Devils – went to the podium more than 17 times in the first three rounds in a three year period since the demise of the Original 21.
There’s potential for the Senators to add to their haul, too, by trading Cody Ceci and Mikkel Boedker at the draft. And then there are reliable depth players like Chris Tierney and J-G Pageau. None of these players will produce a high pick, but they might give Ottawa more shots at the carnival game.
While many of the teams with that number or near that number of picks were only able to produce a few NHLers, many of those years took place pre-salary cap, when there wasn’t as much emphasis on drafting and development as a key to success, and when analytics weren’t nearly as accessible to scouts and GMs. The teams that did have that many draft picks more recently produced a larger cohort of NHL players.
Some of those picks might turn out to be pretty good, too. Obviously, Ottawa’s own picks will be pretty high, so there’s potential to add another blue-chipper or two to Ottawa’s emerging core. If Columbus re-signs Duchene and Panarin and Bobrovsky walk in the off-season, they could be on the outside looking in playing in the Metropolitan. If the Sharks re-sign Karlsson, Ottawa receives their 2021 2nd rounder, and if they make the Cup Final this year that turns into a 1st. A lot would have to go right and then suddenly wrong for the Sharks, but they have one of the older lineups in the league and play in the ultra-competitive Pacific, with much younger teams. In addition to Ottawa’s 1sts, there’s a scenario where the Jackets’ and Sharks’ 1st end up being pretty high value.
I mean, let that sink in:
Blue chippers
Upside
Who knows?
We’re Probably Still Boned
I know the obvious response to all of this is: “So what if we have potentially good players? If Melnyk owns this team and we don’t have a new arena, there’s no money to re-sign them.”
That’s true!
I don’t have a rebuttal to that.
Have a good day.
In Episode 14 of Fifth Liners: The Podcast Whose Name or Hosts are Never the Same, Luke and James do a lot of swears, talk about various trades, compare Matt Duchene to an unlucky talisman, get acquainted with a few of the newest Senators prospects, bid a fond medium farewell to Guy Boucher, and try their hand at numerology by breaking down the Belleville Senators jersey numbers.
I learned something on Twitter the other day. Once the shock of having engaged in a meaningful interaction on that social media platform wore off, the substance of what I’d learned began to sink in: the Green Bay Packers are a publicly-owned nonprofit corporation.
This was of immediate interest to me. Anybody unfortunate enough to have followed me on this site and on Twitter (@thisthreetime: come join the pointlessness) will know that my particular bugaboo is the NHL’s reliance on whacky billionaires to own and manage their franchises. While it’s true that most of these billionaires are just fine, and that the NHL is hardly unique in this reliance, the business model does have a tendency to occasionally blow up in the league’s face. Tying a team’s fortunes to an individual’s wealth is how you get Charles Wang meddling in hockey operations, Oren Koules running the Lightning into the ground after the real estate market collapsed, and Eugene Melnyk challenging old-school whack-a-doos like Harold Ballard and Bill Wirtz to rule their Mr. Monopoly fiefdom with the most iron-y of fists.
My uneducated speculation in this area has led me to valorize the idea of the consortia of local business interests, like those that exist in Winnipeg and Nashville. In these arrangements, the risk is spread out among more investors so if, say, your pharmaceutical magnate runs into liquidity trouble as a result of a worldwide contraction in the pharmaceutical market, it doesn’t affect your nice little hockey club.
But then a nice person on Twitter told me about the Green Bay Packers. Here, from the esteemed Wikipedia.org:
The Packers are the only publicly owned franchise in the NFL.[1] Rather than being the property of an individual, partnership, or corporate entity, they are held as of 2016 by 360,760 stockholders. No one is allowed to hold more than 200,000 shares,[2] which represents approximately four percent of the 5,011,558 shares currently outstanding.[3] It is this broad-based community support and non-profit structure[4] which has kept the team in Green Bay for nearly a century in spite of being the smallest market in all of North American professional sports.
Green Bay is the only team with this public form of ownership structure in the NFL, grandfathered when the NFL’s current ownership policy stipulating a maximum of 32 owners per team, with one holding a minimum 30% stake, was established in the 1980s.[5] As a publicly-held nonprofit, the Packers are also the only American major-league sports franchise to release its financial balance sheet every year.
What obviously interests me about this structure is that it takes the idea of making risk more diffuse among a few local interests and turns it up to eleven. The risk would be spread out between everyone and anyone who owns shares, with the consolidation of shares limited by the shareholder agreement. Locals would be incentivized to support the team by buying tickets because they, or people they know, would feel a literal degree of ownership of the team. If the team runs into liquidity problems, it could also issue more shares and spread the risk out even further.
What would this look like, in practice? Would we have hundreds of thousands of people debating the merits of trading for Gary Roberts? Not really.
Again, from Wikipedia:
Even though it is referred to as “common stock” in corporate offering documents, a share of Packers stock does not share the same rights traditionally associated with common or preferred stock. It does not include an equity interest, does not pay dividends, cannot be traded, and has no protection under securities law. It also confers no season-ticket purchasing privileges. Shareholders receive nothing more than voting rights, an invitation to the corporation’s annual meeting, and an opportunity to purchase exclusive shareholder-only merchandise.[4]
Shares cannot be resold, except back to the team for a fraction of the original price. While new shares can be given as gifts, transfers are technically allowed only between immediate family members once ownership has been established.[3]
In other words, being a shareholder first and foremost empowers one to contribute to the sustainability of one’s team and mitigates risk. It essentially takes the concept of season ticket holders and makes it more affordable and guarantees some voice. There’s nothing requiring Melnyk to hold season ticket town hall meetings. Shareholders are entitled to certain rights, however.
This goes to the immediate benefit of such an arrangement: it immediately makes possible a level of transparency and accountability that currently does not exist among the more dictatorial ownership groups. The fact that the team most not only release a balance sheet every year but that shareholders can attend an annual general meeting at which general governance is voted upon reduces the likelihood of, say, the general manager announcing one day that he’ll make a decision on the coach at the end of the season and then firing the coach the next day. It’s not that he’ll need to bring that sort of decision to a vote, but if he acts in that manner he must answer to the shareholders during the AGM as opposed to only answering to his whacky billionaire boss (who may or may not have ordered the firing in the first place). Shareholders would not be involved in the day-to-day of the draft, trades, or getting a hockey team on the road, but could ask for justification of strategy and, should there be enough votes, vote to approve broad changes in management.
Secondly, this structure would act to reinvest the profits into the community. While shareholders would not receive dividends (which could incentivize shareholders to reduce costs as much as possible to maximize returns), as a nonprofit the corporation must carry a limited surplus. Any excess profits could be reinvested in the teams’ infrastructure or in the community via the corporation’s foundation after, say, adhering to an agreement to spend within a certain percentage of the cap or privileging re-signing one’s drafted players.
Finally, the idea of a publicly-held entity may incentivize government to help with the construction of an arena. As opposed to the ephemeral notion of economic growth as the spillover result of arena construction (something that’s been pretty thoroughly debunked at this point), the city, province or feds may be more amenable to contributing revenue knowing that the economic benefits of team ownership will not be conferred first to a whacky billionaire who winters (and probably does his taxes in) the Bahamas but instead to constituents. I don’t know if the math works out, and it’s probably always a safer bet to invest in public transportation, schools, and housing, but at least the ephemeral promise of growth is guaranteed to confer more directly than it would if it traveled first through the bank account of a pharmaceutical magnate.
How likely would any of this be? Oh lord, not at all:
Any new purchase of an NHL team must be approved by the league’s Board of Governors, which is comprised of some of the more established owners in the league. The board not only establishes the rules of membership in the NHL ownership fraternity, but decides what, if any, help the league may offer franchisees in negotiating arena leases or other related legal matters. Balsillie’s bid to buy the Phoenix Coyotes out of bankruptcy in 2007 was essentially sunk when members of the board, such as Minnesota Wild owner Craig Leipold, painted Balsillie as deceitful and uncooperative.
The NHL’s current ownership rules exist to make possible the long-term economic benefit of an elite group of whacky billionaires. It seems unlikely that the same group would vote to allow an innovative ownership structure that cuts them out of the equation rather than, say, simply identifying another whacky billionaire to invite to their club. The only reason Green Bay’s arrangement exists is that it was grandfathered in from a time when unions and collective ownership were considered essential components of our economy as opposed to the tools of despicable socialists.
But in Melnyk, we’re seeing the tragic trade-offs of the league’s current reliance on cartoon villains with formerly deep pockets. We may romanticize whoever comes along and saves Ottawa from this endless cycle of misery – as we once did with Melnyk – but by then the damage will have been done to the brand, to the community, and to the sustainability of hockey in Ottawa. I can’t imagine anybody at NHL head office is arguing that what’s happening at the moment is ideal.
I’ve noticed a tendency to think of this round of Ottawa Senators trades as the latest chapter in a coherent, linear narrative: Ottawa trades or allows to walk some of their best players because the owner doesn’t have the money to pay them. I have to disagree, somewhat, that this is only the latest in a constant theme. I offer, instead, that what’s happening right now is much worse. What’s happening right now is the final emptying out of the idea of the Ottawa Senators as a shared experience, a local narrative, and a hub around which Ottawans build community.
During the 2010-2011 season, which resulted in the Ottawa Senators finishing fourth last in the league, the feeling was that the time was right for a rebuild. The team had older veterans who might garner picks and prospects – Daniel Alfredsson, Jason Spezza, Mike Fisher, Chris Phillips, Alex Kovalev, Chris Neil, Milan Michalek, Sergei Gonchar, Chris Kelly, and Zack Smith. In the end, only Fisher, Kovalev and Kelly would be traded for futures. Goaltender Brian Elliott would be traded for an older goaltender, Craig Anderson, who was extended. The team elected to keep several key veterans in the fold, either because no deals came along to their liking or out of fear of losing long-time Ottawa players.
In other words, the team was loyal to a fault and maintained a higher payroll thinking they might soon return to contention.
When Daniel Alfredsson walked to the Detroit Red Wings before the 2013-2014 season, it was viewed as an inability or unwillingness to pay a franchise player who’d taken team-friendly deals (and been screwed by salary rollbacks during CBA negotiations, to boot). But on the same day, GM Bryan Murray traded for Bobby Ryan, a younger, scoring winger (theoretically; this was before his hands turned to dust) who would soon require a big-money contract. The fans felt anxiety, at the time, that Ottawa would not pay up. Instead, the team signed Ryan to a massive seven-year, $50.75 million deal.
When Jason Spezza was dealt in 2014 it came in response to a request for a trade and with the veteran on an expiring deal. He was extended by Dallas, an extension that has not looked great for the Stars who now pay him north of $7 million to play select minutes.
Ottawa made decisions that would not turn out particularly well in some cases and would alienate long-time fans with affection for their homegrown talent, but at least these decision existed in the world of logic: if your team is not contending with your current roster, you sell off your older players for futures in the hope that a future iteration will contend. Ottawa might have turned off a few because of bad decisions, but they maintained the narrative on which hockey relies: the team, and as an extension, its community, are always building toward the future.
What is happening to the Ottawa Senators right now is different, for the simple reason that teams that are lucky enough to draft good players, and lucky enough to develop them into good players, and lucky enough to still have them on their roster in their prime do not typically trade those players unless it’s for other players with the same or higher potential. For Ottawa to trade Erik Karlsson, Mike Hoffman, Matt Duchene, Mark Stone, and Ryan Dzingel – all players who are still young and could contribute to a rebuild – is a perversion of the natural cycle of team development. It is mortgaging the future on which sports mythology rests.
You amass futures and develop them so that you can compete when your window opens. You don’t amass futures and develop them so that you can sell them off for more futures prematurely. If you do the latter, it alienates your fans even worse than losing a player we feel nostalgic about because it dilutes the very premise of the sport, the underlying narrative that informs our long-term loyalty to the game. If the team is not building to anything in particular, then why should we spend any time on it? If the heroes of a particular narrative are not in pursuit of some commonly-understood objective, then why should we see that narrative through to the end?
The current state of the Ottawa Senators is not unpredictable; we’ve seen this throughout the world of sports. This is a natural byproduct of any business model that relies on sole ownership by people whose wealth is concentrated in markets that can, occasionally, bottom out. If and when Melnyk sells the Ottawa Senators, if it’s to another sole owner or small group and if their wealth is derived from a single source – real estate, pharmaceuticals, a traveling circus, whatever – we are at risk of returning to this endless cycle of building to nowhere.
The fault for this lies in part with the NHL. As I’ve written before on this site and on Twitter, until the league starts focusing on building up consortia of local business interests that make risk more diffuse among partners, we’ll always be at risk of a billionaire owner becoming less than a billionaire or, at the very least, going senile and interfering with management decisions.
I, more than some, have been able to ‘gotta-hear-both-sides’ many of the decisions made by the Ottawa Senators management over the years. While I might disagree with a particular trade or signing, I have, in most cases, been able to understand the assumptions that were made that led to it. This time, it’s different: the financial status of the owner has interfered with the natural cycle of sports narrative to disrupt our shared sense of purpose.
As a result, this is the lowest moment in the history of the Ottawa Senators, including those early expansion years. This is the moment those leading the team acknowledged that the Ottawa Senators as an idea, as a hero in their own story, as a community, are meaningless.
This episode features special guest Poppy Fitzgerald of the amazing and indispensable This Amelnykan Life podcast. In addition to a discussion about their work (seriously, just fuggin subscribe) we talk about Gritty and Spartacat both being Libras, Melnyk’s bizarre statements about spending to the cap, the impending doom of Stone and Duchene at the trade deadline, and something about an Australian reality TV show that I refuse to Google to learn more about.
In this episode of the podcast, Luke and James speak about the Belleville Senators Experience, and whether the Sens’s Rookies can bring feeling back to their cold dead heart. Eugene Melnyk barely even comes up!
James and Varada talk about the young season, say the word “spiritual” several times, are haunted by the invincible Cody Ceci and fall in love with Brady Tkachuk’s wonderful jerk face.
Well, it’s happened. The Ottawa Senators have traded the best player in franchise history and hollowed out the soul of the team for years to come. James, Varada and Luke react with cooler heads than anyone might have thought.
The Ottawa Senators are proud to share the vision for the future of our team and this organization. We are about to launch an exciting plan to rebuild our team and we are inviting you to be a part of our rise to new heights. #OttawaRising pic.twitter.com/hok2jYCUVi
— Ottawa Senators (@Senators) September 11, 2018
There’s a level on which the bizarre 10:05 PM tweet from the Ottawa Senators’ official account undoubtedly represents an unprecedented low point in the modern history of the team or, at the very least, of the Eugene Melnyk era.
There’s another level, however, on which what happened last night was depressingly predictable given the continued underinvestment in what most large businesses take for granted: public relations and media strategy departments, professional writing and rigorous field testing of a message, good old-fashioned managing up and an actual, clear vision of progress. No healthy organization would have allowed this quality of a product in this kind of a toxic environment to see the light of day. This video – this utterly if unintentionally hilarious monstrosity of an attempt to control the damage – is the inevitable outcome of a franchise gone to seed.
Here are a few of the things I was thinking as I watched the ratio under that tweet surpass a thousand replies:
Perhaps weirdest is the owner taking the opportunity to tell the fans that he’s not going anywhere for a long, long time. This, after a summer in which #MelnykOut became the organic, unifying meme this team has never been able to create itself. Maybe Melnyk is out of touch with how his customers feel, or billionaires just have brain worms from years of people sucking up to them, but if he has even the slightest sense of what’s going on then the inclusion of this little tidbit can’t help but feel like a big “fuck you” to those of us who can’t bring ourselves to buy a ticket if it means giving Eugene Melnyk a dollar. He’s saying he’ll outlast us.
And finally, I feel for the veterans in that dressing room on unmoveable contracts: Bobby Ryan, Craig Anderson, Marian Gaborik, Mikkel Boedker, and Zack Smith. When they signed those contracts, the team seemed to be trending up. Now they’re trapped between an owner nobody can control, an irate fanbase, their own declining abilities and the complete lack of a future. Craig Anderson, in particular, who’s been a warrior for the team for the better part of eight years and probably the best goalie the Sens have ever had, is about to be on the receiving end of a really bad team’s really bad season. I hope they find a home for him elsewhere and a real chance to end his career competing for a Cup.
In the end, what we’re left with is our own work. Last night’s spontaneous combustion of our favorite team was at least a moment to appreciate the creativity and passion of the fans on twitter. We deserve better than this. At least we’ve got each other.
— Capital Gains (@Capital_Gains65) September 11, 2018
Welcome To Your Karlsson Years 