Plenty of interesting interpretations of Kyle Turris’ new deal out there. Maybe predictably, Sens blogs and fans think it’s a steal because the assumption is that he will progress towards the expectations of a third overall pick. If that happens, then the team bought some of Turris’ prime years at what might be a discounted rate. Others take a more measured (read: pessimistic) stance, assume Turris is getting a lot of money and term for not a lot of production, and wonder if Ottawa just threw $17.5MM at a nebulous concept.

Both of these perspectives are valid, of course, and both represent risk for the organization. If you lock him up ahead of time, you hope for value down the road at the risk of the player not reaching their projected performance. If you don’t, you sidestep the risk of an anchor contract, but at the risk that you may have to pay more if the player performs. What I find interesting in all of this is that fans would internalize these two scenarios equally.

I think I’ve said before on this blog that if the Sens are not spending to the cap–even a cap rolled back in the CBA negotiations–then I don’t particularly care if Eugene Melnyk is getting great value for his money. A goal is no more enjoyable if the player scoring it is being paid less for doing so. At least not for me. The only scenario in which I care if an owner is getting value for his money is one in which he intends to spend as much as he is allowed, and the value of his contracts will help the team compete against other cap spenders. But this team, so laden as it is with over-performing rookies, entry-level contracts, and players like Michalek, Karlsson, Alfredsson and Anderson over-delivering value on their contracts, then it I certainly can’t get motivated to anger if a player gets paid because management didn’t have the foresight to predict his performance. If Turris ends up being worth, say $5MM, why would I, as a fan, care that the team has to spend that?

When we talk about the fan experience of watching a hockey game, one factor–money–is abstract, and doesn’t really impact how entertaining the game is. The other–term–isn’t abstract because we watch these players for the years of their contract. It seems logical to me that we should have a greater investment in the quality of the product on the ice than in the owner getting value for his money. These things are related, of course, but less so when you have a team spending so little in any case.

What should terrify fans more is term. If this 23 year old incurs an injury or mental block or simply fails to perform without the motivation of needing a contract for five more years, then it affects me as a fan. Simply put, I’m stunned that this management was willing to give out a contract of that length after such a short audition. Erik Karlsson only got two more years than Turris.

Listen to Melnyk’s interviews and you don’t get the sense that this team is going through a temporary period of low-spending during a rebuild, to be followed, inevitably, by more spending to the cap. Something’s changed. Spending so much money only to have last year’s cheap-o team make the playoffs seems to have really gotten to Melnyk. Now, when he speaks about the team, he talks about it as if it inhabits a permanent state of small market spending, restraint, and patient prospect development. None of this is strange to me. What’s confusing is the attitude of fans (or at least those fans whose opinions I read online) who take some personal pride out of defending this billionaire’s cash. I’m not trying to troll here, Melnyk saved our team from bankruptcy after all. I’m trying to get at the tendency of armchair analysts like myself to look at every deal in terms of value for investment, even when the owner is openly saying he will spend less than he can on payroll and the league is in a bar room brawl over revenue sharing.

I like Turris (though I’ve been rough on the deal that brought him here), and he seems like a good depth player on a team that has a number of quality prospects coming up. And I hope that the team is seeing something in his off-season development that makes five years less of a risk than a one year, wait-and-see deal. But as of now, consider me perplexed.

Kyle Turris and his twin brother Tyle Kurris enjoy an afternoon of whatever this is…Rich people stuff? These guys look alike.

The Mighty Varada 

I guess we should analyze, huh? AUGUUUUUST.

Hard not to like a low-spending team getting a pretty decent second line center for $3.5M for the next five…presuming he’s a second line center and not a fourth liner the way Phoenix used him. I’m excited about locking in a young player with great pedigree, someone who’s primed to grow with this team and hopefully become a core member. On the other hand, it would have been nice to take a year to see what we really have on our hands here. If he ends up surprising the hell out of everyone and putting up 60-70 points or something, well then that’s the kind of problem every team wishes they had, and the risk seems far less than Turris becoming what he was on his last team and us counting down the days to his contract coming off the books.

I guess what I’m saying is that this team has become pretty great about taking players with flashes of brilliance–Bobby Butler playing with Spezza two season ago, Regin against the Pens in the playoffs way back in 1977– and giving those players guaranteed contracts that will look brilliant if the player’s success translates into a full season and cost nothing if they don’t work out. Turris’ deal looks the same on the surface, but is different in a few important ways. Obviously, it’s more money and more term. But also Turris has a body of work to analyze, where Butler and Regin didn’t.

Turris played two relatively full season in Phoenix, getting about ten minutes a game as a depth player. He played against weak competition, and had respectable possession numbers. In Ottawa, he proved that with an extra four or five minutes a night and against better competition, he can at least maintain those possession numbers–even improve on them relative to competition.

So I guess what I’m saying is that this is a totally reasonable contract by a team that can more than afford it, and it takes one of their prime chips for the UFA period next season off the table. All of this is great if Turris keeps up the good work. If not, well that five year term looks a little bit foreboding. If anything, you can tell the economics of this game have gone wacky when we all agree that paying $3.5M a year for a 23 year old player whose career high in points is 29 and career PPG is .403 is a crazy steal.

James

Well sir…if the pressure was on Turris to perform this season now it’s “iz-on” like old people say. And for 5 seasons. Comparisons to Mike Fisher and fans’ perennial displeasure toward him never quite reaching the nearly unreachable expectations put on him are to be trucked out upon his first dry spell. A huge difference is though, is that Mike Fisher was making an average of 5 million per which was too much.
Should Turris falter some or be usurped for 2^nd line centre (good problem) and slip to 3^rd line centre, his 3.5MM annual hit is a not impossible to digest.
Sidebar: Imagine Kyle Turris as 3^rd line centre facing off against the Tom Pyatts of the world because some Mika Zibanejad or Stephane Da Costa (what?) turns out to be a 60-70 point pivot? I would take that.

Put it this way: If things were to go South and Turris were to end up a 3^rd line centre, he’d be making 500K more than our beloved Chris Kelly currently is and for just one more year….except Turris is 23 to Kelly’s 31. Oh and has way, way more scoring touch.

This deal seems to work well for both sides of the table. Despite reports of his reputation in Phoenix (which you never know what the full story is / how much of it is Agent vs. Management  more than Player vs. Management, etc), Turris genuinely seems very eager to play for the Sens and to be part of this team’s core going forward.
Seeing as we are not and will ever be New York City (and who is in this work-a-day world?), getting players who want to be here for the long haul likely proves tough. People criticize how Murray seems to always give out that year or two more term than seems necessary such as on deals like Anderson’s 4. I think in the cases of quality players like Andy or Turris a franchise like Ottawa has to give a little extra than others would to lock them down, especially during a rebuild, . Makes me judge teams like Calgary a little less for giving Jay Bouwmeester a billion dollars a year for a little too long. A liiiiittle less I judge.

Turris wants to be here and conversely Murray and co have  shown him clearly that they are ready to make him a big part of Ottawa’s future. If he was underutilized before in his past life in Phoenix a five year deal shows those days are long over. Obviously, at this point in his career this is a gamble deal but so far Turris has shown in his time with Ottawa that if you give him the ball he’ll run with it (it’s a sports metaphor…I know, I don’t get it either).

As far as the gamble element of the deal goes, as we learned during my recent post on pedigree vs. performance in Ottawa’s lineup…….you DIDN’T read it? Well I want you to know that just because I litter my posts with diarrhea on toast jokes it doesn’t mean I don’t put time into them…ANYWAY, we learned(ish) that the safest round to gamble on is the first. That said, its important to note that Nikita Filatov was taken in the same draft as and way ahead of Erik Karlsson so, life is like a box of Lieutenant Dans but if you’re going to take a gamble on a player a guy with 3^rdoverall pedigree and a good track record on your team is not lunacy.

Welcome Kyle Turris

May the Team 1200’s post game call in show be forever at your back and The Alfie on your wing something something you to the stars.

PS. It hurts my and Varada’s feelings that you still dont follow us on Twitter 😦

Hoo boy is it ever hard to find hockey to write about in August. Especially given that there might not even be a season and my favorite team has decided not to spend any money—everything seems like it’s stuck in a perpetual holding pattern. Still, I managed to piece together some uninformed opinions about the league in between bouts of drinking outside in the sun.

Detroit: Can’t help but wonder if Kenny Holland’s incredible reputation as one of the best GMs in hockey is only now truly being put to the test. I mean, he had the greatest defenceman maybe of all time playing 30 minutes a night and into his 40s, and you combine that with late round steals like Zetterberg and a goalie like Osgoode, who stunk just enough in the regular season that they never had to pay him and suddenly became incredible in the playoffs every single damn year. This offseason, tasked with replacing Lidstrom, Holland did something very ordinary and predictable, not at all befitting such an apparent genius: he went after the best unrestricted free agents on the market.

This franchise enjoyed the longest sustained hand job from hockey critics the world over as proponents of “moneypuck” alternative metrics, vertical integration, and scouting proficiency. And it just resorted to the very antithesis of those things. Holland wrote a giant-sized novelty check to Suter and Parise, despite all the evidence that they couldn’t possibly provide value relative to that sort of money. And, just like all the other unoriginal big market GMs, when they miss out there’s very little in the way of Plan B.

Now I hear rumors that they’re looking closely at Bouwmeester and maybe even Gonchar, having to pay a premium in prospects or picks for mediocre talent, and I have to wonder: how did they not see this coming? How have they not been shoring up defensive prospects for the last ten years, knowing that one day their linchpin and captain would retire? Unless Holland has some kind of trick up his sleeve, or his metrics are so alternative that we can’t see how secretly good this defense corps will be, Detroit is going to regress hard this year. As a fan of a team that once lost Chara for nothing, I’m sympathetic. I think Detroit’s incredible run of playoff appearances may soon come to an end.

Edmonton: really enjoying the way certain hockey fixtures, especially those in Edmonton (obviously), are speculating on the team’s ability to possibly make the playoffs this season. This is a team that needs a 20 point bump over last year to be competitive for the eighth seed. To give you some perspective, Ottawa finished about 20 points out of the playoffs the season before last, and they were still up about 10 points on last place Edmonton that year. Now, Ottawa made a 20 point improvement on their place in the standings, but on the back of Karlsson’s Norris Trophy season, Spezza being top five in the league in point scoring, quality goaltending for the first time in forever, no injuries, Alfredsson being incredible at age 83, Paul MacLean’s system actually working, Milan Michalek shooting about 20% for a good chunk of the season, and a whole bunch of improbable comebacks. Edmonton makes no changes other than adding another very skilled teenager, a defenseman who is highly touted but has never played in the NHL, and Khabibulin being a year older. I don’t think anyone would be surprised to see Tambellini—or, god willing, someone else—sitting up there on TSN’s season-ending draft lottery show in the spring.

CBA negotiations: I don’t know if I’m being terribly naïve, but I don’t think there will be an enormous lockout this season. There’s just too much money on the line, and the NHLPA looks too well organized this time around to keep the discussions from being at least partially constructive. I know there’s a lot of posturing, and everyone is afraid of setting precedent for the next twenty of these things, but there just doesn’t seem to be that fundamental, existential discussion required this time. This isn’t about instituting a mechanism that will change every facet of the management of the game. This is basically about tweaking revenue sharing. Not to minimize the size of the differences between the two sides, but it just doesn’t seem so much more difficult than any other standard negotiation on how to split up the pie. No negotiation ever gets fixed early, after all. A few all-nighters in September and I bet we see a deal hammered out.

One wonders if there’s a way during future CBA negotiations to silo off some of these issues—say, have the main contract negotiation essentially comprised of revenue sharing methods, and then have sub-agreements for matters like participation in the Olympics. I know everything is related to revenues to some degree or another, but I can’t help but think that there will be a number of concessions made in the name of expediency if only because the scope of the discussion is so big.

In a way, I’m hoping that the first part of the season is cancelled. I’ve always thought that the 82 game NHL season is way too long, especially when you add all of those useless exhibition games which, here in Canada, are breathlessly announced and endlessly broadcast by a hockey-crazed media. I’m not above it. I watch too, and listen as Dean Brown or whoever analyses how Chris Neil, playing on the first line with all of the team’s good players sitting out because the games are meaningless, really came close to a shot on net there. By the end of every season I’m reduced to hockey exhaustion, waiting out the final 10-20 games in anticipation of the playoffs. I don’t even know how Islanders and Leafs fans feel, their seasons usually out of reach long before. If they could just go ahead and start the season on November first, I’d be okay with that. I’d prefer to trim the last 20 games off the schedule that the first, but I’m not against the concept.

In any case, I wonder how much longer we’ll have to wait before Melnyk weighs in with another one of his “this team needs to make it to the second round to break even” panic attacks.

Ottawa is proud to select, from the Frolindinhoff First Nations, Derek Carleton.

Hi everybody,

Let me be the first person to welcome you to summer. Welcome! As someone who …hmmm let me choose my words carefully as our lawyers have informed me that I cannot refer to what I do here as “writing” ….k, lemme start again. As someone who smashes a keyboard to produce word-like combinations with the possible intent of creating hockey-esque shapes I must admit that it can be a little tough to come up with interesting and fun subjects to discuss during these dog dangling afternoons. Seeing as the CBA does not qualify as remotely interesting but DOES qualify as a complete fucking bummer, we will skip that! Spotlight please… *soft R and B music*

Baby, there’s been a lot of talk about the rebuild lately. A lot of fussin’ and fightin’ about prospects. Lotta pillow talk about their current worth relative to development ceiling, their trade value, their blah di bling blong bluuuu. All this talk has got me thinking about what last season’s squad would look like if we put on that Natalie Cole record and stripped things dowwwn to …alright I am really sorry, I am creeping mySELF out at this point.
Here’s a chart I made. I wanted to examine what last season’s team looks like if you break it down to who drafted each player and where, what at this point in time is popularly viewed as their role on the team and if they have solidified themselves in said role. “BUT JAMES JAAAAAAAAMES!” You say, “I’ve already skipped over the boring part and noticed a bunch of people missing! Where be Filatov and the like!?” Well, You, that’s why you always read everything, and always leave a note. I arbitrarily chose to define a roster player as someone who participated in 20 or more games for Ottawa last season. Come away with me…

*Oh fuck fine. He played only 10 games for Ottawa this past year but the guy has suited up for over 150 games as a Sen so far so he makes the list.

*dusts hands* Well that just about wraps things up, now if you don’t mind…OH RIGHT, I didn’t talk about anything I noticed yet.

One of the first things that struck me is that the vast majority of picks on the team were selected by Ottawa. Given there have been a couple eras of management  at work and quite a few FAs and deadline acquisitions have come and gone over the years, at the end of the day the team is largely made up of in-house picks. I have to admit that it’s a pretty reassuring thing to see as the team goes through a rebuild.

Okay, did anyone else notice that Matt Carkner (who’s not even on the team anymore) was the only second round pick on the squad? And he was another team’s pick at that! I’m not sure what that means. I’m not trying to undervalue 2^nd round picks here. It might actually have more to do with how Ottawa tends to donate its upcoming a second round pick to pretty much every team it makes a transaction with. No fourth or fifth round picks on the team either. Funny as with all the talk lately about “Are undrafted signings worth it?” there were more of them on the team this year than rounds 2, 4 and 5 could boast combined. The more you know the more you grow I guess. *shooting star* 

Speaking of draft order, it would certainly appear that if you are a forward playing in the top 6 or a defenceperson playing in the top 4 you were likely drafted in the first round. Lots of pedigree up in there except for one weird thing: You may also find yourself playing in the top 6 or top 4 if you were some later round drop in the bucket.

All one has to do is review a draft table from nearly any year to see that being a even a high end first round pick does not mean you’ll get so much as a cup of coffee in the NHL but this chart shows me two things:

1. Pedigree seems to matter greatly to building a team.

2. Quantity of picks also seems to matter greatly to building a team as draft picks are like a box of shrimp boat captains you never know who lieutenant Dan your going to ping pong champion.

Maybe it’s because I’m a Sens fan and I’ve seen so many high pedigree flameouts but it is very satisfying to me that Jason Spezza is out there delivering on what he was supposed to be when taken 2^nd overall on draft day. Ditto Erik Karlsson. Also very  satisfying is watching a 6^th round pick play over 1000 games your team (mostly serving  as captain) or a 7^th rounder put up 17 goals in his rookie season. Looking at the line up this way makes me feel great about the combination of quality and quantity the Sens currently enjoy in the coffers. The Mark Borowieckis and Mark Stones of the world have just as good a chance of becoming NHLers as the Cody Cecis and Mika Zibanejads. Well maybe not JUST as good, but pretty damn good! Hockey is weird like that.

Anyone else see any patterns emerging from the Da Vinci thing?

Oh, I realized just now I forgot Brian Lee…umm… *shooting star* 

Hello readers,

This July marked the two year anniversary of Welcome To Your Karlsson Years, once The Cory Clouston Fashion Review, and before that a whole bunch of Gmail threads. We had a vision way back in 2010: to talk about the Ottawa Senators without access or insight, as only several other Ottawa Senators blogs were capable of and already doing.

Since that time, it’s been pretty remarkable to watch our little readership and community develop. I don’t have any doubt that we’re a very small fish in a very large sea of opinion, but nonetheless it’s been gratifying, humbling, and boner-inducing to see our traffic go steadily up. In July we beat our best ever month for site hits. That’s right: July. That blows my mind.

We do have to thank a couple of sites in particular for helping us along the way. Both Silver Seven and Puck Daddy have linked to us many times, shunting a segment of their literate and larger readership in our direction. That’s very gracious of them. By linking to them here and shunting at least tens of readers back, we consider that debt repaid.

I’d like to thank Erik Karlsson for being amazing and making us look smart for naming our blog after him, and the NHLPA for not suing us, despite the tenuous value and borderline damage this blog brings to Karlsson’s considerable brand leverage. Someday we hope to be folded into the young man’s synergy strategy and, as a result, learn Swedish.

But most of all, we have to take a moment to thank you, dear reader, for returning to our site every day, or at least every couple of weeks when you think of it because Jeremy Milks hasn’t been updating as much lately and seriously I wish he would. Because of you we get to live our dream, until such time as we develop superior and more lucrative dreams.

Even though by the time this posts it will be August – the month known in the hockey universe as That Scene in Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey Where They Play Board Games with Death – we’d like to clue you in to what we have planned for the blog in the coming weeks and months and years and centuries.

First, we will continue to write. About whatever comes into our heads. James will be funny. I will pretend that I have any idea what I’m talking about, using a cursory glance at BehindtheNet to suggest that Bobby Butler should have been named assistant coach.

We are still planning, and working on producing, a podcast, which I’ve learned is some kind of online radio show for cyberpunks and horrible loners. In our heads it is awesome.

We’re gonna get Steve producing some more of those magical images that are basically our bread and butter, including, possibly, some nice new site design elements. We will continue to abuse Steve in this way with little recompense for how very much our friendship has cost him.

We are also working hard to get James a press pass for a solitary game. He will write the Ottawa Senators Blog equivalent of Dr. Zhivago, and then we’ll sell the site to BF Goodrich or Subway so that we might recoup some small portion of the value our employers lose as we write about hockey on their dime.

And finally, we guarantee that the Ottawa Senators will win the Stanley Cup this season. Stephan Da Costa gets the Conn Smythe. Bank on it.

But until then…thanks again for reading. Go Sens go!

– Varada

As has been reported by news-starved hockey outlets all over Canada, Ottawa bought out Bobby Butler a couple of days ago.

From The6thSens post on the topic:

“The Senators will pay Butler $200,000 per season in real money but according to Capgeek, the cap hit on a potential Butler buyout will be $50,000 in the first year of the deal and $200,000 in the second. (Note: Steve Lloyd has reported that the Butler’s cap hit will actually be $75,000 in the first year of his deal and I’m not sure what accounts for the discrepancy. Nor am I interested in going through the CBA to find out the reasoning, if true, since that $25,000 difference is inconsequential to this team’s cap situation.)”

Inconsequential is right. $25,000 is as inconsequential to this team’s cap situation as $200,000, or $2,000,000. If Bobby’s buy-out somehow had a cap hit of 10 times his full salary, it would be inconsequential to this team’s cap situation. They’re currently about $20MM under the cap, spending less than all but the New York Islanders and Phoenix Coyotes. They’re being outspent by financial juggernauts like Nashville, Florida, Anaheim and Columbus, with no players left to re-sign, no quality UFAs left on the market, and no room in the forward ranks for new players.

So, let me be straight here: I’m not complaining about having a potentially competitive team who is spending less money than most. That’s great. I’m not advocating a $114MM offer sheet to PK Subban. (Strokes chin thoughtfully for a moment, vomits in wastebasket.) But that still doesn’t make this buy-out make much sense.

Butler had 37 points in 94 games, a 0.39 PPG average, which ain’t great and ain’t terrible neither. His Relative CORSI for the season wasn’t bad (3.5), though it was terrible in the playoffs (-22.1). In a nutshell, he’s a young player (25) who doesn’t cost much, has okay possession numbers, has okay point production, and has room to grow.

So…exactly the type of player a rebuilding club might want to keep around, if only for depth?

I know Butler spent his share of time in the press box last year, and the team probably didn’t want to pay him 15 grand per game to watch hockey (though paying him $400K over two years to get absolutely nothing has got to sting), but I also think Ottawa got through most of last year relatively unscathed on the injury front. They go into this year with players like Alfredsson (gods willing), Latendresse, Michalek, Spezza, and Peter Fucking Regin in their top six. Some or all of them could be missing for long stretches. And the message management sends is that they’d rather go in with an $800,000 Regin who hasn’t played hockey in about two years than pay Butler money they clearly have in the event that maybe, just maybe, they’re going to need someone who’s played some NHL games to put the puck in the net somewhere down the line.

I’m okay with the team not spending as much money as the big clubs. It’s the economics of the league, and I’ll take smart management and prospect development over whatever it is exactly that Brian Burke does any day. But I’m also okay with inexpensive depth. What exactly is a team this far below the cap floor doing buying young players out?

As far as I can tell, there are two potential subtexts to this thing: Murray has something expensive planned, or Melnyk is hoping for at least one season of high-sales/low-payroll to maximize his return on a team which, he insists, loses money.

I’ve taken issue with Melnyk’s math in the past, but even if it’s true that he needs to run a bargain basement franchise just to make a few bucks, I wonder if there’s a point at which fans start to look at the team’s bottom line and strategy and become less forgiving of cost-savings measures. Butler’s not a game changer, and the odds were long on him making a sustained impact on this lineup. But the point is that the team could afford, both in terms of cap space and revenues, to take a wait-and-see approach to his development. A tough season–one in which he received about three minutes less ice time per game–is not unheard of. If the team presumably saw enough potential to sign him to that deal in the first place, I’m curious to know what changed. Shitty exit interview?

If this is purely about the dollars and cents, then it leaves a sour taste in my mouth. Not because I liked Butler so much. But because I wonder if this move implies an era of cost-cutting and the challenging hockey that comes with it.

In any case, good thing we didn’t name this blog the Ballad of Bobby Butler. May your legend live on, you wonderfully-named, collegian shooting star.