-If you lose back to back games in Alberta, you really don’t deserve to make the playoffs. A night after a disappointing loss in Edmonton, the Senators were just as bad against the lowly Calgary Flames. These two losses all but extinguish the team’s playoff chances with 19 games left in the season. Sports Club Stats now puts Ottawa at just 7.6%. It would take some kind of magical run for Ottawa to make it at this point.
-Twitter was abuzz yesterday with fans questioning Head Coach Paul MacLean. And with good reason. Turris, Ryan and MacArthur all saw extremely limited ice time while the trio of Greening-Smith-Neil remained a favourite of the Coach. I have said it all along but it’s important to remember that more goes into a Coach’s decision than what we see during games. That fact is the only thing that is keeping me from thinking Paul MacLean has gone completely insane. All season it feels like Mac is in some sort of power struggle with the team’s best players. Would be nice to know why.
-A wild deadline day in the books and the end result was Ales Hemsky joining the Ottawa Senators. It’s a good low risk move that really didn’t cost Ottawa a whole lot. The Sens and Sabres did talk about Matt Moulson at some point but in the end, Tim Murray’s asking price was too high. Hemsky made more sense anyway because Murray and the Senators feel like they have a decent shot at retaining him beyond the 20 game audition. We shall see.
-Individually, each of the moves made by the Senators yesterday is justifiable. But when you look at the whole picture, it stinks of the familiar “money in/money out” approach. In the weeks leading up to the deadline we heard about how the Sens were ready to buy and that they had the go ahead from Eugene Melnyk to add salary if need be. In the end, they gave up Conacher for nothing, loaned Corvo to another organization and got the Oilers to take on half of Hemsky’s salary. Certainly seems like the internal budget was a factor in Murray’s decisions yesterday.
-Thanks to everyone that made SensChirp your Trade Deadline hang out. It was an exciting day around these parts with some record traffic and comment numbers. Combined with the Game Day discussion, the thread got up over 1500 comments. Pretty incredible. Although I should apologize to all your employers for your ridiculously low productivity yesterday.
