High draft pick might be Sens’ saving grace

They are asking the same question all over Ottawa today.

When to pull the plug?

They are asking it on Parliament Hill, with Conservatives and Liberals eyeing the coming budget as the moment of decision for a federal election.

They are asking it at Scotiabank Place on the western edge of the city, and in the bars, offices and airways.
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“Is it time to blow up the Sens à la Wile E. Coyote?” ponders a morning host on the local sports talk radio station.

It may well be.

On Tuesday night in Boston, the Ottawa Senators put on a display that would have embarrassed the franchise back in 1992-93 – the year Sports Illustrated tagged them the worst team in history – when they fell 6-0 to the Bruins.

The loss, the team’s sixth in a row, has reduced the coach to talking about scoring chances and goalposts – language again reminiscent of the desperate days of the team’s very first year.

Friday will mark exactly one year since the Senators came out of a similar tailspin in New York. During the morning skate before a game against the Rangers, Ottawa forward Mike Fisher bounced a puck off the head of Pascal Leclaire, the Joe Btfsplk of NHL goaltenders, and two backup goalies took the team to 11 consecutive wins – enough to send the team, barely, into the playoffs, where they lost in the opening round.

As of Wednesday, roughly the halfway point of the current NHL season, the Senators stand tied with the Toronto Maple Leafs for 12th place in the Eastern Conference, 13 points shy of the final playoff position. Some Battle of Ontario …

Toronto, however, has been playing well of late and has two games in hand. On Thursday, the Senators will play the New York Islanders, a team also playing better and also with two games in hand. It is not inconceivable that – considering the unlikelihood of another 11-game winning streak – the Senators may be caught by every team in the East but penny dreadful New Jersey Devils.

This is not necessarily a bad thing.

The Ottawa year has been a disaster. Leclaire, the $3.8-million-a-year (all currency U.S.) goaltender that was to solve, finally, the Senators perennial problems in goal, has rarely played and even more rarely played well. Milan Michalek, the only actual player obtained in the Dany Heatley forced trade with the San Jose Sharks, has slipped badly. Alexei Kovalev, the $5-million-a-year elite forward brought in as a free agent, has so given up on trying that his current injury has strengthened, rather than hurt, the team. Sergei Gonchar, the $5.5-million-a-year defenceman brought in to run the power play, is a team-worst minus-20 and seems a thin shadow of the player he once was.

Leclaire and Kovalev, fortunately, are up for contract renewal this summer – their return surely less likely than a Bloc majority government.

So badly has the team played that the best line has been composed of three players who came from the minors and, on most teams, would be back in the minors. When the NHL announced that 20-year-old defenceman Erik Karlsson, a promising player plagued by mistakes, would be the Senators’ representative at the all-star game, it said all that needs be said of all the rest of the team. They have spent to the salary cap, with virtually nothing to show for it.

The gossip is wild. General manager Bryan Murray is said to have tried to fire coach Cory Clouston but was prevented from doing so by owner Eugene Melnyk, who is considering his options. Murray has denied any such thing, but it has not stopped the speculation that Murray himself may soon be out and that the owner’s choice for coach is Dave Cameron, who handles Melnyk’s junior team, the Mississauga St. Michael’s Majors, and was the systems-driven coach of the Canadian juniors in the recent world championship.

So desperate have things become that call-ups from the minors have become major debating points in Ottawa. The latest to get the call from Binghampton is Corey Locke, the American Hockey League’s leading scorer. Locke, an Ottawa favourite as a junior, has neither size nor speed and has never merited scoresheet mention in four previous NHL games.

But you never know – Julian Fantino, after all, could turn out to be the Conservative Party’s answer to a breakthrough in Toronto.

Little wonder, then, that a great many in Ottawa are now advocating the team pull the plug on this season, trade off whatever aging assets it can, go low in the standings and pray for a future saviour in the bottom-feeders’ lottery that will decide which team picks first through five at the draft.

The lottery stands as perhaps Ottawa’s most significant contribution to the NHL since re-entering the league in 1992. By deliberately hoping to come last – even, at one point, suggesting a competition with the only team as bad as they were to decide which of them would pick first – the Senators caused the creation of the lottery system.

Perhaps the time has come for the creator to act.