Is it too late for the Ottawa Senators to bounce-back this season?
A new era has dawned in Canada’s Capital.
The Ottawa Senators fired head coach D.J. Smith on Monday, bringing back former boss Jacques Martin as the interim replacement. They also assigned former Senator Daniel Alfredsson to be the new assistant coach, elevating a famous face to the bench in a meaningful capacity.
Martin was the head coach of the team from 1996-2004 so he can hardly be considered “new” to the Sens organization. When the Senators hired him as the “senior advisor to the coaching staff” just under two weeks ago, it came as a bit of a surprise.
Martin hasn’t held a head coaching position since 2011-12, when he was fired mid-season by the Montreal Canadiens and hasn’t coached in any capacity in the NHL since 2020-21 back with the New York Rangers. He’s not exactly a youngster at 71, either.
Martin will be faced with a number of challenges as he attempts to steer the team back in the right direction. The Senators currently sit in 29th place in the NHL at the 26-game mark of the season. The team is close to the point of no return for their playoff aspirations this year. This reality has been a gut-punch to Sens fans who have waited patiently since 2017 to return to the postseason.
As of now, the Sens are 12 points out of the final playoff spot in the Eastern Conference with two games in hand. It is an understatement to say it will be a challenge to get back into the playoff spot. They’ll need someone – anyone – to step up in the vein of the Hamburglar that made the Senators nearly unstoppable in 2015 if they’re going to get this figured out.
But that shouldn’t be Martin’s top priority. He must identify precisely what hasn’t worked in the past four-plus seasons and implement systems that will help the team reach its potential. Fortunately for him, the Senators have a legitimately good team on paper.
The center depth of Tim Stutzle, Josh Norris, Ridly Greig, Shane Pinto (when he comes back), Mark Kastelic, and Rourke Chartier is solid. The wingers that round out the top nine, including Claude Giroux, Vladimir Tarasenko, Brady Tkachuk, Drake Batherson, Mathieu Joseph, and Dominik Kubalik, are better on paper than several current playoff team’s depth.
The blueline, when healthy, looks good, with both Thomas Chabot and Jake Sanderson capable of being No. 1 defensemen, with Jakob Chychrun showing why he’s potent top-four defenseman. Artem Zub rounds out that group as the defensive guru with veteran experience.
That leaves goaltending. While nobody will say Joonas Korpisalo is a Vezina-calibre goalie, he is usually good enough to be a decent 1A/1B goalie. Anton Forsberg has had his struggles, but has shown the ability to be a solid backup.
Unfortunately, the Senators have had several high-profile injuries this season that have affected the team. Chabot has missed 17 games and will still be out for another month, Zub missed seven games, Greig missed 10, and Brannstrom missed five games earlier on. At one point Chabot, Zub, and Brannstrom were all injured at the same time.
While injuries certainly hurt the team this year a coach can never unironically go up in front of the podium and shrug off a loss because of injuries. And yet that’s what former head coach Smith did time and time again. The problems that plagued the team can not be ascribed to injuries, bad bounces or anything else. Good teams find ways to win, bad teams find ways to lose. The Sens have done too much losing.
For the Senators to make the playoffs this year, they’ll likely need to finish with around 95 points in the standings. To get to that, they’re looking at a 34-17-5 record, or about 73 points from now to the end of the regular season. That comes out to a win percentage of .652 or roughly winning 6.5 games every 10 games from now to the end of the season.
Easier said than done, that’s for sure.
Only two teams in the Atlantic Division have a win percentage of .652 or higher. The Boston Bruins are at .741, while the Toronto Maple Leafs are in second place at .679. That’s the company the Sens need to be in if they’re going to make this work.
We don’t know whether Senators owner Michael Andlauer and president Steve Staios want Martin to be a short-term stop-gap or a long-term fixture. But what a story it would be for the man who helped the young Senators from the early 2000s become perennial contenders to do it again for the same team 20 years later.
If the Senators want to find a permanent head coach elsewhere, the market is open. Craig Berube, Dean Evason and Gerard Gallant are among the best options. But for now, they’ve got to start salvaging things if they’re going to attempt a playoff run, regardless of who’s leading the charge.
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