Ottawa Senators owner Eugene Melnyk is a mercurial man, but you can take him at his word when he said he won’t be giving general manager Bryan Murray the Dave Nonis treatment.
One could make a case that Murray deserves an axe for his work this season now that his Senators have been swept out of the playoffs in four straight at the hands of the Pittsburgh Penguins. And one could make an ever stronger case by pointing out that if Melnyk found cause to fire John Muckler from the GM post last summer after Muckler got the Sens to the Stanley Cup final than Murray deserves the same fate and perhaps a gloved slap on both cheeks for emphasis.
But that would only make Melnyk look worse than he already does. But think about how difficult it would be to find a competent GM to succeed Muckler-Murray if the candidates were relatively certain that nothing less than a Cup victory in season one of his employment would lead to dismissal.
What’s more likely to happen is that Murray will survive and changes, including a new coach and an upgrade in goal, will be made with Melnyk sitting quietly in the background while he fights the charges brought against him and his Biovail company by the SEC.
It will also give Melnyk time to address the sobering reality that he’s just as big a part of this mess as Ray Emery, Bryan Murray, Jason Spezza and Dany Heatley.
Ottawa’s best opportunity to win a Stanley Cup is now gone and the series with Pittsburgh proved it. It’s not all their fault. Time and the salary cap have taken a toll on a team that has been around the top of the game for almost a decade.
Even if they hadn’t self-destructed, there was a good chance they would have lost to the Penguins in six or seven games. The Penguins are the Senators of six or seven seasons ago. They are young, talented, well coached and well led and though they have flaws, they do not appear to be in goal or in the clutch scoring department so they should be moving forward for several seasons to come. The same can be said of the Washington Capitals and a handful of other teams who are starting to grow in the East.
That said, Ottawa doesn’t need to enter a total rebuilding phase, but it does need an extensive overhaul and that takes time and an experienced hockey man at the helm.
Murray deserves his share of the blame for what’s happened to the franchise, but he also fits the criteria for director of the rebuild. He knows hockey and he knows talent and where he gets an edge is that he knows Ottawa’s problems from the inside out. Given Melnyk’s other problems, Murray is the guy Melnyk has to charge with fixing the Senators.
Goaltending will be a huge issue. Emery is as good as gone, likely via a buyout. That message was sent from the moment Murray nailed him to the bench in favour of Martin Gerber. Gerber wasn’t awful in the series, but he was never close to being a difference maker and if a team has Stanley Cup aspirations or even aspirations of making the playoffs (which will be both a singular and difficult goal for the Senators next season), that has to improve.
Murray also has to deal with the fact that he has too much money tied up over two long a period of time in Jason Spezza, Dany Heatley and Daniel Alfredsson. He now has a Jay Feaster-like problem on his hands. Alfredsson, injured before the playoffs even started, is aging, but he is still talented and effective as well as a fan favourite. Spezza is talented and younger but he has been a bust in the playoffs for two seasons now. It’s possible that can be corrected, but it’s not going to be easy as he has a mindset that indicates he would like to do better, but has neither the knowledge nor the passion to make it happen.
That would seem to leave Heatley as the fall guy. He is a proven non-performer in the playoffs and that isn’t likely to change. He also has a long-term contract at a price point that makes him harder to move, especially with a reputation as a non-playoff player. Murray would be fortunate to construct a Brad Richards-like deal for him but that’s pretty tough considering Richards has a Conn Smythe Trophy on his resume while Heatley does not.
What’s a general manager to do?
Murray could try and add youth and grit to his team in the hopes that it will at least cover some of the failures of Spezza (also just one assist in the series) and Heatley (the same), but that’s not easy and it doesn’t happen quickly in today’s NHL. While all that’s going on he needs to find a defenceman or two as he will likely lose Wade Redden to free agency, further weakening his defence.
It’s not a pretty picture and without Muckler, whose strength was and remains identifying talent and getting pieces to fit, Murray will be on his own while also looking for a new coach in the process.
Summing up, the Ottawa Senators aren’t just a failure, they are a mess and it’s a mess that won’t be cleaned up quickly.
In the end, that shudder at the top, compounded by some of the moves Murray made and didn’t make, was felt at every level of the operation.
The finely crafted pieces of the plan started falling off in small pieces at first, but later in chunks and then entire sections. Had the regular season lasted just one week longer, it was obvious that what was left of the Senators wouldn’t have even qualified for the playoffs.
That’s the state of the franchise today. In the end there was no team there. The Senators were poorly run, poorly managed, poorly coached and they performed poorly as a result.
The Penguins were exactly the opposite. The result was as predictable as it was inevitable and everyone in the Ottawa organization had a hand in that.