OTTAWA – The situations are so similar, the parallels so close, that it’s not much of a stretch to see Bryan Murray as Jay Feaster or Daniel Alfredsson as Jarome Iginla.
If the Ottawa Senators hadn’t defied the odds when half their team was sent to the injury ward earlier this season, wouldn’t we be talking about the departure of two iconic captains in Canadian cities right now?
That it hasn’t even become a topic of conversation here in the nation’s capital — save for a day or two of speculation last month — demonstrates just how impressive the Senators have been.
In fact, for the second straight year, there’s a strong case to be made that they are the most surprising team in the entire NHL.
With the trade deadline less than a week away, they’ve built a nine-point cushion in the Eastern Conference standings. Five wins in their 14 remaining games gets them to the playoffs. And no one has had to even seriously consider that Alfredsson might be on the move like Iginla.
“I don’t think we would have made the decision,” Murray said Friday. “Alfie’s a Senator and we’d like him to be that for the rest of his career. Other than media speculation, I don’t think there was any time we were even considering anything with him.”
However, the veteran general manager was at least willing to acknowledge the situation could have played out differently.
Had rookie forwards Mika Zibanejad and Jakob Silfverberg not been ready to step in and contribute, had little-known Eric Gryba not been able to log almost 22 minutes per night on the blue-line, had Patrick Wiercioch not taken another step in his development, had Sergei Gonchar not found the fountain of youth in a contract year, had goalies Ben Bishop and Robin Lehner not been able to fill in capably for Craig Anderson…
On paper, there was every reason to believe the Sens would stumble without Anderson and leading scorer Jason Spezza and Norris Trophy winner Erik Karlsson and even promising young defenceman Jared Cowen, who have all been out with serious injuries.
Yet they’ve managed to roll on.
“We’re fortunate though that our team has played the way they have — fortunate (although we) kind of anticipated they’d be pretty good,” Murray said. “We’ve got a good group of young people here that play hard. Alfie and some of the veterans have really made a big impression on them.
“We’ve really been the benefactors because of it.”
The Sens are in the middle of a youth movement, according to Murray, which is why you might have expected them to at least talk about moving Alfredsson had they sunk to the bottom of the standings.
Just like Iginla, the 40-year-old winger is missing a Stanley Cup from his resume.
Just like Iginla, Alfredsson has won an Olympic gold medal and racked up impressive career statistics. Both men even once carried their teams to the Stanley Cup final before falling short.
Any way you look at it, they have had such remarkably similar careers in the same era that they can almost be seen as the Eastern and Western version of each other.
Upon hearing Iginla had been traded to Pittsburgh earlier this week, Alfredsson said: “I’m sure it’s really tough.”
“But at the same time it’s a great opportunity I believe,” he continued. “I’m pretty sure if he could have it his way, it would be the Calgary Flames at the top of the standings in the West and they were talking about who they were going to acquire to help them out. But it didn’t turn out that way for them.
“It’s a great opportunity and he’s such a good player that he’ll be a big addition to that pretty deep team already.”
For the players who occupy the Senators dressing room, it’s tough to imagine ever moving on without Alfredsson.
The day is obviously coming – whether it’s next year or the year after or the year after that – and it will require a seismic adjustment for this group.
“We want him around,” Zibanejad said. “He’s our captain, our leader. He’s been here for so many years that he’s a face out to the community and he means a lot to us.”
Even tough guy Matt Kassian already speaks glowingly about the captain. Less than three weeks after arriving from Minnesota in a trade, he referred to Alfredsson as the “real deal.”
“It’s no secret to why you hear night in and night out when you’re at home, the crowd just starts saying `Alfie!’ all the time,” Kassian said. “He’s a great player and a great captain and a great leader. I already have a tremendous amount of respect for him.
“He’s the kind of guy if he comes up to you and were to ask you to do something, you’re going to try your darndest to go out and do it.”
In other words, he’s the type of player any team could use.
One of the more interesting aspects of the trade deadline is the impact it has even on teams that are expected to be quiet. Teams like Ottawa.
Less than an hour after Murray told reporters “we’re not doing much of anything” on Friday afternoon, coach Paul MacLean called the looming trade extravaganza a “distraction for everybody.”
“For you guys, for me, for the PR staff, for the players for sure,” he said. “It’s a distraction for them if they’re paying attention to it. We tried to address it – all we’ve said about is: ‘You’re players, come in and be players. You don’t control anything else.”
Now imagine what it would be like if Alfredsson was on the market?
During a quiet conversation with this reporter ahead of last year’s all-star game, the Senators captain made an interesting point about his personal situation.
He noted that the team’s surprising season had spared him from being bombarded with questions about his future in Ottawa during that event – something that would have cast a shadow over since it was being held at Scotiabank Place.
“My heart’s in Ottawa,” Alfredsson said at the time. “I want to be part of taking this organization in the right direction before I retire too. It obviously feels great to be where we are now and not be on the outside looking in.
“It’s also been nice not to be answering questions about what I’m going to do by the (trade) deadline. There’s no question about that now and that’s the way I wanted when I went into the season.”
Nothing has changed and that is a story in itself.
It means that Alfredsson might get the chance to do something Iginla now can’t – wear just one NHL sweater for his entire Hall of Fame career.