BY ALEX FLETCHER – FAN FUEL BLOGGER
During the holiday season, Fan Fuel bloggers are looking back at their favourite sporting moment from 2011.
For most people, June 24th and 25th, 2011 were pretty normal early summer days. However, for any fan of the Ottawa Senators, those two dates were pivotal in transforming their team’s fortunes for the better.
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In the four seasons following the Senators’ appearance in the 2007 Stanley Cup Final, Ottawa accumulated just 345 points, qualified for the playoffs only twice, and won a measly two playoff games. The team that had once been a force, qualifying for the playoffs in 11 straight seasons, was now mired in mediocrity.
Hope for the future was grim, too: the Senators’ prospect pool was horribly underwhelming. Although it had recently begun to be replenished with the additions of players such as Jared Cowen and Robin Lehner, the talent level fell off a cliff shortly after those three.
Among the Sens’ next best prospects were the likes of Louie Caporusso, Jim O’Brien, and Roman Wick. Decent players? Certainly. But not the types of prospects that fans of a team in desperate need of retooling should have to pin their hopes on.
The 2011 NHL Entry Draft, however, changed everything.
With ten picks in all, including three of the first 24 picks in the draft, the Senators loaded up on skilled forwards – the area of the organization’s prospect pool that needed the most work. Ottawa selected eight forwards and two defencemen with their picks, and each of their first five selections was a highly talented forward.
In fact, in using their three first-round selections to draft forwards Mika Zibanejad, Stefan Noesen, and Matt Puempel, the team added an entire potential scoring line to its prospect pool, and then followed up by picking two other skilled forwards: Shane Prince and Jean-Gabriel Pageau, who play for the Ottawa 67s and Gatineau Olympiques, respectively. And, to add some more sizzle, Murray swung a deal for former sixth-overall pick Nikita Filatov, who, although released by the Senators to play in Russia for the remainder of the season, may not deserve being given up on just yet.
The Senators hadn’t been able to come out of a draft with pundits calling the team the biggest winner of the event in a long time, but in 2011, they did just that. Suddenly, the dearth of offensive talent in their system vanished.
Combine all of their picks with last spring’s college free agent signees Stephane Da Costa and Pat Cannone, and the continued development of players like Jakob Silfverberg and Mark Stone, and very quickly the Sens’ prospect pool became one of the best in the entire NHL.
The World Junior Championships will give fans a chance to see some of the team’s new talent in action, too. Zibanejad and Fredrik Claesson, both 2011 picks, will represent Sweden in the tournament; Stone, currently the leading scorer in the Western Hockey League, will represent Canada and is expected to be a key contributor; and Prince has a chance to be a top-six forward for the United States.
The omission of some of the Senators’ other 2011 picks in the tournament is not necessarily a sign that they are struggling, however. Noesen and Puempel have a combined 27 goals and 63 points in 56 games in the Ontario Hockey League, while Pageau has scored more goals (18) than he has played games (17) in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League. Darren Kramer, one of the team’s sixth-round picks, has already bested his offensive output from last season in fewer than half the games, and Max McCormick and Ryan Dzingel, picked 171st and 204th, respectively, have combined for a very decent 21 points in 27 games in their freshman years for Ohio State University.
This season in Ottawa, a youth movement has been in full swing. Jared Cowen and Erik Karlsson, with a combined age equal to that of Nicklas Lidstrom, have been the team’s two best defencemen, and Karlsson leads all NHL defencemen in scoring; Zack Smith, Colin Greening, and Erik Condra, none of whom has played a full season in the NHL, are all among the team’s top ten point scorers; and other brand new NHLers such as Stephane Da Costa have, at times, been given significant roles on the team.
Over the next few years, you can expect to the see the Senators continue to add young players to help rebuild the team to the dominant force that it once was. The 2011 NHL Entry Draft was an extremely important step toward that goal.
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