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It’s every team’s worst nightmare. With the Ottawa Senators leading the Rangers 1–0 early in the third period, 230-lb. New York winger Chris Kreider tripped and slid on his side into the crease, blindsiding Sens goalie Craig Anderson and taking his legs out from under him. The NHL’s top netminder through the first month of the season flopped onto his stomach, writhing in pain and burying his mask in his hands. As coach Paul MacLean’s usual grin gave way to a look of open-mouthed horror, the Senators could only wheel in nervous circles. While Anderson was still contorted on the ice, Ben Bishop, the 26-year-old backup with all of two dozen NHL games to his name, handed his red ball cap to a trainer and pulled his mask on.
He tapped Anderson once, gently, on the shin as he headed to the crease that was now his to defend. Silence descended over the crowd as Anderson was carried to the dressing room. You could almost see the thought bubble hovering over the Senators’ bench: “Again?!”
Ottawa has been ravaged this season by a list of injuries so long it would be funny if it weren’t so awful. Through the end of February, they’d already racked up 80 man-games lost to injury, second-most in the league. That number is bad, but who they’re missing makes it even worse: last season’s Norris Trophy winner, Erik Karlsson; the team’s leading point-getter last season, Jason Spezza; last season’s leading goal-scorer, Milan Michalek; and Anderson, who was on track for a Vezina- or even Hart-winning season. And there are other fallen soldiers. Yet, somehow, the Senators just keep coming. They’re playing NHL-calibre hockey with a largely American Hockey League roster thanks to stellar goaltending—Bishop withstood a seven-round shootout to secure a win in that Feb. 21 Rangers game—as well as organizational depth and a warm, forgiving coaching style. Ottawa managed to string together five consecutive wins and a perfect four-game homestand in the midst of the injury bug—good enough to be battling for home-ice advantage in the playoffs as the halfway mark of the season approached. Given the team’s success during the past two years, calling Ottawa surprising is, well, no longer surprising. But now, with a dressing room pumped full of adrenaline from rookies and no-names eager to prove they deserve this accidental shot at the NHL, the Senators are, against all odds, holding their own—and having a lot of fun.
The injury curse hit before the season started, when defenceman Jared Cowen underwent season-ending hip surgery in January. Then Spezza played just five games before needing back surgery that knocked him out of commission indefinitely. Guillaume Latendresse (whiplash) and Peter Regin (took a puck to the chest) also went down, but the most brutal loss was the horror-movie injury Karlsson suffered on Feb. 13, when his left Achilles tendon was 70 percent severed by a skate blade. At the time, Karlsson was having a season that could have seen him nab a second straight defenceman scoring title in the NHL while holding onto the same honour in Finland’s SM-liiga—despite playing just half a campaign there during the lockout. Anderson was carrying a 1.49 goals-against average and a .952 save percentage when his collision with Kreider a week later resulted in a sprained right ankle. “Someone’s got a Ouija board somewhere talking to the gods,” says Marc Methot, Karlsson’s former defence partner, chuckling darkly. With each injury, the remaining players went through an accelerated version of the stages of grief. “Your heart just drops,” says centre Zack Smith. “There’s almost a time of mourning, but we realized there’s nothing we can do about that stuff.”
Instead, the club has rallied around a one-word motto: “pesky.” For the Sens, that means winning low-scoring games by a single goal, in a shootout or in any other ugly fashion they can pull off—it’s still two points. Captain Daniel Alfredsson likens the team to a pack of hyenas, scavenging whatever they can. And the team’s refusal to go away frustrates and freaks out their opponents. “They know ‘We should beat this team’ and start doubting themselves a little bit,” Alfredsson says. “That’s one of the secrets for us.” The rehabbing players are always around for a morale boost and to offer advice for the herd of rookies who have replaced them, but the talent sitting on the shelf is staggering. The day after the team completed their homestand sweep, a miniature delegation of the 2012 All-Star Team—Spezza and Michalek—arrived at the practice rink in full gear for what MacLean called “a public skate” while their able-bodied teammates completed an off-ice workout back at Scotiabank Place. That same day, Anderson walked in while Bishop was in the middle of an interview, then ducked behind some reporters and jabbed his replacement with a stick before ambling off with a smirk on his face.
It’s tough to overstate just how young and in flux the Ottawa roster is. There’s a giddy first-day-of-school vibe around the dressing room, and all the new faces almost necessitate name tags in media scrums. The never-ending stream of call-ups has nearly picked clean the Binghamton Senators, led by former Ottawa assistant coach Luke Richardson. “They were in first place before I started to screw around with his team,” Ottawa GM Bryan Murray notes dryly. Reporters were still figuring out how to spell and pronounce winger Dave Dziurzynski’s name when he scored the lone Ottawa goal in a Feb. 25 game against Montreal. Of the 20 Senators who dressed for that game, 14 had fewer than 200 NHL games under their belts; nine had played fewer than 50. Bishop was spectacular again, turning aside 44 shots and recording another shootout win for his badly outplayed team.
Ottawa acquired Bishop at the trade deadline last year for a second-round draft pick in 2013 after Jaroslav Halak and Brian Elliott made him expendable in St. Louis. The move reunited him with goaltending coach Rick Wamsley—the two had previously worked together in the Blues organization. This season, Bishop patiently rode the bench while Anderson turned in one fantastic performance after another, until he was suddenly thrust into the role of saviour. “It’s kind of a flip of the switch,” Bishop says. “Once you get in there, you’re just focused on playing hockey. It’s just doing what you do, and the next day, preparing like it’s any other day.” Anderson’s play had given his team—inexperienced even before the injuries—room to make mistakes. When Bishop took over, he immediately showed a steady hand and a cool head, with Robin Lehner, the brash 21-year-old sitting near the top of the AHL with a 2.12 GAA and .938 SP, backing him up. “Guys aren’t panicking and running around as much,” Methot says of the calm confidence their goaltenders inspire. Bishop, who at six-foot-seven is the tallest NHL goalie in league history, had been at the centre of trade rumours before Anderson went down; that chatter has died.
The Senators have enough talent to call up from the minors thanks to incredible depth built through shrewd trades and smart drafting. The injuries have accelerated the team’s rebuild, and Murray says Mika Zibanejad, 19, the sixth overall pick in 2011, is a prime example. They know he’s going to be a good NHL player, and in a normal season, they would have brought him up for 10 low-pressure games but otherwise let him “be important in the minors.” Instead, he’s logging about 13 minutes a game—including top power-play minutes—by necessity in the NHL. The homegrown depth also means cohesiveness in the dressing room, even with all the turnover. “It’s the same players, it’s just a different league and a different speed,” says defenceman Eric Gryba, 24, who played with Binghamton’s Calder Cup–winning team in 2011. “Having inside jokes before you’re even up here is kind of nice.”
MacLean is working with a lot of rough-edged talent, but he loves the energy and character he gets from players with so much to prove. “Some of them think they should have been here for a long time, and that we’re pretty dumb to have them in Binghamton,” he says. “Now that they have the opportunity, they’re making it very, very hard to not have them here.” Ottawa led the Eastern Conference with a 9-1-2 home record through the end of February, but March poses a huge challenge, with just one home contest in a nine-game stretch. MacLean has tried to keep the game plan consistent even with the injuries, but psychologically, it’s all about convincing his players not to try to be something they’re not. “That’s the biggest thing we’ve tried to emphasize with our group: Just be you,” he says. “You can’t be someone else, you can’t replace somebody else, you just have to come in and be yourself.” MacLean’s coaching persona is that of a cool, kindly sitcom dad—the focus is on teaching and encouragement, and he allows people their mistakes, happy as long as they’re improving. “Mac’s unbelievable,” says Kyle Turris, 23, who’s become the No. 1 centre in Spezza’s absence. “Every day you show up and he’s making it fun. He makes you want to be at the rink, and you want to win for him.”
In fact, in spite of the run of terrible luck and the tempered expectations for the season as a result—or, in a roundabout way, because of them—they’re having a pretty good time in Ottawa. The string of wins helps, of course, but a dressing room full of eager understudies makes for an electric atmosphere. It doesn’t seem to matter who’s wearing the uniform—the peskiness won’t let up. “We don’t make it look like a nice oil painting,” Alfredsson says, laughing. “But at the end of the day, it’s still a painting, and somebody wants to buy it.” Whether they finally get healthier or someone continues jabbing pins into an Ottawa Senators voodoo doll, the run of injuries has provided a glimpse of what the club has to work with down the road. The hockey might be ugly right now, but the future looks pretty good.
Shannon Proudfoot is a staff writer at Sportsnet magazine