How 'steady' Steve Staios turned Senators from pretender to contender

Slow and steady wins the rebuild race.

It was an eight-year-long trek for the Ottawa Senators to reach the post-season last year, but here they are again, this time with higher aims than just getting back to playoff hockey in the nation’s capital (Game 1, Saturday on Sportsnet and Sportsnet+, coverage starts at 2:30 p.m. ET).

A lot of that credit should be placed on "steady" Steve Staios’ shoulders — in his first full two seasons at the helm, the Senators' rebuild is now in contention mode.

It’s always hard to change a losing culture into a winning one, but that’s what Staios has done. The Senators this season earned the most points in a season since 2014-15, and it was the first time they had back-to-back 97-plus point seasons since 2005-06 to 2006-07.

“My job is to set this group up, set the culture up,  to make the best decisions possible, to set ourselves up,” Staios told Sportsnet in an interview. “Not all (decisions are) going to work.

He hired the right coach in Travis Green over the fans' choice, Craig Berube, and Green’s got his team to play better than the sum of their parts.

“I'll never make a decision to win a headline,” Staios said.

“There were some good coaches out there, one was some more recent success, and that would have been a great day for the franchise, but I was looking at this more as the right fit, and long-term moving forward, how we could evolve as a group.”

Staios brought in veterans such as Nick Cousins, Michael Amadio, Nick Jensen, and Lars Eller to insulate the Senators' young core that was isolated for too long.

“I think with adversity, you develop resilience, too. I think that is the reason why I looked to bring in veteran players was for that. A lot of it is stuff that they bring on the ice, but also off ice as well,” said Staios.

As for their contributions on the ice, Cousins and Amadio have become integral to Ottawa’s third line alongside Shane Pinto, which has become one of the best shutdown lines in hockey. Staios made another smart move at last year's draft by trading down two spots in the first round for an additional third-round pick, then flipping that to acquire Jordan Spence — who might be the reason the Senators stayed afloat after injuries to Jake Sanderson and Thomas Chabot.

That’s why, against the incredibly talented and consistently great Carolina Hurricanes in Round 1, many are picking the Senators because they’ve routinely outshot teams and dominated them in a similar fashion.

Jake Sanderson and Fabian Zetterlund have praised the culture in the room, each saying that this Senators team is "25 best friends" playing together.

Sure, Staios inherited a pretty good nucleus of Brady Tkachuk, Tim Stutzle, Sanderson, Pinto, Chabot and company. But he also inherited no prospects, a penalized 2026 first-round pick and a losing culture.

He traded and signed for Linus Ullmark from Boston, which has worked out — albeit despite Ullmark’s public mental health struggles and on-ice struggles, too, which led to a statement regarding the unfounded social media rumours that swirled around Ullmark in January. There was also much drama and headlines around his captain, Brady Tkachuk, his Olympic journey and his podcast.

The Senators have been way more attention-filled than Staios would like, but his outlook remained the same.

“It's a steady approach. I think that goes for the entire organization. Because Ian (Mendes, VP of communications) comes in and tells me, like, 'you know, we have to deal with this,' we really don't let it affect us,” said Staios about the drama this season.

“There's not a team that hasn't dealt with some sort of outside noise. And I feel like we can be pretty proud of the way that we've been able to handle it.”

Agree to disagree because it’s been different in Ottawa than anywhere outside maybe Toronto. Unlike his predecessor, Staios — outside of one statement — has not been the centre of the noise.

Regardless, when the team was struggling in January with Ullmark away on his personal leave, and the team’s goaltending was at historically bad levels, Staios brought in James Reimer, who quieted things down as a serviceable backup with quality NHL numbers. More importantly, the Senators went 7-4-2 with Reimer.

When the Senators were tied for last in the Eastern Conference, they needed steadiness, not impulsive decisions.

“There's going to be stumbles, there's going to be adversity. And we’ve developed a pretty resilient mindset around this group,” said Staios.

That starts at the top.

Even with his team four points out of a playoff spot on deadline day, he bought rather than sold. Staios made a shrewd buy-low move for Warren Foegele by trading a second-round pick for the former 20-goal guy. Foegele scored at a 23-goal pace with six goals in 21 games to help vault the Senators into the playoffs.

Staios was a buyer because he believed, correctly, that the Senators' elite underlying numbers would shine through in an 82-game regular-season sample. The general manager was also integral in helping the Senators get their first-round pick back after initially losing it due to the botched Evgenii Dadonov trade under Pierre Dorion.

“You look around from last year, we're a way better team than we were last year,” Sanderson told Sportsnet.

That belief is derived from the decisions the head honcho has made that have led to success.

We must allow for the mistakes Staios has made — the Fabian Zetterlund deal has been so-so, losing youngsters Mark Kastelic and Parker Kelly has hurt. The Senators' drafting history has been muddied under his leadership, although it’s early and he’s not a scout.

As he acknowledged, he won’t always make the right decisions, but he’s made more good choices than poor, and it’s why the Senators are poised to do damage in the playoffs. That breeds hope for the future of this Senators team, and potentially keeps Tkachuk in town past 2028. Winning solves everything.

“(Senators owner) Michael Andaluer asks me, 'Where were we a year ago?'" Staios said. “And I think we're never satisfied, but I think we can be proud of when you really look back a year or two and some of the things that we've been able to accomplish, and when I say accomplish... some of them are unquantifiable, but certainly I feel everybody, including our fans, would say that this team’s more stable, obviously more competitive. It has taken another step from last year, and this last step, I think, is going to be probably the hardest step for us to get to where we want to get to, but we're certainly moving in the right direction.”

In less than three seasons, Staios has completely transformed the Senators from a pretender to a contender.

As the Senators open their playoffs today, we are about to find out just how good a job Staios has done.