OTTAWA — Being an NHL head coach can be a thankless job, getting blamed for every loss and rarely given any credit for the wins.
There are exceptions to the rule, and that’s when you know a head coach is coaching.
As Travis Green told his Ottawa Senators recently after a game, “work your balls off.”
Maybe he was speaking about himself.
In January, the smart money said the Senators were going nowhere as they sat at the bottom of the Eastern Conference. They were analytics darlings, outshooting and out-chancing opponents with one of the best defensive structures in the league but weren’t getting saves or killing penalties.
That’s when you need your coach to rally the troops, which happened as the Senators brushed off the outside noise to make the playoffs. In fact, the team’s turnaround has rightfully put Green in the conversation for the Jack Adams Award for coach of the year. And he has his sights set on a Stanley Cup, no less.
Green’s story — and not just for this season — is one of perseverance, learning from his mistakes and growing as a coach.
It started with the Vancouver Canucks, where Green was coach from 2017 to 2021. His record was 133-147-34. It wasn’t sparkling, so when the Senators hired Green in May 2024, it raised eyebrows. But general manager Steve Staios saw something.
“That was that deep dive,” Staios told Sportsnet.ca. “We went through their roster, wins and losses, but also how they performed. … The easy way to do it would be wins and losses and Stanley Cups.”
Interestingly, the Old Boys club played no part in Staios hiring Green: the two had met just once before the interview process.
At the time, a lot of Sens fans wanted to see Staios pick Craig Berube, a Cup winner in St. Louis. “One of the guys out there was a Stanley Cup champ, and what I really dug into was where my team was at and who's the right fit,” said Staios.
“I'll never make a decision to win a headline.
“There’s been a number of times where it would have been easy for me to make decisions that our fans would have been excited about, but I wouldn't be doing the right thing by the team.”
Well, Green has become a positive headline this season, while Berube has not in Toronto.
When Staios looked under the hood, he saw that Green consistently outperformed with a poorly constructed and rebuilding Vancouver team. Green managed to get the Canucks to Game 7 of the second round of the playoffs with a young Quinn Hughes, Bo Horvat, Elias Petterson and J.T. Miller.
”We started to dig into the numbers," Staios said. "We went real in depth to try and figure out exactly (how) he got more out of teams on the defensive side. … We talked about it a lot in Year 1, where we wanted to establish that foundational defensive game, and then build off of that.”
Green told Sportsnet.ca that it was a learning experience coaching the Canucks.
“Head coaches have a lot of confidence in themselves, and when I went to Vancouver, I felt like I had a lot of things figured out. But you definitely learn a lot the more you do it,” Green said.
“I would expect a guy that's a doctor or a lawyer is a much better lawyer after seven or eight years than he was his first year. And I think that's definitely the case right now. Even system-wise, I've changed a lot of my systems that I originally came into league with. I'd like to think I'm a little bit of a hockey nerd, as far as studying and listening and watching hockey, but also just handling players and going through different scenarios, different situations. When to push, when to have patience.”
“Coaches are always better after their first job,” said Staios.
Green’s transformation of the Senators began with its defensive structure. From 2018 to 2024, the Senators were in the bottom half every season in goals against. Some of that was goaltending, but a lot of that was a mix of great talent but lack of structure in their game under coach D.J. Smith. Staios wanted a level of accountability for the team’s youthful stars, namely Tim Stutzle, Brady Tkachuk and Jake Sanderson, which they may not have had under Smith, the coach they had been weaned on. Don’t forget Elias Petterson’s best years were under Green.
From Day 1, in 2024, Green sought to suffocate opponents’ transition games by dumping the puck in, which allowed Ottawa to be great defensively. And he got Stutzle, Tkachuk and Thomas Chabot — all poor defensive players at the time — to become good defensively, even great in Stutzle’s case. The Senators are now second in expected goals allowed per game.
“They want coaching, they accept coaching, and it's not always rainbows and butterflies. Coaching is being honest, and the players aren’t always hearing things that they want to hear,” said Green.
For years, the young core played exciting but not winning hockey. They needed structure and a kick in the butt.
“Honestly, ever since Travis came, he just taught us the right way how to play hockey, the winning way,” said Sanderson. “It's not fancy. May not be fun all the time. It's tiring, but he understands that. He gives us the rest when we need it, so we have the energy to go out and play that way every single time.
“Honestly, not enough nice things I can say. He's honest, but he's fair,” Sanderson told Sportsnet.ca.
“I've tried to promise myself to never forget what it's like to be the player,” said Green, who played 14 years in the NHL. “That's important for coaches.”
Nick Cousins said the fact that Green puts himself in “our shoes” is a major reason the team has rallied and tuned into Green’s voice. When they “need that video session or to come in and scream and yell at us …. (he) knows what buttons to push.”
In many ways, being a coach is as much about the human element as it is the Xs and Os.
“Sometimes, as a coach, you're like a father figure, you're a brother and you're a friend, and that changes from day to day," Green said "And I think if you can build a relationship with your team … but also have authority on how they're going to play and when they're going to play.
“How I treat Shane Pinto is different than how I treat Ridly Greig.”
Good coaches also learn from their mistakes.
Before the Senators went on a run at the end of January, their penalty kill was second worst in the league. Green switched out assistant coach Nolan Baumgartner for Mike Yeo to run the penalty kill. Since then, they’ve had the sixth-best unit.
“There's times where you look back and (think), ‘Ah, maybe I should have handled that a little differently’, and that only helps you the next time it comes up,” said Green.
Green also realized his team could not play run-and-gun like others, so looked for a pragmatic defensive approach while growing the offensive side of the game. Ottawa now sits eighth in goals for this season.
“We don't have a team that has 50-goal scorers, 100-point guys, but we have a real team that has a lot of good players. And they're committed on both sides of the puck,” said Green.
But maybe the hardest channel Green navigated this season was the so-called outside noise: the drama that surrounded Senators on Team USA, Tkachuk’s dad’s comments, Linus Ullmark’s leave of absence and subsequent viral rumours about his personal life.
It was a lot.
But in December, with the team losing and with a ton of drama ahead, someone sent Green a note that became the mantra of the 2025-26 Senators.
“When you hear hoof beats, think horses, not zebras, and I actually wrote it up on my board,” said Green. “It just meant don’t look for something that's not there.”
A few weeks later, in January, when the team was in the basement of the Eastern Conference, Green made his famous speech caught on video following a 7-1 win over Vegas.
“Don’t listen to the (expletive) white noise. Don’t listen to people outside this (expletive) rink. Zero negativity,” said Green. “Let’s go on a (expletive) run.”
We asked Green about his speech.
“That was around a time where there was a lot of noise around our team. Why were we not winning?” Green said.
“Especially in today's world with social media … there's a lot of noise around the team … (so it was about) not letting someone else's opinion get in the way of what we want to do.”
It worked. The team launched into an impeccable 20-6-4 run all the way to the playoffs.
But Green isn’t satisfied.
“My goal is to win the Stanley Cup," he said. "Plain simple, that’s what I want to do. I never got to do it as a player. And I want to win a Cup as a coach. ... I firmly believe that this team has a chance.”
The best time of the year starts for Green against Carolina in Round 1.
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