OTTAWA – With a laugh, Travis Green said there are times as a head coach in the NHL where you’re forced to get a lot of takeout because going out for dinner would mean staring an angry fan base in the face.
Such is the fine-line nature of the job. But winning usually helps.
Green has done a lot of that over the past three seasons as the bench boss of the Ottawa Senators – and, with that, has enjoyed plenty of coffee shop runs and restaurant meals – and was rewarded Monday with a multi-year contract extension.
Green’s new deal will run through the end of the 2030-31 season. He is the 14th head coach in franchise history and earned his 95th win with the team last Thursday, placing him fifth all time among Senators head coaches. Green’s assistants, Nolan Baumgartner, Ben Sexton, Mike Yeo, and goaltending coach Justin Peters, also received multi-year extensions.
The Senators have made the playoffs the past two seasons, and Steve Staios, the president of hockey operations and general manager of the team, was chuffed to say how much Green has delivered on all of the character traits he saw during their interview process.
“It’s a proud day for me. It’s a proud day for the organization. We have a lot of work ahead of us,” Staios said, “but this is another foundational step for us and the Ottawa Senators moving forward.”
Green began his NHL head coaching career with the Vancouver Canucks, where he was fired in his fifth season. He coached 21 games for the New Jersey Devils before coming to Ottawa.
Green has long preached a hearty defensive structure, and the team has firmly bought into it.
“We’re not going to score the most goals, but we’re going to win hockey games playing this way,” Dylan Cozens said Monday. “And that’s a goal in this room.”
When training camp got underway, these Senators were eager to take the next step and come closer together as a group after their captain from the last half-decade, Brady Tkachuk, requested a trade that ended with him joining brother Matthew in Florida. Green’s steady hand has helped the team get off to a 6-3-0 start in which they’re hanging with the best teams in their division.
Ottawa remains firmly in the mix early in this new season even as they have had to deal with key injuries to their defence corps and rank 25th in goals per game.
“We want to win,” veteran Claude Giroux said. “I’m a strong believer in whatever the system is; if everyone is on the same page, it makes your job a lot easier. I think guys are buying in. We saw it last year at the end of the year when we were playing well and playing to our identity and winning a lot of hockey games.”
Giroux is of course alluding to the post-Olympics, post-Linus Ullmark mental health leave-of-absence when the Senators sprinted into the playoffs with a 16-5-4 run after players returned from Milan. That stretch came after a now iconic Green speech in the locker room where he preached ignoring outside noise and urged his players to go on a run. The coach is quiet on the surface, but isn’t afraid to make his voice heard when it’s needed. He’s honest and open, as a former player, and the players respect that.
After Green’s effort last season, he received four first-place votes for the Jack Adams Award.
“For me, playing against Ottawa (was) always one of the hardest teams to play against,” said the recently acquired Andre Burakovsky, who is in his first season in a Senators uniform. “He’s been doing a terrific job. It’s a well-deserved extension. Just how hard he wants us to play. He wants us to be dedicated to work ethic and grind other teams down and play with the puck and win puck battles. It’s been fun working with him so far.”
Ottawa was solid in plenty of key defensive metrics last year, including shot suppression, where they sat second in the league. The team kept learning and growing as they moved through the injury adversity last year and into this year, too – the Sens have already used 10 defencemen in their first 10 games, and it was announced Monday that captain Thomas Chabot would be out for 1-2 weeks with an upper-body injury, just as Jake Sanderson is set to return for his first game since being injured in the season-opener. He’ll likely be in the lineup Wednesday against Tkachuk’s Florida Panthers.
Green was quick to heap praise on Sanderson when asked about his star blueliner earlier this year, and Sanderson was even quicker to return the favour after his coach’s extension on Monday.
“Obviously you want to play hard for the guys, but when your coach is an awesome dude (and) everyone gets along in the dressing room you want to play hard for them too,” Sanderson said. “The year is so hard. You have to bring it every night. For me, (Green) talks about ‘Being excited to play.’ That’s one of his mottos. I love that.
“You should be excited to show up and work for each other.”
With the security of an extension in place, there is a lot more work ahead of Green on Ottawa’s bench, and he couldn’t be more excited about the opportunity.
“As coaches, you’re always looking for something that works for you. Words like stability, commitment, collaboration … We hit all the boxes. Checks all the marks. But you also have to believe you can win,” Green said. “Every coach wants to win. I truly believe our team can succeed and win and win long term. You’ve got to enjoy coaching the players.
“We have a group that wants to be coached, and we enjoy coaching them. I love living here, I love the city, and I want to win. For me, it was an easy decision.”
