Montreal Canadiens: Senators Completely Collapse as Habs Future Looks Brighter
It goes without saying that, at this point in the 2023-24 NHL season, there are still a lot of question marks surrounding both the Ottawa Senators, and the Montreal Canadiens.
In September, I had done a piece on the state of the Senators rebuild as they entered what I and many others considered to be a crisis point, having failed to make the postseason in each of the past six seasons. While GM Pierre Dorion had done a solid job to this point of constructing a fast, young, and promising offensive core around Captain Brady Tkachuk, the on-ice results had yet to match consistently.
Ultimately, after a botched deal with the Vegas Golden Knights cost Ottawa a first round pick, they did what most had seen coming for months at this point. Letting Dorion go after eight seasons. Not long after, following an embarrassing 6-3 loss to the defending Stanley Cup Champion Vegas Golden Knights on Sunday, head coach D.J. Smith was similarly fired after four seasons, with little to no success to show for it.
A former top junior coach with the OHL’s Windsor Spitfires and a long-time AHL defenseman before that, Smith’s penchant for development didn’t exactly translate to playoff appearances, even as Ottawa’s top prospects slowly but surely turned into top-line players.
With this, the two men that orchestrated Ottawa’s rebuild were gone, with Steve Staios replacing Dorion as GM, and none other than Jacques Martin replacing Smith behind the bench, the coach who originally took Ottawa from the brink of disaster in 1995-96 as the team was on the verge of bankruptcy.
With former Senators Captain Daniel Alfredsson being brought in alongside as an assistant coach, its clear Ottawa is trying to fix things and fix them now. Having realized by this point that their chance to compete with this roster is dwindling more and more with each regular season loss, this is something the Canadiens well… don’t have to worry about, yet somehow find themselves performing leagues above the Senators with a roster that isn't anywhere near as developed.
With a 3-2 OT win over the Winnipeg Jets on Monday, the Canadiens finally got themselves out of the .500 bubble if ever so briefly, with an impressive 14-13-4 record given the lack of a reliable options both defensively and in goal.
Led once again by the one-two offensive punch of Cole Caufield and Nick Suzuki, the Habs are still a young and developing team at their core, and as such weren’t exactly expected to be world-beaters going into this season, with the focus of GM Kent Hughes and VP Jeff Gorton being, rather expectedly, development and rebuilding above all else. In contrast, the Senators, for as much as fans and analysts alike would like you to believe otherwise, are done rebuilding, and the actual build has gotten off to a rather putrid start to say the least.
As I looked at the Eastern Conference standings on Friday morning, there was a noticeable disparity between these two teams, and well… its not the one I think most people were expecting when the season began. Going into a Tuesday night matchup against the Arizona Coyotes, the Senators sat at 11-17-0 on the season, dead last in the Atlantic Division by a wide margin, and 13 points back of the Canadiens in the standings, even with 4 games in hand.
While the Coyotes have been a major surprise this season, benefiting from a wealth of offensive depth and a legitimate starting option in former AHLer Conor Ingram, I thought Martin’s influence would at least lead to a better defensive performance from the Senators, with Martin have essentially built his career on being a defensive minded coach.
Yet, even with the presence of Martin and well... a 3-goal lead, the Senators somehow still managed to blow it, surrendering said three-goal lead to lose 4-3 in regulation. Yes, that's right, regulation, meaning Ottawa couldn’t even manage a point from this matchup. Facing the Colorado Avalanche on Thursday, things were even worse, losing 6-4 with supposed starting goaltender Joonas Korpisalo now sporting a 3.86 GAA and a 6-10 record.
Now sitting 11-17-0 on the season, the Sens are in a complete and total freefall, having lost 6 games in a row with a 6-game winning streak needed to even get them back to .500. It’s yet another colossal failure from a Senators team whos’ immediate future is now heavily, heavily in question. I mean seriously, where do we go from here? This isn't an easy hole to come out of both mentality wise and performance wise, and, as stated, both the GM and the coach that orchestrated all of this to begin with, are gone.
After the collapse of the Martin and Alfredsson era following Ottawa’s surprise appearance in the 2007 Stanley Cup Finals, it was former GM Bryan Murray who slowly but surely rebuilt the Sens around a core of Mark Stone, Mike Hoffman, Erik Karlsson and Craig Anderson, one that took Ottawa to within one overtime goal of the Stanley Cup Finals in 2017.
Then, after Karlsson voiced his displeasure with the direction the team was heading, that core also collapsed, and Dorion was subsequently brought in to clean things up once more, which he didn't... well... didn't do.
Throughout all of this, the Canadiens were mired in what they’ve pretty much always been mired in since Captain Guy Carbonneau hoisted Montreal’s 24th and to-date, last, Stanley Cup on June 9th, 1993. Mediocrity.
With them currently mired in a 6-game losing streak, the Ottawa Senators are no longer a rebuilding team like the Montreal Canadiens. If anything, Montreal is handling their future better as Ottawa's collapses.
In between the occasional 47 or 50-win season, things seemed to always give way for Montreal as the team could just never build a true contender around their star players. Aside from miraculous Playoff runs where Jaroslav Halak and Carey Price just decided they wanted to go far into the Playoffs and carried mediocre if not downright bad teams there, Montreal didn’t have much in the way of consistency when it came to the regular season standings. All the while, the Senators became the definition of consistent success and always seemed to find a new group of stars to lead the team into the future as the past iterations grew old.
Even in 2022-23, Ottawa had 5 players finish with 60+ points, including two with 80+. Tim Stutzle emerged as an offensive star after being one of the main returns from the trade that saw Karlsson leave Ottawa, and the Sens managed to land former Philadelphia Flyers captain Claude Giroux in free agency, who posted 79 points last year whilst playing all 82 games for the first time since 2018-19.
Even still though, they fell short of the postseason, suffering from a lack of defensive support and a true No. 1 option in goal. While Cam Talbot did what he could with a 17-14-2 record and a 2.93 GAA, Ottawa ended up using six different goaltenders including former ECHL starter Dylan Ferguson.
Having signed Korpisalo to a long-term deal in free agency as yet another attempt to find a starter in goal, 2023-24 was seen as do-or-die for Ottawa when it came to finally making a concrete and driven run at the postseason, after having never really gotten off the ground in any of the past six seasons in spite of a core that was, by this point, fully developed.
Yet even still, to put it politely, there hasn’t really been a whole lot of do and a lot more of die. While the offense is as potent as ever, the defensive deficiencies both on the blue-line and in goal are more prevalent than ever, even with two goalies in Korpisalo and Anton Forsberg who have shown starting potential in the past.
To emphasize again, the Habs are a rebuilding team. Hughes has stated it. Gorton has stated it. Its acknowledged, and its expected that they still have a few more years ahead of them before they can contend once more.
There’s no issue in calling the Montreal Canadiens a rebuilding team because that is what they are. Its not a case of underachieving for them its simply a case of development and facilitating a learning environment, something head coach Martin St. Louis has emphasized since day one. The Ottawa Senators are not a rebuilding hockey team.
Calling the Canadiens a rebuilding team is an acknowledgement of where they are at after a largely dismal era under former GM Marc Bergevin. Calling the Senators a rebuilding team is an excuse, and its an excuse that can’t be made any longer. This team needs to win, and isn’t, and something desperately needs to be done about that before all of this completely implodes on itself.
It goes without saying that comparing the Senators and the Canadiens as similar teams at this point is, as I mentioned in my last piece, a complete and total insult, there’s no other way to put it, both to the Canadiens and the Sens.
This isn’t just overly hopeful optimism from a Sens fanbase and organization that long for the days of Karlsson’s dazzling passes and offensive wizardry, this is pure delusion from a team that is desperately trying to salvage whatever they can from a core that is coming apart at the seams, going as far as using the team like the Habs as comparison when honestly, Montreal seems to be handling their future better. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, how do you think Claude Giroux feels about this team's performance?
What about Tkachuk? Or Stutzle? Or genuinely any other player on this team that isn’t on this team to rebuild, rather compete. Yet it seems like Ottawa as a team simply doesn’t have the tools to do that. Of course, the Canadiens similarly aren’t ready to compete at this point, but that’s to be expected with the roster they have.
As the 2023-24 season continues on, the Canadiens continue their path towards the future under St. Louis, Caufield, Suzuki, and the numerous other prospects trying to find their footing in the NHL, whether it be Justin Barron of Juraj Slafkovsky. Yet, just as much as one team looks towards what lies ahead, another team is desperately trying to salvage whatever they have left. The Ottawa Senators are in trouble, a lot of trouble, and the comparisons between them and the Montreal Canadiens, simply, need to stop.
This is no longer a rebuild folks. Rather, this is simply starting to look like a massive failure.