Paul MacLean had become something of a cult hero in Ottawa. Like Robin Hood, MacLean managed to tax the rich while having very little to work with of his own. However, owner Eugene Melnyk’s axe fell on Monday morning, coming down on the affable MacLean in the midst of a 3-6-1 skid.
While Sunday night’s 4-3 overtime victory over the Vancouver Canucks seemed to have bought MacLean some time to right the ship, the situation in the nation’s capital was deemed too poor and the Senators announced his dismissal, along with the hiring of interim head coach Dave Cameron, on Monday.
MacLean joined the Senators in 2011, and in his first season in charge Ottawa overachieved massively, making the playoffs on the strength of career-years from Jason Spezza and Erik Karlsson. Despite boasting minimal secondary scoring, the Senators’ first year of a planned rebuild became a rallying cry as the #PeskySens were born. Despite a rightful first round exit in the playoffs, the Senators abandoned their rebuild in hopes that they could return to perennial playoff status.
In a shortened 2012-13 campaign, MacLean’s team again overachieved, this time on the strength of Craig Anderson (.941 sv%, 1.69GAA) and Robin Lehner’s (.936 sv%, 2.20GAA) superhuman efforts in net. The goaltending remained hot in the playoffs and the Sens miraculously managed to win a playoff series, beating the undersized Montreal Canadiens 4-1. Natural selection got the better of the Sens in the second round as they fell 4-1 to the powerhouse Pittsburgh Penguins, but confidence was nonetheless sky-high and expectations were becoming unreasonably bloated in Canada’s capital.
2013-14 saw the Senators plummet back down to earth, as the goaltending fell back down into the realm of reality. MacLean’s team was led offensively by defenseman Erik Karlsson’s 74 points, but a lack of secondary scoring doomed Ottawa to an 11th-place finish in the Eastern Conference.
For some reason, expectations remained centred around the word ‘playoffs’ for the Senators, despite the fact the organization lost its top playmaker to Dallas in Jason Spezza. Entering 2014-15, Sens fans were optimistic and using the term ‘playoff team’ very liberally.
The season started out in surprising fashion for everybody, with the Sens jumping out to a 7-3-2 start on the strength of Craig Anderson’s incredible form in net.
Unfortunately for the Senators, statistics dictate that giving up 35 shots per night will result in a sub-.500 record, and thanks to a recent 3-7-1 slide, the Senators now sit on a middling 11-11-5 record.
While things were bad on the ice, most Ottawa hockey people assumed that the problems ran deeper than the head coach. This was the 2013 Jack Adams Award winner, the man who couldn’t rub two proverbial pennies of offence together yet somehow managed to make the playoffs in back-to-back seasons.
However on Monday afternoon, the Senators made one of the biggest mistakes in recent franchise history. Instead of acknowledging the fact that the team’s roster is built on the cheap (cheapest, in fact, in the NHL), the organization axed its own identity.
MacLean embodied hard work, grit, and determination. His teams played a clean, hard game and managed to beat the odds to make the playoffs in 2011-12 and 2012-13 despite having virtually no right to be there. The #PeskySens were born under MacLean, in line with owner Eugene Melnyk’s frugality and the team’s inability to attract any big free agents.
Now, he’s gone and the Ottawa Senators will have to build a new identity, mid-season, with the cheapest roster in the NHL. Most alarmingly, this will have to happen in a market that demands a competitive team, or else.
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