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Which Fix Should Be Priority #1 For Boucher? |
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Guy Boucher has inherited a Senators team with some upside, but one that was severely lacking in a few key areas, some of which are directly under a coach's control.
Without a doubt Boucher and his staff will be addressing all of them, but which one is of the utmost importance if the Senators are going to make a return appearance to the post-season.
I will leave out depth, and individual performances because they are not directly under the coach's control (even if systems implemented can affect the latter in either a positive or negative light). And some of them will be intertwined, where improving one area will have a positive affect on another area.
I will look at 3 key areas, all of which handcuffed the Senators last season
1. The Power Play - Ottawa finished with a top 10 offense in terms of goals for in the NHL (9th with 230). They also had the 5th worst power play in the NHL in terms of percentage, clicking just 15.8% of the time with the man advantage. No team scored fewer power play goals either. So while they were defensively terrible and had to score their way to wins a lot of nights, so even improving their power play to the middle of the pack, or around 18 or 19% would result in 6 or 8 more goals which could easily have translated into 3 or 4 more wins over the course of the season. And the weird part is they were actually respectable on the road, ranking 8th in PP percentage, but were by far the worst team at home. The system wasn't working, and the injury to Kyle Turris didn't help, but any team with Erik Karlsson as the quarterback shouldn't have a bottom-5 power play, plain and simple.
2. The Penalty Kill - Continuing along the line of special teams, the penalty kill was even more dreadful than the power play. On the bright side, the Senators led the league by a country mile in terms of scoring shorthanded (17 SHG compared to 2nd place Pittsburgh's 11), but maybe too much focus was put on scoring instead of denying chances. While in the past you could point at a disparity in the number of times the Senators were shorthanded, last season was not a case of that as they finished 19th in terms of most times shorthanded. Adding Chris Kelly to help in that area will help, but the key is developing the right system and also being able to avoid using Karlsson on the PK if possible to avoid the burden. Its not that he can't kill penalties, but his assets are best used elsewhere and if they can take some of those tougher minutes away from their star, he can be a little more energized in other areas of the game.
3. The Shots Against - Let's face it, Craig Anderson isn't getting any younger and he is showing signs of his age. Whether or not you consider him a goalie that is in the top half of the league (which I no longer do, but that is a discussion for another time), overburdening him with almost 33 shots per game is a recipe for disaster.
The fact that they only outshot their opponent 21 times in 82 games is telling. Although somehow their record when they did outshoot their opponent was 5-14-2 and their record when being outshot was 33-20-7, so maybe the "rope-a-dope" strategy (whether intentional or otherwise) had some merit. But by and large that is not a system that I would anticipate working in a similar fashion over the long haul.
So those are three areas that desperately need improvement. The Senators finished 11 points out of the playoffs, and fixing just one of these areas isn't likely to help overcome that deficit. However all 3 (and some are interchangeable) are certainly capable of being fixed with coaching and that is why hiring the tandem of Boucher and Marc Crawford is the biggest move of the summer. Systems and proper player deployment might be all it takes, because the talent is there and for the most part there were more underacheivers than overacheivers last season.
Ottawa Senators Blogger • 
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