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Rarely in sports does a team
completely tear it down and get rid of everyone on their roster worth some sort of value. Rebuilds usually mean trading some of your best players, but not all of them, and keeping some veteran players who can still be useful in a few years once the team is competitive again. We saw this in 2011 when the Senators went through a mini rebuild by trading Mike Fisher, Chris Kelly, Alexei Kovalev, Brian Elliott, Jarkko Ruutu, and Chris Campoli, but they kept older players who were going to be important in the future such as Jason Spezza, Daniel Alfredsson, Chris Phillips, Chris Neil, and Milan Michalek. Ottawa made the playoffs the very next season, so there wasn’t a need to trade those players after all.
The rebuild that Ottawa is currently going through is a lot different because it is immensely more painful and will last much longer. It looks like all three of their best forwards could be on their way out, meaning they don’t exactly have much of a core to keep around, despite already moving a ton of veterans such as Mike Hoffman, Erik Karlsson, Dion Phaneuf, Derick Brassard, and Kyle Turris.
With Mark Stone, Matt Duchene, and Ryan Dzingel potentially getting traded, who will be the veterans on this team that can help the young players in their development? I love having a roster filled with young players, but you still need older players to show them the way and help them with things on and off the ice, because there are a lot of things to be learned at the professional level. And the thing is, a “veteran” doesn’t have to be a 35-year-old player either, Stone is just 26 but I would consider him a veteran because of the kind of leader he is. He would be the perfect player to keep even though the team is bad, but it’s looking like that might not happen.
So who are the veterans that are left?
Right now, there are only three players on the roster who are 30 or older (Craig Anderson, Bobby Ryan, and Zack Smith), and the next oldest are Mark Borowiecki (29), Mikkel Boedker (29), Anders Nilsson (28), and Magnus Paajarvi (27). Nilsson and Paajarvi are both UFAs at the end of the season, meaning there could be just five players at least 27 years of age on the NHL roster. Obviously, there will be some changes to the roster composition, but that’s pretty incredible. Others in this age range who have played in games this season include Mike McKenna, Tom Pyatt, Mike Condon, Justin Falk, Paul Carey, Darren Archibald, Erik Burgdoerfer, Cody Goloubef, and Chris Wideman, but they are all either no longer with the team or aren’t good enough to be consistent NHL players.
Smith and Ryan are the only two non-ELC players signed beyond next season, so they are certainly going to be vocal voices in the room. Anderson can probably not be moved, so he will have one more year left with the Senators. I find it hard to imagine Borowiecki playing with any other team just because it seems like the team loves him so much, so you can count on him being apart of this group as well. Although they are both just 26 and 25 respectively, I can definitely see Jean-Gabriel Pageau and Dylan DeMelo being included too, so long as they are re-signed before the summer of 2020. Boedker is a wildcard in this, because although he is 29, I just don’t get the sense that he is the most vocal of players, but I could be completely wrong on that. He’s also a UFA in 2020, and I can’t see Ottawa keeping him past then. Then depending on what happens with Nilsson, Paajarvi, and potential trades or free agent signings, there might be one or two added to this mix.
So in terms of 2019-20, it looks like Smith, Ryan, Anderson, Borowiecki, Pageau, and DeMelo will be the veteran presences in the room to help guide the younger players. But in 2020-21, any or all of those latter four players could be gone because their contracts are expired. I would assume that Anderson is the only one that doesn’t get re-signed, but who knows, maybe Ottawa will look to trade someone like Pageau at the deadline in 2020. Furthermore, although Smith is signed until the end of the 2020-21 season, we know that Ottawa has been trying to get rid of his contract since last season. So in the end, Ryan is the most likely player on the team right now to be one of the “veterans” in 2020-21.
The Senators are going to be astonishingly young over the next few seasons, and there won’t be many older voices in the room to help those players along. That might not be the worst thing in the world, but I certainly think it can’t hurt to keep a few of the more experienced players around just to make sure they get accustomed to the league quickly. I think having Alfredsson around helped Karlsson a lot, and having Karlsson around helped Thomas Chabot too. It’s a shame that Duchene might not be able to help Colin White or Logan Brown and that Stone might not be able to help Brady Tkachuk or Drake Batherson much longer.
I hope the young players are able to soak in as much information as they can in the next little while before some of their best players are (most likely) traded.
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