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You must have seen the video by now. The Senators Twitter account released one of the strangest videos late last night that featured Mark Borowiecki “interviewing” his boss Eugene Melnyk. It’s over 5 minutes long, and if you haven’t seen it, it’s quite a doozy:
There’s a lot to unpack here, but I won’t go over everything. First of all, picking Mark Borowiecki of all people is something that is incredibly easy to make fun of, because he’s a 6th/7th defenseman and he’s essentially being shown as a major face of the team. I don’t blame him for being in the video, but the fact that the team picked him for it makes me think that he’s one of the few players that they trust---and that’s horrifying.
Secondly, I can’t remember the last time Melnyk has come across positively in the media. Even while trying to be positive about the upcoming season, he did it in the most laughable way and made fans even more riled up. Just by posting this video (which I’m sure the Senators production team loathed making), he get #MelnykOut to trend again. He even noted that “I’m going to stick around here for a long, long time. I’m not going anywhere,” which does the opposite of get the fans excited.
The most important takeaway from this though is that he made it pretty clear that Erik Karlsson will almost certainly be gone next season, and there’s a good chance the same can be said for Mark Stone and Matt Duchene. Melnyk talked about the importance of having veterans in the room to usher along the young players (and awkwardly tried to get Borowiecki to relate), but he also talked about the number of rookies that will be on the team:
“This coming year, we’re going to have 10 out of the 22 players [that] are going to be new – meaning they are either rookies or maybe they played under 10 games last year. And then the following year, it’s going to go up to 15 of the 22 – maybe 16. So that’s a total turnover – which is what exactly should be in a rebuild.”
So let’s dissect this then. 10 players who are “new” is a lot, and that could include Colin White, Filip Chlapik, Logan Brown, Christian Wolanin, Brady Tkachuk, Drake Batherson, Alex Formenton...and perhaps Aaron Luchuk and Christian Jaros? If Melnyk actually believes all of those players will be on the team this year, that is insane. Then he thinks 5-6 more will be ready in 2019-20, which could include players like Filip Gustavsson, Jacob Bernard-Docker, Johnny Tychonick, Gabriel Gagne, and Max Lajoie. To think that every single one of those prospects are going to be a consistent presence in the lineup one year from now just baffles me and that belief is not based in reality.
That clearly will not happen, but his quote shows that there aren’t going to be many veterans left in 2019-20. If 15 players are going to be new, then that leaves seven spots. There are only nine players under contract for next season (excluding Clarke MacArthur and Marian Gaborik): Zack Smith, Bobby Ryan, Mikkel Boedker, Jean-Gabriel Pageau, Mark Borowiecki, Thomas Chabot, Ben Harpur, Craig Anderson, and Mike Condon. There’s also Cody Ceci who is an RFA and I’m sure will be staying. With those “veteran spots” already taken, there is no room for Erik Karlsson. Or Mark Stone. Or Matt Duchene. Hell, or even Ryan Dzingel.
I really can’t imagine Ottawa going that heavy with rookies just because they don’t have nearly that many NHL-ready players, but I do think this video is a signal that he wants to move on from Karlsson, and probably even Stone and Duchene. He also said this which seems like a slight to Karlsson:
“It’s not about individuals anymore. One player, two players or three players aren’t going to do it. You need the leadership and then you build under that. And we’re going to build that with young prospects”
You can preach leadership and teamwork all you want, but the best teams still have the best individual players as well, which Melnyk fails to realize. I get this eerie feeling that this video is a precursor to an impending Karlsson trade, because he tried to get the fanbase excited with prospects, but he clearly failed to accomplish anything here. I’ll certainly be on high alert in the coming days for some trade action.
Melnyk also mentioned that in this rebuild, the Senators have a solid “base.” That might be true if they are planning to keep Karlsson, Stone, and Duchene, but they’ll have a pretty horrific one if they are not. The whole video just came across as a Russian-style propaganda machine, and the reply ratio on the tweet just shows that nobody is buying what he is selling. It’d be incredibly naive to think that the “rebuild” (a word he used multiple times) is on the upswing.
If he wasn’t tone-deaf enough, he said that he believes “the fans are going to be supportive,” which would be 100% true if he wasn’t currently owning the team. The Senators just couldn’t let people make fun of the Montreal Canadiens for more than one day...
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