The Sens temporarily loaned Mikael Wikstrand to Farjestad to participate in Champions Hockey League group games (ongoing), but he’ll be back in Ottawa to take part in the rookie tournament.
Speaking of the rookie tourney, the roster has been announced (2015 picks in italics, AHL/ECHL contracts noted in brackets):
Forwards (15): Filip Chlapik, Vincent Dunn, Ryan Dzingel, Travis Ewanyk, Gabriel Gagne, Alex Guptill, Tobias Lindberg, Max McCormick, Nick Paul, Ryan Penny (AHL), Francis Perron, Matt Puempel, Buddy Robinson, Alex Wideman (AHL), and Matthew Zay (AHL)
Defensemen (7): Chris Carlisle (AHL), Thomas Chabot, Marcus Crawford, Ben Harpur, Chris Rumble (ECHL), Troy Rutkowski, and Mikael Wikstrand
Goaltenders (2): Matt O’Connor and Chris Driedger
The only FA invitee is Marcus Crawford (Saginaw); the Ajax-native is a draft-eligible player, but I think he’s here because he’s local and to round out the numbers. Incidentally, while I didn’t mention it when he was signed, Carlisle was nominated for the Leo Lalonde Memorial Trophy (overage player of the year in the OHL). Before you get too excited about that trophy (and the fact that Ryan Callahan won it in 2006), it’s worth noting previous winners include non-entities like Tyler Donati, Michael Swift, Justin DiBenedetto, and Bryan Cameron. That doesn’t mean he won’t be a useful ECHL (or AHL) player, but keep expectations at a minimum.
The rookie tournament is a lot of fun, albeit the caliber of play is not very high. I don’t think we’ll see much of Penny, Wideman, Zay, or Crawford, incidentally.
Callum Fraser‘s latest post echoes my sentiments:
While Matt O’Connor has never played a professional game of hockey before and Andrew Hammond still only has a couple months in the NHL under his belt, if Craig Anderson has any sort of injury, the Senators will have their hand near the panic button. As for the bottom six, losing arguably their best player [Condra] will likely not go over well. Especially now that Chris Neil, Colin Greening and Zack Smith are getting ready for a possible reunion tour.
Fans with a better memory than mine will know the answer to this, but have reporters ever asked David Cameron if he’s aware of just how bad that trio is? They don’t pass the eye test or the analytics test.
I don’t typically read SensChirp, but with the dearth of Sens news I was floating around the blogosphere and popped onto the site. It’s interesting how popular it is–judging by the number of comments it’s more popular than the similar looking SenShot and the similar news digest format of The Silver Seven. I think the regularity of the blog helps (although it’s not quite as frequent as Silver Seven), but there must be more to it. I’m always surprised The 6th Sens isn’t more popular, but perhaps the sober tone and less frequent posts makes that impossible. Putting the speculation aside, there’s a good break down of the Sens draft picks by Craig Smith that I missed from a couple of months ago, so I recommend checking that out.
That reminds me that I didn’t do my usual Sens draft review, largely because Nichols followed my format this year by quoting scouting reports on all the players (he splits them into two posts: here and here). There was no point in replicating what he’d already done (my comments on the picks can be found here). There’s a lot of chatter about draft picks in the fanbase and for me the touchstone always has to be their statistical performance and the collective reporting of scouts. Too often fans get excited only by the former or else the hype from just one particular scout/organisation/reporter.
Travis Yost has an excellent article that focuses on Individual Point Percentage (IPP) and how it relates to predicting trends for players.
Travis also looks at the difficulty in assessing goaltenders:
To start, there’s either no rhyme or reason to how goaltenders develop, or teams do a very poor job of scouting talent. I’m inclined to believe it’s a mixture of the two – the position, generally, being complex in nature, and the eye test failing us in ways it may not with goal-scoring forwards.
Goaltenders are voodoo. Statistical analysis has proved only mildly helpful as it pertains to identifying goaltending talent and forecasting future performance. Teams also struggle mightily with goaltender evaluation – from the time of the draft, to the time in which they decide to fork over the first (or second) lucrative contract. Down the road, technological improvements may pay significant dividends here, as metrics will be crafted to better identify goaltending talent, and separate skill from the noise.
He followed this article up with one trying to figure out who were the best goaltenders in the league (concluding they are Henrik Lundqvist, Tuukka Rask, and Carey Price).
Evansville has signed two more players: Adam Stuart (SPHL 54-21-32-53), a 26-year old forward who will likely spend the year back in the SPHL, and re-signed 31-year old Jarret Lukin (56-12-26-38), one of their few productive forwards from last season.
This article is written by Peter Levi (@eyeonthesens)
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