Just after posting about there being no news in Sensland, Eugene Melnyk dropped a few bombs. Thoughts:
-I agree with Nichols (link above) that Melnyk threw Dave Cameron under the bus and that he’ll be gone at the end of the season; I can’t celebrate knowing Bryan Murray is likely the one replacing him, as Murray’s coaching selections have been between awful and incompetent
-Melnyk carried on the Sens tradition of making excuses for how the season turned out (blaming injuries)
-Nichols spends about forty paragraphs explaining why being a budget team hurts the Senators–it’s all good stuff, but just on the face of it the problems it creates are pretty obvious
-I’m not sure what “Well, not a lot of changes, but key changes” means, but again, who is making the changes is what’s important
-I partially agree with Nichols’ sentiment on how the Sens have drafted, although I’d add that they’ve traded away (or alienated) some of the better assets they’ve acquired, with a downward arc since losing Anders Forsberg and Tim Murray (the former, incidentally, works for the latter in Buffalo now)
-I’ll quote Nichols: “maybe if a team struggles to get on a significant winning streak, the talent level of that team isn’t very good?” Indeed!
-Melnyk understandably poopoos another rebuild, even though the team never truly went through that process
-Melnyk: “I’m looking at all of it [adding new voices]. It’s right across the board. There’s nobody safe when you have a year like we just did. There’s no way. The status quo will just us there again next year and this team cannot survive not making the playoffs. We have to do it by guts. We have to do it by hard work and we can get there.” The “guts and hardwork” is meaningless patter and is usually used to justify the Mark Borowiecki‘s and Zack Stortini‘s of the world. On the other hand, doing so would be the status quo–so who knows what Melnyk means here? It doesn’t help that he added this:
Well, I’ve actually had a lot of experience in analytics when it comes to horse racing. In horse racing, it doesn’t work. I can tell you that. I spent a lot of money on it. In hockey, you defer to and it depends on who you talk to. It can work as a tool, but it’s only a small tool. It’s not even half the tool. It just tells you… a lot of statistics, you have to be into that, but a good, experienced hockey person like a Bryan Murray – of that vintage – they don’t need analytics. They can see it already. They’ve seen the play over and over and over again and they know how to fix things because they’ve been there and done that. It’s just another day in the office, so analytics are great. People should see it, but it’s not the beginning and the end. There’s no chance that it will make that big of a difference
This is incredibly stupid. We all know what a false equivalency is, but putting that aside, Eugene simply demonstrates no understanding of analytics at all. Zero. Which does explain why Bryan Murray can bumble and stumble around with old-time-hockey cliches and get away with it (and also why the Sens will remain a bumbling organisation so long as he, or someone like him, is at the top).
Ary M explores at length the mismanagement of Matt Puempel as an asset, which is well worth reading, but no surprise to anyone who has followed the Sens the last few years. Having finally become a top-AHL players he’s languished and stagnated in the NHL as Dave Cameron (like all of Murray’s coaching hires) prefers to dress less talented players.
Travis Yost looks at what drives coaches to reduce ice time and the answer (for both forwards and defense) is a decrease in offensive production.
Analysis
There was an interesting piece posted recently that found that Francophone officials call more penalties on Anglophone players.
More free agent signings out of college, as Casey Nelson was signed by Buffalo and Tom Parisi by Montreal.
This article is written by Peter Levi (@eyeonthesens)
eyeonthesens 