Blog World

  Starting when the first puck drops in the rookie tournament and moving right into training camp and the pre-season comes a battle of epic proportions. Let’s be fair here: this is the NHL that these guys are competing for. The Show...the place every young hockey player aspires to be.

  Now think of this. There are 12 spots on forwards, 6 on defense and a player who sits in the pressbox, maybe two. Spezza, Heatley, Alfredsson, Vermette, Fisher, McAmmond, Kelly, Neil, Ruutu, Donovan take up 10 of those possible spots. They’re locks, they’re not going to the AHL, that’s for sure. They might sit in the pressbox, but theoretically, they’re the 10 guys who are taking spots on forward for the Ottawa Senators this season. So then, you have two spots open. Figure that Foligno’s a pretty good bet to make the team out of camp (it would be a massive disappointment if he was demoted to the AHL), Bass is almost sure of a spot based on his solid play last season and into the playoffs. I mean...he was really, really effective as a 4th line, grinding/checker, why should he lose his job?

  Then there’s Jesse Winchester who Murray thinks so highly of, he signed him to a two year, one-way contract. A guy that Murray scouted for a full year and then beat 20 other teams to sign him. Do you really think he’s going anywhere?

  What about Ilya Zubov and Alexander Nikulin? Didn’t Murray say that they’d be full time NHLers this season? So now you have Winchester, Zubov and Nikulin battling for the right to sit in the press box.

  Next we have Phillips, Volchenkov, Schubert, Kuba, Smith and Lee who are locks to play on D. Even if Lee was sent to AHL to begin the year, there would still only be one spot left. But, I personally don’t think Lee will be sent to the AHL, I think he’ll start the year as a Senator, so Nycholat, Bell and Picard, have no place on this team right now. At best one of them will be in the pressbox and the Sens will carry two extra players, but that’s unlikely to happen in all 82 games.

  So it all comes down to the kind of training camp where if you’re one of these three and you have a guy in your sites, you ‘accidently’ let ‘er go. If it happens to hurt the guy a little...oops. Well maybe not quite that far, but you can expect the kind of competition that would normally be reserved for NHL games. If you’re not ready and you’re on the bubble, you’re going down to Bingo. Bus rides, crappy food, run down motels - or nice, cushy planes, good food and big money if you blow Murray and Hartsburg out of their chairs.

  Even Chris Neil and Dean McAmmond are playing for jobs in a sense. They’re playing for jobs on the Senators, that’s for sure. I mean...I like McAmmond a lot, I always have. He’s a great utility player that can play all 3 forward positions and can excel at each one. We can call upon him to play top 6 in a pinch, and while he won’t light it up, he’s not a detriment out there. But he didn’t recover well from the Downie hit. And while at times it looked like he was hitting his stride, he’d fade back into oblivion and be reduced to 4th line minutes. He makes a low salary, but it’s still almost a million. If he has a turkey of a training camp, is he on his way out? Can he even avoid it at this point?

  I like Chris Neil too. He fights, and we’re losing guys who can drop ‘em pretty quick. He’s really tough, he likes to dole out punishing hits and he gets under guy’s skin. But he took too many dumb penalties last year - and Hartsburg won’t have patience with him if he keeps having these tremendous mental lapses. If he has a turkey, there are guys in the wings who want his place so badly. They can’t fight though, so Neil has a big edge here.

  The NHL season will be an interesting one for the Ottawa Senators. I think we’ll be above average for sure, but as much of a roller coaster as this season might be, it’s nothing compared to what’s coming. In the following weeks we will see the most vicious competition we might see all year. 

  And they’re all on the same team.