Brian Murray and the Rebuilding Sens

Trading one or two prospects away for a young prospect or rising star (Rundblad for Turris) is fine. But we don’t want to mortgage the farm for some over the hill guy. I think we’re an elite player away from being a true contender (especially once Alfie hangs them up), but shrewd moves to bring in young talent would be great.

I do agree that the Sens this year are legimitately competitive: they might win a play-off series, and, if they’re lucky, two. The Sens might get lucky and beat the Bruins or the Rangers in the play-offs, say, but that’s the thing with luck: you can’t count on it.

Success can be deceptive. If the Sens regress to playing middling hockey, which is what until recently they had been playing, then they’re fighting for their play-off lives instead of sitting pretty.

The team’s depth in forward prospects has not yet been tested, and they need to improve their depth in net, and perhaps on the blueline. An injury to Spezza or Karlsson, and the Sens are finished (as last January sans Spezza showed). And if they continue to play well, arguably they don’t need improvement at the trade deadline.

Anyway, Murray has yet to make a good deadline or late season trade that has ‘added the missing piece of the puzzle’ (even when the player acquired, such as Matt Cullen, played well for the team in the play-offs), so, if anything, the Sens would be better off if he didn’t make a move than if he did.

You could say that the team’s big move to ‘add a piece for the play-offs’ was getting Turris from the Coyotes for Rundblad and a pick.

However, if Murray can move a player soon to become an unrestricted free agent (say, Kuba) to another team in return for a player with an expiring contract, that wouldn’t be too bad, since he at least wouldn’t be giving up the team’s prospects and picks.

Present adversity is also a training ground for future success. The Sens have won 10 of their last 13 games because of what they learned from the experience of struggling during the preceding 32 (their record was 14-14-4), and a hard-fought first-round play-off defeat (which would be ‘blooding’ them as much as a winning a play-off series would) could be a better lesson than an easy first-round victory and sweep in the second round at the hands of a superior team.

We should give BM a little more credit. He knows this team is different from years past when they thought (too optimistically) that they were contenders. He knows he has a young team, with good young players and good young prospects. He’s not going to make a trade that would mortgage the future for a aging veteran that won’t contribute to our future success.

Let’s not panic too much, and trust the guy! He’s made some shrewd moves in the past calendar year!

Gleason and Laich maybe, and then a bunch of nobody’s who did not light the world on fire. Eaves . . .Who? We would surely have neen a cup contender had he not been traded away. If all the other teams are loading up for the playoffs, unless you think there is nothing out there worth having, why take a kinfe to a gunfight. Stone is found money, DaCosta is almost a point a game player in Bingo, Boro is apparently close to NHL ready, whatever that means. It’s not like he will deplete the entire prospect pool with one trade.

Just kidding. I honestly can’t think of anybody! I just don’t know what forward he would get that would be worth giving up a prospect for. Any ideas?

Although I like your enthusiasm, I caution you or anyone else who thinks that being a playoff contender at this time of the year means that the rebuild is done.

As the Green Bay Packers found out, a winning streak only means that they won some games… They were not present when it really counted which means that they were not prepared.

The Sens have shown vast improvement, and it’s exciting to watch… and it is not even nearly there yet. I see a team that is one injury away from oblivion, with precious little depth in nets.

Add to that a system that seems to be working well in the regular season, which resembles four forwards, one dman and a goalie who is standing on his head, and we have a team in transition.

When Murray announced that he wants to add a top six forward to this team, I reacted, because although it’s his job to kick the tires, I’d rather he do that quietly, so as to not toy around with the sometimes fragile egos of players who are under pressure to increase their ice time.

If any moves need to be done, I’d rather see a solid backup goalie and a defensive shutdown dman added to the mix, rather than another top six forward. Anderson will not continue to have such a lofty GAA.

I believe that the top six forward situation will be solidly in place by next year if we are just patient and let these guys play. With the new additions mentioned that are coming, it will be mightly hard to break into the top six of this team next year.

Patience will get it done.

I am not sure what season you have been watching but Anderson has hardly been standing on his head. It is only since Christmas that he has shown even a glimmer of the goalie he was last year. Michalek and Karlsson have both been out and it has not caused us much grief. We are not one injury away from oblivion and anyway you cant spend your season so conservativly in case someone goes down. If depth at goalie is a problem, trade for a legit backup during the playoffs, AA is a disaster this year.

I am not sure where the Packer analogy comes from. If lack of preparation is the issue, that has nothing to do with depth or talent, that is a coaching issue.

As to the way he kicks the tires,Bryan Murray is doing it right, he is stating publicly that he thinks his team and players are legit and that he wants to see how good they are by ensuring they get into the playoffs. Lets make no mistake about it, every player on that team wants to be in the playoffs, and if there is a single player on the team that thinks it is more important for him to have more ice time than for his team to succeed in the playoffs or has so fragile an ego that he looks negativly on team improvement and only how it affects him, he needs to be rooted out, tied naked to the four corners of the goal and have pucks shot at him for an hour.

As to difficulty breaking into the top six….I don’t understand your point at all. You want it to be near impossible to break into the top six on your team, that means you have a great top six. Zbad and Silfverberg and the player currently on the top six have no golden ticket to the top six next year or any year. If they don’t make it they go for further development or are used as assetts to trade for need.

Only in Ottawa would we have people more excited about a slow rebuilding team than one that is exceeding expectations and looks to be playoff ready.

I don’t have a problem having too many top six forwards unless the cost to acquire them is too high.

Our past history has proven that rentals are not worth our draft picks, and the kinds of players we’ve been talking about like Anaheim’s are going to go to the highest bidder… which means overpayment.

Just imagine the conversation about Ryan or Perry. “OK we’ll take Karlsson and Z’jad and your 1st round pick,” or “Z’jad and your 1st round pick for the next two years”.

I’m just saying that we have the horses to be a really good team by next year if we don’t pull a Toronto Maple Leaf move and give away the farm trying to get better right now in the short run. In the end, I trust that BM will do the right thing.