I've been here a while, and I love this community. But there are certain times we just end up talking round in circles. One of those is about Don Brennan. Every time we link to a post by him, it inevitably degenerates into a (justifiable) name calling circus where we accomplish nothing other than the smug satisfaction that we are better than him. But every time we click a link to his site, he gets another view, the Sun gets paid for ad revenue, and so his job becomes even more secure.

The fact is, we are better than him. While S7S relies on an active and engaged community to survive, Brennan needs to be sensationalist in order to remain relevant in the newspaper business and to get pageviews. It's the same reason Gizmodo stole the iPhone 4 prototype, and sites like Perez Hilton exist. He doesn't want to be a good journalist, because he is not rewarded for being a good journalist. He's rewarded for people viewing his page, and so will write whatever it takes to make it happen.

To that end, I would strongly suggest that Brennan posts be excluded from the site moving forward. Unless he adds something of substance - which he occasionally does - linking to his tripe about "trade Butler/Anderson" and his juvenile name-calling (Peter Toomanyvowels) brings down the quality of the dialogue here.

Ryan Suter won't let Wayne Simmonds anywhere near "his precious".

via 29.media.tumblr.com

Pretty well every team with any cap space around the league is going to kick the tires on Ryan Suter, a 7th overall pick in 2003, this summer. The 6'1", 195lb defenceman will be among the most sought after players on July 1st this year. Suter's 4 year, 14 million dollar contract with the Nashville Predators expires this year. Suter refused to comment too much about his contract situation earlier in the season, but the general idea was that he would resign if Nashville could bring him a cup in the near future. Well, this year Nashville went for it. Poile brought in Gill, Gaustad, Andrei Kostitsyn and Radulov in order to bolster his team for a run at the cup. Last night, the Predators were eliminated in a 2-1 loss to the Phoenix Bettman's Coyotes despite Suter notching an assist on Nashville's lone goal. The question is whether Suter will perceive this loss as the end of the road in Nashville or a new beginning. Personally, I think he'll want out.

Suter is quickly emerging as one of the league's elite shut-down defencemen. This past season, he recorded career-high numbers, notching 7 goals and 39 assists for 46 points and a +15 on the season. On a Nashville team loaded defensive-minded players and one of the strongest bluelines in the league, Suter still separates himself from the pack.

(from behindthenet.ca)

This year, Suter led all defencemen (70GP+) in Corsi Quality of Competition with a 2.069 rating. He also boasts an extremely respectful Relative Corsi QoC of 1.262. Looking at his other numbers it's easy to see that he significantly betters his team. His Relative Corsi is a positive 7.3. He takes a miniscule amount of penalties (0.5 per 60 minutes), although he doesn't draw too many (0.1 per 60 minutes). He starts in the offensive zone 45.7% of the time and finishes in it 47.0% of the time -- clearly a good thing. His PDO is above 1000 too, coming in at 1019 - which is pretty darn good.

All this being said, it is rather clear that he is a very, very good hockey player. The question is: where will he sign and for how much? Let's tackle the "how much" bit first, shall we? Personally, I feel that Suter is worth 6 to 6.5 million per year -- feel free to disagree with me. There's only a handful of teams at the moment that have the cap space and are willing to dish out that kind of cash for one player. I see Detroit as the front runner as they have the allure of success, a hockey market and the cap space, on top of the fact that Stuart and Lidstrom most likely won't be returning next year.

The question we all want to know: What about Ottawa?

While the Senators have the cap space to sign Suter, I doubt he'll be a Senator come fall. Here's why.

Otttawa's perspective: Bryan Murray will already have to break the bank on Erik Karlsson, so bringing in another expensive blueliner is unlikely. Melnyk recently said that Ottawa can't afford to be a cap-ceiling team at the moment, so that even further dispels the notion of #20 suiting up for Canada's capital. Keeping in mind that this is a rebuild, Ottawa will need cap space down the road to resign it's prospects that may will undoubtedly be great players, so tying up 6 million in one player is probably not the smartest idea.

Suter's perspective: If Suter is leaving Nashville, it's because he wants to be on a competitive team -- he wants a cup. While Ottawa will be a legitimate contender a few years down the road, they are not cup favourites any time in the immediate future. Going back to what I said about needing the cap space later, it would be nice if Suter signed for a few years so we could re-evaluate the situation when it comes time to resign everyone. That being said, I don't think that Suter is too interested in being a rental player, albeit a rental player on a bubble team. He has a wife and child to take care of and I doubt he wants to be a journeyman quite yet.

What do you guys think?

Hi All, I have an non-SENS topic for discussion that I wanted to get your input into. I was browsing the news outlets, and happened upon multiple stories detailing the press release of Greg Jamison's tentative bid for ownership of the Phoenix Coyotes. This got me to wondering what "Yotes Fan" thinks about the newest white knight, so I wandered on over to 5 For Howling to see what they thought. Lo and behold, cautious jubilation, which is understandable, hate directed at Canadians who have been calling for the Coyotes return to Canada, but barely any mention of the abysmal impact sustaining the Coyotes has had and will likely have on the City of Glendale. This got me to thinking: At what point should reality trump loyalty for Coyotes Fans (or sports fans in general)?

More after the jump.

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The Citizen is reporting that Kurt Kleinendorst is stepping down as head coach of the Binghampton Senators to pursue career opportunities outside of the organization. This is also being reported on twitter by Joy Lindsay.

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In my ten years of coaching hockey from Atom to Bantam AA, I found that the best way to build a team was to have a great goalie and build a strong defence, and the goals would come. Anytime the best players on my teams were all forwards, it turned out to be a frustrating year of "underachievement".

So it's interesting how well the teams with good defences and goaltending in these playoffs are doing.

We are building some impressive offensive depth already, and I say that we should really concentrate on building the defence this off season through the draft and through the trade route. We won alot of games that were wide open run-and-gun this regular season, and did alot worse in games that were tight checking.

Now I'd love to see us run-and-gun our way into the lead in a game, and then be able to switch and shut it down when we need to.

Karlsson realized in the playoffs that his usual all out offensice style wasn't going to work, and we were not adept enough at changing the way we played without him playing 4th forward.

Yes, we had a great year considering, but now exepectations will be higher, and I'd love to see this team shore up the defence.

I'm glad to hear BM talking about acquiring a defensive dman. I can't wait to see who that is going to be.

Now the dust has settled on the Senators season and I've had time to reflect, I'm trying to find a Team 1200 audio clip of Kyle Turris's OT winner from game 4. I want to use it as my ringtone back here in the UK. If anyone has it (say 10 seconds either side of the goal), I'd appreciate a link.

Is there an offical date as to when the fixture list for next season (assuming CBA issues get resolved) id published?

Well, the season's over. What a year! Here's the final, not-so-scientific Heroes and Zeroes results. I did not separate the playoffs from the regular season, as creating the table is a time consuming process.

Ok, here's my interpretation of the results. As the Heroes and Zeroes points are compiled based on mentions in the Heroes and Zeroes or Honourable Mentions section, what this table really shows is how popular individual players are with the writers. Or put another way: How forgiving are the Silver Seven authors to a particular player's performance?

For example: Take a look at Spezza's numbers. He finished the season with a team leading 84 points, and lead the Sens in playoffs scoring. Yet he finished with a mere 19 "hero" points and eight "zero" points. For a leading scorer, he sure doesn't get a lot of press, good or bad. It makes me wonder if someone was afraid to pump him up or to put him down. On the other hand, he could simply be scoring a lot of garbage points, but I don't think so.

Another example would be Konopka. He finished with a -3 difference. Based on that, it would be very easy to conclude that the Sens would be stupid to try to re-sign him. Yet, I doubt anyone feels that way and I would be very surprised if he is let go. I feel his result is almost entirely due to being simply overlooked. If game recaps are written to summarize the event and encapsulate the feeling of the night, few recaps are going to gush glowingly about face-off percentages, blocked shots, hits or other less "legal" efforts.

Few NHLers are so terribly bad on a consistent basis to gain a huge amount of Zeroes points, it is much more likely that many players' off nights are simply unmentioned. This would go unrecorded in this compilation, and I think this statistically biased the results. For example, take a look at Filatov results, nine games and only a -1 result. That would imply he had one bad game and eight OK ones. However, to anyone who watched his play it was obvious that for every game, except possibly one, he was not an NHL caliber player. And that's just my point: At the highest level of competition, games where a player is forgettable or unseen is JUST AS BAD as a game where the player is obviously a "zero".

Peter Regin re-signed with the Ottawa Senators today with a one year, one-way contract.

Full story here.

And since I apparently need at least 75 words to complete a FanPost, I'll insert a short opinion: I'm happy about it. It's short, it's undoubtedly $1m or less, and it gives us another look at a relatively young prospect who at one time was seen as a surefire second line player. I hope Regin has a great offseason recovering from his abundance of shoulder injuries and comes into training camp with a fiery vengeance.

Alright, with the emergence of elite prospects, free agency and the draft, Ottawa's line up could look drastically different next year. My question to you is: what would your "Dream Team" (within reason) look like? I've thought about this one and over the year I've become attached to players like Winch, Anacondra, JOB or the Baby Elephant so they're harder to let go for me. My team would look something like this:

Michalek (4.333M)-Spezza(7M)-Parise(6.25M)
Silfverberg(0.9M)-Turris(1.4M)-Alfredsson (4.875M)
Greening(0.817M)-Z. Smith (0.7M)-Foligno(2M)
Neil(2M)-JOB(0.9M)-Condra(0.625M)

Carle (4M)-Karlsson (6M)
Gonchar (5.5M)-Cowen (1.265M)
Phillips(3.08M)-Borowiecki (0.61M)

Anderson (3.188M)
Bishop (0.65M)

With an overall cap hit of 56.147M -- Well below cap. (source: Capgeek)

I'm undecided on Foligno. While I know he's going to be resigned because Murray already challenged him to show that he's a Top-6 forward.. I don't think he is. I doubt he'll be satisfied playing a third line grinding role forever. I like the energy he brings to the team, but not his reputation. You could flip a coin on Foligno for me: on one hand, we get a great, talented player... on the other we get great return contributing to the rebuild.

Though, I do like the idea of signing Suter, I like the idea of signing Parise (for 6 million) better as he brings a whole lot more to the team in my opinion and committing to two superstars could affect how we resign the stars we actually drafted. The Carle-Karlsson pairing has a dual meaning to me: One, I like Carle and I think he would compliment Karlsson well. Two, if (Heaven forbid) Bob Cole announces another Ottawa game, could you imagine the struggle that would ensue due to a Carle-Karlsson pairing?

Letting Zibanejad and Stone develop even further in the AHL for a year, then re-evaluating them again next year would do them great good, I think.

What would YOUR team look like?

For those who haven't kept up with the hype on Justin Schultz hype, here's an overview on who he is.

A defenseman drafted in the second round in 2008 by the Anaheim Ducks, Justin Schultz has played the last 4 years with the University of Wisconsin. In his last two seasons there, he has 91 points in 78 games. Schultz is 6'2", and has reportedly been putting on some muscle in an attempt to improve his defensive game to go along with these offensive numbers. My "The Hockey News: Futurewatch" magazine ranks Schultz at 21 in their "Top 75 Prospects." For some perspective, the magazine lists Zibanejad at 5, Lehner at 20, Stone at 45, Silfverberg at 67 and Noesen at 72. Between our youth movement, and Murray's love of all Puck Moving Defenseman, chances are Murray could be making a pitch for this blue-chip prospect.

So, why is this young, promising prospect a UFA? Well, he's finishing his 4th year at College now, and in spite of the Ducks' best efforts, he still doesn't have a contract with Anaheim. Under the rules of the CBA, if he still has no contract on July 1st, he's a UFA. He's not holding out for money, as teams will still only be allowed to give him an entry level contract. He's holding out for the ability to be able to decide for himself where he plays.

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