Sens at Land’s End

Too subtle?

It doesn’t seem quite right that the Sharks don’t play in Ottawa this year, does it? Heatley skipped town and he gets to avoid the consequences for at least a full year. Well, the Sharks do have to play the Canucks this season. Tonight, in fact. And although my disgruntled Sens fan voice will be a tiny minority in a room full of Canucks fans who probably don’t care that much about our pain, I will try to make myself heard.

Tonight, Ottawa, I boo for thee.

Apologies for the lack of activity in here lately. I am finally finishing up my school career and getting ready to leave Vancouver, so I’m pretty busy with real life stuff. I still watch the Sens, but I don’t have much time to blog. This situation will continue until December. Then I’ll be free! Free to do fun stuff like think about hockey to my heart’s content. Unfortunately (not really), I’ll also be in California at that time with no access to TV broadcasts of Ottawa games. So yes.

At any rate, I just wanted to check in quickly and do some self-promotion: I am now a weekly contributor over at Cycle Like the Sedins, where I will be providing links to good posts about the Northeast Division every Wednesday. You can check out my first post here, and please email me or tweet at me if you have any suggestions for links I might post.

There was a signing in Senators-land today: Bryan Murray rewarded Matt Carkner’s solid play with a two-year, $1.4 million one-way contract.

The timing of this deal strikes me as strange. Carkner has performed better than I think anyone expected to this point in the season, but it’s only been seven games and it seems a bit soon to conclude that he’ll keep it up forever. On the other hand, a cap hit of $700,000 would make Carkner the 191st best paid defenseman in the NHL this season. A number like that doesn’t seem like much to risk on a guy who can, at the very least, worry people and kill penalties. When you think about the somewhat inflated contracts of Chris Kelly, Chris Neil, and Mike Fisher, it’s unfortunately refreshing to see a hometown hero type of guy get a very reasonable, totally non-crippling deal from the Sens for once.

The interesting part of all this is wondering what it means for the Senators’ future roster. Ottawa’s defense looks rather crowded at the moment; if Filip Kuba ever happens to recover from whatever injury he’s dealing with, someone will have to come out of the lineup. The team also has Brian Lee down in Binghamton and the monstrous Jared Cowen in the pipeline. But:

• Anton Volchenkov is a UFA at the end of this season.
• Chris Campoli, Alexandre Picard, and Brian Lee are all RFAs at the end of this season.

That leaves four spots on the blueline definitely filled in 2010-2011: Chris Phillips, Carkner, Kuba, and presumably Erik Karlsson. It’s also possible that Cowen will make the leap to the NHL, which means five of six/seven positions may be filled before Campoli, Picard, Lee, and Volchenkov even enter the picture.

So. What is the deal here? What is Murray’s plan? It seems reasonable to assume that at least one and maybe two of Campoli, Picard, and Lee will not be back. Personally, I’d be inclined to re-sign Picard. He played very well paired with Kuba at times last season and he’s definitely looked more impressive than Campoli so far this year. As for Lee and Campoli, well, it wouldn’t break my heart to see either one walk (unless I started thinking about wasted first round picks).

The real question is: what will happen to Volchenkov? Is signing a very cheap player like Carkner a way of readying the payroll to give the A-Train his raise? I kind of hope so. Every time Volchenkov crushes another rookie, he reminds me why he’s one of my favourite players and I would hate to see him leave Ottawa. That said, I’m also with Nichols of The 6th Sens in not particularly wanting to see Volchenkov eat up $5 million of the Sens’ cap space for the foreseeable future (see Nichols’ post “What’s Volchenkov Worth?” for some good reading on this subject).

With that in mind, I wonder if signing a physical d-man like Carkner might be Murray’s attempt to fill a forthcoming Volchenkov-shaped void. I hope not: I like Carkner, but really … he’ll never be the A-Train.