Sens at Land’s End

A lot of things have  happened since I last blogged about the Sens, for me personally and for the team. Let’s start with me:

• I spent the better part of three weeks in California, where I was able to attend homegames for both the Los Angeles Kings and the Anaheim Ducks. Coincidentally, the visiting opponent in both cases was the Ottawa Senators. I wore my Spezza jersey, cheered loudly, and managed not to get beaten up by Ducks fans, who are, despite what you might think, very friendly people. I witnessed two miracles during my time in California: a Jonathan Cheechoo goal in LA and an Ottawa shootout win in Anaheim. Well, technically, that’s three miracles since a shootout win and a win in Anaheim are both pretty rare.
• I finished school. HELL YES.
• I left Vancouver. I have now moved back to my beloved hometown of Ottawa. This move leaves me with a bit of a dilemma as I am no longer a displaced Senators fan and the title of my blog technically no longer applies. Some editing will be required, but I don’t think I’ll change the name. Thoughts?
• I joined the world of the gainfully employed. This partially explains why I haven’t been blogging: for once I have a job that actually requires me to spend most of the day working. The horror!

Major life changes, as you can see. Now, let’s recap what the Sens have been up to:

• Winning an assload of games.

I think that about covers it.

Tonight, the boys are back in town post-Olympics (OLYMPICS WOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!! CANADAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!) and we start to see just how much momentum they have left from their pre-pause play. Hopefully, it’s a lot. As friend of blog Senators Lost Cojones pointed out via email the other day, “NO Ottawa Senators were harmed in the making of this Olympics.” This is key. In fact, it’s fair to say that all Ottawa’s hockey Olympians suffered some form of embarrassment at the games — Daniel Alfredsson, Milan Michalek, Filip Kuba, and Anton Volchenkov were all eliminated in the quarter finals, with Volchenkov’s Russian team suffering a tremendous ass kicking at the hands of Team Canada (CANADA WOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!); Jarkko Ruutu won a bronze medal for Finland, but I’d like to see him try bragging about that after the so-bad-it-defies-belief collapse the Finns had against the United States in the semi final. Could the anger and shame these players feel motivate them to play at a higher level in Ottawa? Who knows, but we can hope so.

Deadline Fever

As you may have heard, tomorrow is the NHL trade deadline, a day when many NHL players start looking for moving companies. (By the way, Global Pack N’ Ship of Vancouver? Terrible.)

In advance of tomorrow’s frenzy, the Sens today sent San Jose’s second round pick to the New York Islanders in exchange for defenceman Andy Sutton. I’m going to be honest: I don’t know anything about this guy, but I looked him up and apparently he’s 6′6″. That’s really tall. With the pre-Olympics (CA-NA-DA! CA-NA-DA!)  trade of Alexandre Picard and the injury to the awful Chris Campoli, the blue line was looking a bit thin, so it makes sense for Bryan Murray to go after another d-man. Like I said, my Sutton knowledge is very thin but 12 points in 54 games this season on Long Island tells me he’s not an offensive force and he’s in the NHL’s top 25 hitters this season so I assume he’s a physical type. Balance on the Sens’ defensive line appears somewhat skewed now, with Chris Phillips, Anton Volchenkov, Matt Carkner, and Sutton all being primarily defensive players and only Erik Karlsson and Filip Kuba expected to put up points. (Campoli is too bad to count.)

As for Volchenkov and his pending UFA status, I’m completely with The Universal Cynic on this one, as I said in my brief contribution to Cycle Like the Sedins’ Northeast Division deadline-themed post: I understand that Murray is in a predicament, but it simply does not make sense to trade a hugely important component of the team right now just to avoid losing him for nothing on July 1. The worst case scenario here — complete destruction of team chemistry, things fall apart, no playoffs, mass firings, trade the entire roster, move the team to Kansas City … okay, maybe that’s a bit of an embellishment, but it could be horrific — is bad enough to make the best case scenario not worth the risk. The A-Train should stay put, for now and hopefully forever.

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.

Dear Sens,

I have just gone through a really horrific few days of Christmas travel. My best experience was my flight to Regina on Christmas Eve only being delayed for 2.5 hours. (The one I was supposed to take on the 21st was cancelled after I sat in the airport for about 10 hours waiting. They even boarded the plane and still we didn’t take off.) I narrowly missed being stranded in Edmonton for three days last night, but I did eventually make it home after a trip that should have taken five hours at most took twelve.

I woke up this morning with some kind of flu, and am now sick in bed, drinking water to keep from getting dehydrated and eating crackers because they’re all I can stomach.

Today is my birthday.

It would really help me out and make all this somewhat less unbearable if you could somehow pull out a win tonight. Additionally, I have a ticket for your game in Vancouver tomorrow — it was a birthday present to myself — and if I am well enough to go, I’d love to see you win, or at least score some goals. (If I am not well enough to go, it would be great if Heatzza could come to my house and take care of me but I know you’re probably busy so I don’t expect that even though I’d do it for you.)

I know I’m hard on you sometimes, but I am really a loyal fan and I love you all (except Schubert). Various incarnations of your team have caused me a lot of mental anguish over the last 13 years or so, and you could atone for some of that while also making what has been a miserable week a little less horrible with some good efforts on this western trip.

Please, if you don’t want to do it for the points, do it for me. It would mean a lot.

Yours fondly,

Meaghan, aka Sens at Land’s End

Big day for the Sens. Big day.

Jarkko Ruutu has, unsurprisingly, been suspended for two games for that attempted elbow to the head of Maxim Lapierre. “I had no intention to do it,” says Ruutu, “but accidents will happen.” They sure will, Jarkko. They just didn’t this time.

Ryan Shannon has been called up from Binghamton to take Ruutu’s spot in the lineup for the home-and-home against the Islanders on Thursday and Saturday. Where precisely Shannon will fit on the Sens’ forward lines is not clear, but it appears that Antoine Vermette’s time playing with Jason Spezza and Dany Heatley is over. Craig Hartsburg had Nick Foligno on their line in practice today.

Oh, but if you thought that was the most interesting thing that happened at practice, then you were sorely mistaken. There was not only line juggling going on, but also rage. Anger. Frustration. Fury. Plus violence done unto inanimate objects the likes of which hasn’t been seen in Ottawa since Ray Emery left town as Daniel Alfredsson swung his hockey stick of furious angry rage and accidentally (there you go, Ruutu) broke a pane of Scotiabank Place’s glass. According to the Sun, the Captain was frustrated by the team’s “inability to complete a drill.”

Additionally, Bruce Garrioch reports that Heatley and Chris Kelly got into a “heated debate,” and Heatley and Hartsburg had a “long discussion” at the end of practice as well. When asked what he and the coach were talking about, Heatley said “my skates.” The video report on the Sun’s website (which appears on the page linked to above) includes footage of Heatley talking to reporters and well, I don’t know the guy, but I’d say he seemed a bit irritated.

All of this leaves me wondering: um, what the heck happened? Okay, I get that the team lost last night and believe me, I was pretty irritated too — actually, I had to ban myself from watching more hockey last night after I saw that the FREAKING BLOODY PENGUINS had come back on Detroit; the combination of that and the Sens getting shut out was just too much — but I can’t quite see how that leads to half the team (possible exaggeration) suddenly being overcome with berserker rage. Is there no joy in Sensville these days? What’s up? Can’t blame it on Emery this time. (Though, he was in town recently … but no.)

Sens … you’ve got to calm down. Remember what Yoda says: anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. Anger, hate, and suffering are all stops along the path to the dark side. I know the Emperor said that anger could give you focus and make you stronger, but he was creepy. Who are you going to believe: the deathly pale guy in the black cloak or the little green puppet who sounds like Kermit the Frog? Also, I’m pretty sure Darth Sidious was talking about anger directed outwards. If you’re angry at yourself all the time, that’s just toxic.

So. Meditation. Group yoga session. Ice cream party. Whatever. Let’s nip the infighting in the bud before this turns into a horrible repeat of last season and I have to fly home and beat you all with my frying pan.

Brace Yourselves …

I want to give you fair warning, my loyal reader(s?), that I will not be making my usual game posts on Thursday and Saturday. My good friend Golly will be visiting from England starting tomorrow. She’s going to watch Thursday’s game with me, and I’m thinking it might be slightly rude to blog with her in the room. On Saturday, Golly and I will be attending the Canucks-Leafs game, which is unfortunately at the same time as the Sens game, so we’ll have to miss the Sens entirely. It’s for a good cause: Golly has never seen live hockey before. Don’t worry, though — I’ll make sure she knows to boo the Leafs.

A few random tidbits for the day:

Please, Just Shut Up. Those bloody Spezza trade rumours are surfacing again for some reason, and this time they seem to be tied to the Nikolai Khabibulin to Ottawa rumours that just won’t go away. A report from Chicago has it that the Blackhawks may be interested in Spezza, while HockeyBuzz’s Eklund is saying that the Sens will send Spezza to Calgary to clear cap space for Khabibulin. Which makes total sense, because obviously Bryan Murray would want to trade the guy who has probably been Ottawa’s best player this season so far, who is only 25 years old, who finished eighth in the league in scoring last season despite missing six games, and who is signed long-term for what seems like a pretty reasonable cap hit of $7 million, to make room on the payroll for a 35-year-old, injury prone goalie whose $6.75 million deal expires at the end of this season. Right. Did Murray sustain a head injury I don’t know about? I guess the nice thing about Eklund reporting all this is that it means it will definitely never come to pass.

Prepare to Die! There was an exciting post-game altercation in Buffalo last night, which involved Adam Mair trying to charge into the Sens’ locker room in order to do violence to Chris Neil. Apparently, he grabbed Jarkko Ruutu but was sent on his way by locker room defender Luke Richardson, who calmly tried to explain that what happens on the ice should stay on the ice. (In case you missed it, someone has conveniently uploaded it to YouTube. Ruutu’s interview about it is here.) According to the Sun, the NHL is reviewing the incident. So. A couple of fights, lots of personal insults, plenty of hate … pretty much par for the course for a Sens-Sabres game.

Senator vs. Senators. Bad news for the Sens as Barack Obama has forced them to move their practice tomorrow in a blatant attempt to woo the all-important Florida Panthers fan vote by sabotaging their opponent. But has he shot himself in the foot with Lightning supporters?

Greatness By Association. In blog news, I am happy to announce that Sens at Land’s End is soon to become part of that excellent organization known as HLOG: Hockey’s Ladies of Greatness! I read and enjoy many HLOG blogs, and am very excited to be joining such an illustrious group of hockey bloggers, including fellow Sens blogger Sherry of Scarlett Ice. I just want to thank the ladies for this opportunity, and I will do my best to bring honour to the HLOG name.