What a difference a year can make.
Or in this instance, 11 months.
On Feb. 28, 2023, the Ottawa Senators capped an impressive two-game sweep of the Detroit Red Wings in the span of 24 hours. The Senators dominated the Red Wings 12-3 on the scoreboard, a pair of results that seemed to shape the trajectory of each team heading into the trade deadline.
Steve Yzerman and the Red Wings folded their hand, opting to ship out four veteran players — Tyler Bertuzzi, Filip Hronek, Jakub Vrana and Oskar Sundqvist — in the immediate aftermath of those two humbling losses. Conversely, Senators general manager Pierre Dorion was buoyed by those two victories and chose an aggressive path of landing Jakob Chychrun from the Arizona Coyotes in a deal that cost the club a first-round pick and a pair of second-round selections.
Since then, however, the organizations have gone in vastly different directions — and not the ones we would have necessarily expected. Heading into their meeting on Wednesday evening in Detroit, the Red Wings are somewhat comfortably sitting in a playoff spot, with a five-point cushion over the New York Islanders for the final wild card spot in the Eastern Conference. The Senators are stuck in the basement of the Atlantic Division, with a .435 points percentage that is pretty much in line with their record from the 2019-20 season.
This turn of events is especially startling when you contrast this against our evaluation of the two franchises at the end of the 2021-22 season. In that exercise, we polled five industry experts to compare the quality and depth of both organizations and try to project which one would make the playoffs first. (Fun fact: Dave Poulin, who is now the Senators senior vice president of hockey operations, was one of the experts we leaned on.)
And three of our five experts believed Ottawa would qualify for the playoffs before Detroit.
As our Scott Wheeler wrote at the time, “I think I’d lean Ottawa because they’ve got fewer holes to plug.”
So what happened?
Our two beat writers in Detroit (Max Bultman) and Ottawa (Ian Mendes) weigh in on the current state of each franchise, where the Red Wings have clearly taken a step ahead of the Senators.
1. How crucial were those two losses against Ottawa in February last season in shaping the Red Wings’ map for the offseason?
Bultman: It depends a bit on who you ask. Red Wings coach Derek Lalonde has insisted that we in the media have overblown the significance of those two games – but at a minimum, it’s fair to say those games reflected two significant flaws on the Red Wings’ roster last season that they certainly tried to address.First, they needed more scoring talent. Detroit scored three goals, combined, in those two must-win games, a symptom of a team that just needed more scoring depth behind its big guns.
They did that, in adding Alex DeBrincat, Daniel Sprong, J.T. Compher and Shayne Gostisbehere, and have now become one of the highest-scoring teams in the league. But perhaps more glaringly, it showed how easily they could be pushed around. The Red Wings haven’t been as successful in addressing that, but I do think that was part of the vision in adding names like Klim Kostin and Christian Fischer up front, and they continued to add size on the back end with Justin Holl and Jeff Petry. This area is still a weakness for the Red Wings, especially in comparison to a team like Ottawa, but they’re at least better equipped to make teams pay on the scoreboard than a year ago.
Mendes: Those two wins seemed to push Ottawa into a more aggressive mode, willing to believe they had a chance to win. Dorion pulled off the trade to land Jakob Chychrun, which cost him a handful of assets, as stated above. But the Senators were tied in the standings with Detroit (64 points) and each team was five points behind Pittsburgh for the final playoff spot with three teams — Buffalo, Florida and Washington — to also clear.
While landing…
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