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Official Ottawa Senators Thread

princedpw said:
So, it seems like we did pretty much as well as possible on the free agent market with Tavares, and I think we needed that extra bit of talent to raise our ceiling, even if no unrestricted free agent is super-efficient in terms of production/$.

That was more or less my point. I think the Leafs will probably do roughly about as well as one can when signing a top tier UFA(excluding, say, how the Bruins did with Chara) and even then it's still not going to be a super-efficient use of the money. I think it will probably be on balance a good move but there's really just no getting away from the problems with paying UFA prices in a cap league.
 
I have to say, I'm a little torn on the issue of the Sens attendance woes. On the one hand there's no question that Melnyk is a terrible owner who's done just about all he can to hurt his team's ability to draw.

On the other hand though there's this very weird contingency of Sens fans who seem to be under the delusion that the entire problem is Melnyk related and that if he would only sell the team for sure they'd be bought by some incredibly generous billionaire who would, through his massive investment in the team, somehow overcome the massive challenges facing a team in that market that exist regardless of who owns them.
 
Isn't a large part of the problem due to the location of the arena? When you have to pack a lunch and cross the River Styx just to get there it's not a great start. How much of that is attributable to Melnyk vs to Ottawa's willingness to partially fund a new rink? I got the impression (rightly or wrongly) that they recently had a deal with the city but then Melnyk did something asinine to make it fall apart...again.
 
Hobbes said:
Isn't a large part of the problem due to the location of the arena? When you have to pack a lunch and cross the River Styx just to get there it's not a great start. How much of that is attributable to Melnyk vs to Ottawa's willingness to partially fund a new rink? I got the impression (rightly or wrongly) that they recently had a deal with the city but then Melnyk did something asinine to make it fall apart...again.

It seems in past discussions that angle was laughed off by folks here when discussing Coyote's attendance. Crappy team and poor location are a deadly combination. 
 
Hobbes said:
Isn't a large part of the problem due to the location of the arena? When you have to pack a lunch and cross the River Styx just to get there it's not a great start. How much of that is attributable to Melnyk vs to Ottawa's willingness to partially fund a new rink? I got the impression (rightly or wrongly) that they recently had a deal with the city but then Melnyk did something asinine to make it fall apart...again.

The location isn't wonderful, but it's not as far as some people make it out to be, especially with the way the city has developed. It was in the middle of nowhere when it was built, but the area near it has developed quite substantially. I mean, it's only a 20 minute drive from downtown. The bigger issue is the lack of higher order public transit to get there. It's a bus or nothing - and the bus takes over an hour.
 
Hobbes said:
Isn't a large part of the problem due to the location of the arena? When you have to pack a lunch and cross the River Styx just to get there it's not a great start. How much of that is attributable to Melnyk vs to Ottawa's willingness to partially fund a new rink? I got the impression (rightly or wrongly) that they recently had a deal with the city but then Melnyk did something asinine to make it fall apart...again.

I think the location of the arena is a good example of how "the problem" both involves Melnyk but is also bigger than him and intrinsic to the situation.

Kanata obviously isn't the ideal place for an arena(although Melnyk didn't put it there) and a new downtown arena would be for the best but if memory serves the deal you're talking about to build a downtown arena that fell through last year was an entirely privately funded deal in large part because Ottawa is a small city where the local industry is the federal government and so can't really put public money into a new one(and can you imagine the reaction from Alberta Separatists if Ottawa got any federal money for a building?).

So is Melnyk a complete moron for not being able to put together a private deal to finance a new arena? If so, that's a standard that most owners in the league wouldn't be able to meet. Calgary and Edmonton got theirs by crying poor and threatening to move the team and Winnipeg just moved into the local AHL rink which was only NHL standard-ish because they were owned by someone worth 35 billion or so.

Because that's inherently the problem with these arenas. They don't tend to make private sense so they need what amount to public handouts to be built. The smaller and poorer the city(or, in cases I'll discuss in a second, the less interested in hockey) the less viable those arenas become. Ottawa also has the unique problem of potentially only being the third most popular hockey team in their own region which further complicates trying to convince anyone to think building an arena for hundreds of millions of dollars makes good business sense.

If you look at some of the other worst attended teams in the NHL, the Panther or Coyotes, you see other examples of teams that didn't really make sense financially and where the conventional economic plan didn't really work because of existing arenas and low interest in the sport. After all, how do you sell the city of Miami or Phoenix on a hockey team being a economic driver to revitalize a neighbourhood when nobody cares about hockey and you already have a downtown arena for the local NBA team? So they both got moved outside of the city as part of what were basically real-estate development cons pulled on smaller nearby cities that ended up disastrous. So, like Ottawa, they can't really use "But we're outside the city" as an excuse.

A new owner may be more of a deal maker. He may be better at running the team on ice. But I don't know that a new owner fundamentally changes the economic viability of privately funding a downtown arena.
 
Frank E said:
Bender said:
How stupid are these people?

I'm not as quick to criticize.

Maybe he did something really stupid.

So you're not quick to criticize because the guy they hired as CEO and only lasted two months because he maybe did something really stupid? That would kind of indicate they didn't do a very good job vetting their CEO candidates, wouldn't it? Which seems like a fair criticism.
 
Nik Bethune said:
Frank E said:
Bender said:
How stupid are these people?

I'm not as quick to criticize.

Maybe he did something really stupid.

So you're not quick to criticize because the guy they hired as CEO and only lasted two months because he maybe did something really stupid? That would kind of indicate they didn't do a very good job vetting their CEO candidates, wouldn't it? Which seems like a fair criticism.

Would it?
 

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