Screen Shots: Ottawa Senators, NHL in Australia, and Matt Murray

Adam Proteau discusses if the Ottawa Senators are the Atlantic's top up-and-coming team, NHL equipment arriving in Australia and Toronto Maple Leafs goalie Matt Murray.

This is Screen Shots, a regular THN.com file in which we break down a few different hockey topics, and debate and discuss them in shorter paragraphs. Once again, we’ll end the introduction quickly and get right to business:

The Ottawa Senators made a big splash on the free agent market on Thursday, signing star winger Vladimir Tarasenko to a one-year, $5-million contract. Adding the six-time 30-goal scorer gives the Sens one of the best top six forwards in the NHL, but does it make Ottawa the Atlantic Division’s best up-and-coming team? We don’t think so.

From this writer’s perspective, of the three Atlantic teams battling to make the playoffs this coming season – the Senators, Buffalo Sabres and Detroit Red Wings – the Sabers have the best shot at qualifying for the post-season. The Sens would be second on that list, followed by the Red Wings. Why? Well, because Buffalo’s top six forwards had four players who scored at least 31 goals last season (Ottawa had three), and because Buffalo has two of the best three defensemen (Owen Power and Rasmus Dahlin) among the Sens, Wings and Sabres (Detroit’s Moritz Seider being the other).

The deciding factor in the race to win a playoff spot could be goaltending. In that regard, the Sabres could struggle if rookie Devon Levi doesn’t take the No. 1 job and make it his own. The Sens added veteran Joonas Korpisalo, and Detroit is depending on veteran Ville Husso, but all-in-all, Buffalo’s abundance of talent beyond goaltending is the deepest group of the three playoff-hungry teams.

Tarasenko’s arrival in Ottawa makes the Senators a frightening opponent for any other franchise, but the Sabres were frightening enough in 2022-23, and their top players are just coming into their own. If we were betting on it today, we’d bet Buffalo slides into one of the two wild-card berths this year, but it’s shaping up to be an extremely tight race.

This was an interesting NHL.com feature about the league’s preparations for pre-season games in September in Australia. A whopping 51 pallets of hockey equipment were packed into three 40-foot shipping containers, which sailed for more than a month before arriving in Melbourne, Australia, Friday.

The equipment will be paramount to the league constructing an NHL-worthy rink in Rod Laver Arena, a tennis facility with a retractable roof when the games go down between the Los Angeles Kings and Arizona Coyotes on Sept. 23 and 24. Having nearly two full months to prepare for the games might sound like a lot, but the league’s operations professionals – many of who operate with little fanfare or recognition – know they need a long runway to ensure everything goes off without a hitch.

We often take things like arenas for granted, but they’re marvels of cutting-edge technologies, and the game literally can’t go on without them.

Finally, the Toronto Maple Leafs made news this week with their announcement goalie Matt Murray would be placed on long-term injured reserve and be out of the lineup until further notice. The news came as the Leafs had a second buyout window open after goalie Ilya Samsonov's arbitration ruling, but only players ruled to be healthy can be bought out. Some fans were claiming the Leafs were effectively circumventing the salary cap, inferring Toronto management somehow faked an injury to the veteran goalie in an attempt to get cap-compliant.

The problem with that theory is the NHL does take LTIR cases extremely seriously – if there were any evidence a team was stashing an unwanted player on LTIR, the league would come down incredibly hard on it, levelling sanctions and penalties to ensure teams never even thought about trying to put one past it.

Besides, if Murray has proven anything in recent years, it’s that he’s unfortunately injury-prone. It’s possible he gets back into playing condition during the season, and if he does, Leafs GM Brad Treliving will have no choice but to tweak the roster. But putting Murray on LTIR is a godsend for Toronto’s cap predicament, and it’s also possible we’ve seen Murray play his last game in Blue and White.