The New Coach Bump: Can Jacques Martin Turn the Senators Around This Season?

Now that the Senators have finally made a coaching change, is there still time for the "New Coach Bump" to save the season?

Will the "new coach bump" save the Sens?

The Ottawa Senators have finally fired DJ Smith. It felt like it had been coming for months.

Some Sens fans started chanting “Fire DJ!” back on November 4th during a dismal loss to the Tampa Bay Lightning. The chants didn't subside, even though the team had some impressive victories after that. In Smith’s last game in Ottawa – an embarrassing loss to the Hurricanes – the boo birds came home to roost.

Smith has now been replaced with former Sens coach Jacques Martin, at least for the interim, and club legend Daniel Alfredsson has joined the team as an assistant.

The Senators are the fifth worst team in the NHL in points percentage with a record of 11-15-0, and they're 12 points out of a playoff spot.

The question is: can they claw back into the playoff picture?

If there’s hope, it lies in the “new coach bump" phenomenon. Many teams who change their coach seem to flip a switch and almost instantaneously become better. The chart below shows the records of teams following a mid-season dismissal of their coach (based on records as of Nov 18, 2023).

Let’s presume that the Senators do indeed get a typical new coach bump with Jacques Martin and Daniel Alfredsson taking charge. If the Senators played at the average points percentage after a new coach is hired through 40 games, they’d have a record close to 20-16-4. 

That would bring the Senators to 31-31-4 and 66 points with 16 games left in the regular season. Even if they won all their remaining games, they’d have only 98 points. Last season, the Panthers were the final Eastern playoff team with 94 points.

This would suggest that the Senators cannot come back with just an average new coach bump.

But…when you look at the teams this year who have fired their coach, their cumulative record with the new man in charge has been 19-7-0. That’s a points percentage of .730. If the Senators played the remaining 56 games of this season with that points percentage, they’d be 38-12-6, giving them 82 points.

Now, it does seem highly unlikely that they play that well to end the season. But it has been done before. Just ask the 2019 St. Louis Blues. That year, the Blues were, like the Senators now, dead last in their conference. Worse yet, they were last in the NHL as late as January 2nd, 2019.

After changing coaches, they went on a franchise-record 11-game winning streak—they had a 30–10–5 run to finish the season. And then—drum roll—they went on to win the Stanley Cup.

Nobody expects that to happen in Ottawa. What does seem quite possible—maybe even likely—is that the Senators might be able to go on a run.

Can the Senators pull a U-turn and make the playoffs? Probably not. But it is possible, and it’s been done before.