Ottawa's big deals for Alex DeBrincat, Jakob Chychrun, and Vladimir Tarasenko all added ingredients the Senators already had, while ignoring the ones they lacked.
When Ottawa Senators owner Eugene Melnyk passed away in March of 2022, it threw everything for a loop. By November of that year, Melnyk's family had officially put the team up for sale, but a sale was likely common knowledge within the organization well before that.
When any business goes up for sale, it's common for its existing managers to go into showcase mode. As potential owners kick the tires on things and eyeball the operations, employees naturally wonder about the future of their jobs. And managers often try too hard, doing things to impress or get attention.
This may be at the core of the decision-making of former GM Pierre Dorion over the past couple of years.
It's not a stretch to suggest that Dorion wanted to make a splash to impress the next owner. In July of that summer – billed at the time as The Summer of Pierre – he went out and acquired Chicago star forward Alex DeBrincat and signed long time Philadelphia Flyer captain Claude Giroux. Eight months later, Dorion traded for Jakob Chychrun.
Giroux has worked out spectacularly, but that's a UFA deal that fell from heaven into Dorion's lap. If Giroux and his family were from Long Island, there's zero chance he's rebuffing the entire NHL to sign in Ottawa. Zero.
DeBrincat and Chychrun were also pretty big names – good players who made for big headlines, but they weren't at all the sorts of players the Senators lacked. They already had enough skilled, non-physical forwards. They already had more than their share of offensive left shot D.
And in both cases, they emerged from their first season, well, not that excited about signing extensions. DeBrincat was sent to Detroit. Chychrun said two weeks ago he hasn't thought about staying in Ottawa after the upcoming season.
If we're being fair, the trades were initially exciting, which is good for a GM trying to cling to his job. But the square peg deals were never the right fit, financially or roster-wise for the Ottawa Senators.
Last summer, a couple of weeks after Michael Andlauer was announced as the preferred bidder, Dorion tried again to show what he can do, signing Vladimir Tarasenko to a one year deal. It was another exciting name to replace the one the Sens had lost (DeBrincat), but the deal made even less sense than the other two.
Like DeBrincat, Tarasenko added more of what they already had when there were other glaring roster weaknesses. And, again, he had zero interest in re-signing here. Hence, the one year deal. But Dorion wanted him badly enough that he moved the Sens cap needle to a position where the Sens couldn't dress a full roster on opening night this season. And Dorion agreed to a full no-trade clause, so the Sens are lucky they got anything for him at all at the deadline (a third rounder and a fourth rounder).
With goaltending such a glaring issue, Dorion needed to show he was the man who could fix that as well, even though he and his scouting group had struggled mightily with their past goalie evaluations. So he traded young goalie Filip Gustavsson for veteran Cam Talbot. When that didn't work, he overspent on Joonas Korpisalo, especially on term, hoping he could be Ottawa's number one. Statistically, Korpisalo was one of the worst goalies in the league this season, and he still has four more years left on that deal.
Make no mistake, Dorion truly wanted to see the rebuild through to its years of "unparalleled success." He's an Ottawa guy, this was his dream job, and no one wanted to win more than he did. But it feels like job preservation eventually crept up and overwhelmed the decision-making, maybe even more than he realized – especially as he emerged from the toxic, paranoid workplace culture that Melnyk had fostered for over a decade.