The NHL announced on Friday the Senators will play two games in Germany against the Chicago Blackhawks.
The Senators are clearly hoping that three's the charm.
For the third time in nine years, they're going international, ready to take part in another NHL Global Series. The league announced on Friday the Ottawa Senators will play the Chicago Blackhawks for two regular season games in Germany this December.
The Senators have done well in their two previous appearances in Global Series games in 2017 and 2023, both played in Sweden. In fact, the Sens have never lost a single game in these longest of midseason road trips, putting up a record of 4-0. They beat the Colorado Avalanche twice in 2017 with a pair of 4-3 wins, and then defeated the Detroit Red Wings (5-4 OT) and the Minnesota Wild (2-1 SO) in 2023.
No, the problems arise after the Senators get home from these trips.
In 2017, several months after their amazing run to Game 7 of the 2017 Eastern Conference Final, the Senators returned from Sweden with an 8-3-5 record, looking like a team ready to take another run at the Stanley Cup.
Instead, Guy Boucher and his crew immediately lost 12 of the next 13 games and finished 30th overall that season.
That prompted a rebuild that began in earnest the following September with the trading of Erik Karlsson. To go from double overtime in Game 7 of the 2017 Eastern Conference Final to a team that was “Fallin’ for Dahlin” in the 2018 draft lottery was quite something.
Then you had 2023.
Senators fans were hoping the team was about to finally emerge from the aforementioned rebuild, now five-years old and counting. After victories over Detroit and Minnesota in Sweden, the Sens came home to Ottawa with an 8-7 record and all kinds of reasons to finally have hope.
Instead, DJ Smith and his crew immediately lost 10 of their next 13 games and finished 26th overall that season.
Two Global Series experiences are a pretty small sample size, and maybe those trips had nothing to do with what followed. Hockey seasons are full of wild swings, and teams go through rough stretches for all kinds of reasons... looking in your direction, Ubergate.
But if you're the Senators, why even take the chance?
As we speak, the Senators still have a chance to make the playoffs. Whether they make it or not, very big things will be expected of this club this fall. So the Senators are going to take this exciting, blossoming team, led by Tim Stützle, and head off on another routine-destroying, midseason trip to Europe.
Stützle's effort level in games is off the charts. He doesn't often dish out the big hits, but he's taking them, going to the dirty areas, busting his tail on rushes and backchecks and generally driving play in all situations. At the end of games, he has emptied the tank.
Now his team will hand him a pair of 10-hour midseason flights, which will bookend two NHL games, and as the only German on either team, he'll have a million obligations and demands on his time.
It's always nice to give back, help grow the NHL in other parts of the world, and sell a few Sens jerseys. But all Ottawa Senators season ticket holders really care about is that Stützle and their team are as fully charged as they can be and at their best.
We're seeing right now just how tight things are. There's so much parity, the margins for error are so small, and everyone knows what an extra win or two over the past six months would have meant to the Senators right now.
So maybe the Sweden trips had nothing to do with those past collapses.
But for a team that's been knocked off stride this season by bad luck and injuries, both physical and mental, the focus should be on controlling the things they can control, even the small stuff.
That includes eating well, getting plenty of rest and, if you don't absolutely have to:
- Don't spend most of two days on a plane in the middle of the season.
- Don't put your top forward through the Düsseldorf media tour wringer.
- And don't completely disrupt player routines and body clocks while the rest of the powerhouse Atlantic Division teams carry on, business as usual.
Steve Warne
The Hockey News
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