"If we decided to freeze out every iconic player that left Ottawa under tough circumstances, we'd have nobody left to embrace."

Tonight, the Senators' organization honoured the 'Pizza Line', but its underlying purpose was to serve as a symbolic gesture to welcome Dany Heatley back into the fold.

It is hard to believe that after 15 years, we would reach this point.

At the conclusion of the 2008-09 season, Heatley formally requested a trade from the Senators after four wildly productive seasons, which led to one of the most drawn-out and tumultuous player departures in franchise history.

Heatley's arrival in Ottawa was not without controversy, so it is not a surprise that his exit would mirror it.

As a restricted free agent with arbitration rights, Marian Hossa and the Senators were scheduled to meet with an arbitrator in August of 2005 to determine the terms of a new contract if the two sides failed to reach an agreement. The organization had struggled to get the star winger to put pen to paper. Senators management was concerned about the impact of a Hossa extension, given the need to extend its other core players in the future while facing the complications of the league's newly imposed $39 million salary cap.

Within hours of avoiding salary arbitration with Hossa by signing the forward to an $18 million, three-year deal, general manager John Muckler dealt Hossa and defenceman Greg de Vries to the Atlanta Thrashers for Heatley.

The Senators then announced they had signed Heatley to a three-year extension worth $13.5 million. By moving de Vries' $2.16 million and $6.0 million owed to Hossa, the $4.66 million difference represented significant savings for the small market Senators.

From the moment Heatley arrived in Ottawa, he captivated the fans with his production.

He scored the team's game-winning goal in the league's first-ever shootout. His 22-game point streak to start his career in Ottawa is the second-longest in NHL history behind Wayne Gretzky's 23-game stretch when he joined the Los Angeles Kings. He recorded 50 goals and more than 100 points in his first two seasons with the Senators, earning NHL 1st All-Star Team honours and a "50 in '07" meme for his 2006-07 season.

Together with Jason Spezza and Daniel Alfredsson, the 'Pizza Line' was one of the most productive in the league.

The shame about the 2000-2007 era is that the best Senators hockey preceded modern analytics when data was publicly available. In terms of weighing just how good the players, defensive pairings or line combinations were, we are only left with memories.

How good was the 'Pizza Line' in terms of production, and how does it stack up historically against some of the best offensive lines of this modern generation?

For years, the Senators prided themselves on balancing their lines to put offensive threats on every unit and matchup problems for the opposition.

Under head coach Bryan Murray, the philosophy changed. What started as an experiment to generate offence in games the Senators were trailing became a full-time assignment. The results were electric.

The only available data on the 'Pizza Line' is from the 2007-08 and 2008-09 seasons. According to Evolving-Hockey's combos tool, of the lines that played more than 400 minutes together in 2007-08, only Washington's Alex Ovechkin-Niklas Backstrom-Viktor Kozlov line generated a higher goals for per 60 rate (GF/60) at five-on-five than the 'Pizza Line'. Using the same criteria in 2008-09, the 'Pizza Line' had the fifth-highest rate.

The production and savings were incredible relative to what the Senators were paying Heatley. Heatley would average 45 goals across his four seasons in Ottawa, but like the Senators, Heatley's production and performance waned from his first two seasons with the club.

Fresh off their Cup Final appearance in 2007, fans anticipated the Senators' window of contention would remain open for a few more seasons. Unfortunately, as Ottawa's core became older and more expensive, there was less financial wiggle room to build around the Senators' core. The Senators' amateur scouting staff, which had risen to prominence in the '90s because of their ability to find exceptional talent in the middle to back half of the first round, was not finding the same quality of talent. Trades also impacted the quality of the Senators farm system, which is expected when chasing a Stanley Cup, but Ottawa's pipeline had run dry.

When Heatley inked a six-year, $45 million extension with the Senators in October 2007, it came with increased expectations. As the organization began its slide from prominence, Heatley wore some of the blame because people were less willing to live with warts in his game when the pieces around him were worse, and the team was in decline.

The days of the Senators playing sound two-way hockey were gone, and no one epitomized high-event hockey more than Dany Heatley.

From HockeyViz:

When Cory Clouston demanded more attention to detail and to the defensive responsibilities and tried to hold Heatley accountable by impacting his ice time, Heatley balked and demanded a trade.

It was within his rights, but Heatley was vilified for it. But what compounded his departure was the existence of a negotiated no-trade clause and a $4 million signing bonus that was owed to him on July 1, 2009. Given the constraints of the newly implemented salary cap system, few organizations had the cap space to take on Heatley's $7.5 million cap hit. Fewer were willing to acquire him before his signing bonus was due. For the Senators, it created an uncomfortably thin market of buyers and eventually, the only deal they could arrange was with the Edmonton Oilers.

The two parties agreed to a deal on June 30, the day before his $4 million signing bonus was due, that would have brought Ladislav Smid, Dustin Penner and Andrew Cogliano to Ottawa. When Heatley vetoed the deal by exercising his no-trade clause, Senators owner Eugene Melnyk went apoplectic. It eventually culminated with the owner filing a grievance against Heatley. It took four years before a settlement was reached.

Along with a fifth-round pick in the 2010 NHL Draft, Heatley was ultimately moved to the San Jose Sharks for Milan Michalek, Jonathan Cheechoo and a 2010 second-round pick.

So, why honour the 'Pizza Line' tonight?

You can thank the Senators' vice president of communications, Ian Mendes, for being the catalyst that brought Dany Heatley back into the fold.

"Well, it's twofold. For starters, when I got hired by the Senators, I interviewed with Steve Staios and Cyril Leeder for the job," explained Mendes. "One of the things they talked about was strengthening the bond with the past.

"Strengthening the alumni relations was something that Michael Andlauer wanted to do. So, that was at the top of my mind when I came in. I asked, 'How can we restore some relationships that have been broken in the past.' To me, Dany (Heatley), Jason (Spezza), and obviously Alfie is back, but these are legacy guys for the organization. These are iconic, legendary guys, and it's sad not to have them involved in the organization in any manner, right? 

"You want your best players, your iconic players. I'm not saying they must have jobs (within the organization). They don't have to have their jersey retired, but you want them to have a relationship. You want them to feel connected to the organization and vice versa. It was about just trying to restore that. And again, following the lead of Steve Staios and Michael Andlauer."

Relative to his time here, Heatley was one of the most productive players in franchise history, but he had one of the most public and nasty breakups with the organization. Mendes is cognizant of that dynamic but raised a good point. One that dawned on me as I thought about each member of the Pizza Line. For their reasons, each member of that line wanted out. Jason Spezza, like Heatley, even vetoed a trade to orchestrate his exit to a more preferable destination.

"The way I look at it is if we decided to freeze out every iconic player that left Ottawa under tough circumstances, we'd have nobody left to love," said Mendes. "We'd have nobody left to embrace. It's (Alexei) Yashin, it's Dany, it's Alfie, it's Spezza, it's (Mark) Stone, it's (Erik) Karlsson, and it's Kyle Turris.

"It's really hard to leave an organization on great terms. The organization was lucky to have a couple of guys like Chris Phillips and Chris Neil who saw it all through. They're the exception; they're not the rule. Go through the history of sports. I always think of Joe Montana, and Joe Montana couldn't leave San Francisco on great terms. Go through the list. It's crazy to see how difficult it is to start and end your career without some sort of hiccup. 

"I'm mindful, I'm not expecting everybody to forgive, but it's been 15 years. My point is, I guess I would say this, like if you're not ready to move on after 15 years, then you're probably not going to move on after 20, right? Or 30, or 40. So, that's the way I look at it. I truly believe life is too short. Life is too short to carry grudges. Our organization's history is too short. We're not the New York Yankees, we're not the Dallas Cowboys, the Toronto Maple Leafs. We don't have 100 years of history. We have 30 years of it, and it's weird, and it's colourful, and it's fun, and it's wacky. 

"Dany, Jason and Alfie are a huge part of that. They're a huge part of that story. To bring them back is just acknowledging that we had this wonderful period of time in Ottawa where you would go into training camp in September, and you weren't thinking, 'Would we make the playoffs?' You would think, 'Would we win the Stanley Cup?' They were a huge part of that. It's time that we look back and appreciate what that team did in the 2000s because, honestly, it wasn't like we celebrated that team.

"There were a lot of failed expectations and a lot of anger in the marketplace with fired coaches, big trades, and all that stuff. I don't think we've properly acknowledged how special that group was. Now we've got enough time (that has passed) where I want to acknowledge Dany Heatley. I want to acknowledge Zdeno Chara, Marian Hossa and Patrick Lalime. All of these guys, they all put little blocks, foundational blocks to build a franchise up into what it is today."