The Senators came home from Stockholm in 2017 with two victories and a newly acquired number-one centre. That's when everything fell apart.
Now this is a road trip.
The Senators are in Stockholm, Sweden this week to play two games in what the NHL bills as their Global Series. The Sens play Detroit on Thursday at 2 pm. Then, while we're still sipping our morning coffee, they take on the Minnesota Wild this Saturday at 11 am. Ottawa is the designated home team for both games. So they've got that going for them, which is nice.
The last time the Sens were in Sweden, in the very same arena, they came away with a pair of 4-3 wins over the Colorado Avalanche. That was a weird couple of games for Matt Duchene, facing his old team for the first time. The Senators had just acquired Duchene from the Avalanche in a three-team blockbuster.
So the Senators arrived home from Sweden with wins over the Avalanche, a brand new number-one centre in Duchene, and a record of 8-3-5 to start the young season.
Looking good, right? Yeah, not so much.
Upon arrival back in Canada, the Senators fell into a hole that, six years later, they're still trying to climb out of. They came home and lost 11 of their next 12 games. They finished the 2017-18 season 30th overall in the NHL standings.
So the team that had just come within one goal of the Stanley Cup Final was suddenly awful. And they were plagued that year by off-ice issues like Ubergate, starring Duchene and Chris Wideman (among others), and Family Feud, starring Erik Karlsson and Mike Hoffman.
That's when GM Pierre Dorion – much like Brady Tkachuk's mom in the Hyundai TV ads – pulled the car over to deal with the nonsense. After the 2017-18 season, Dorion traded Hoffman and Karlsson and, in November 2018, shipped out Wideman.
While they were at it, Dorion and owner Eugene Melnyk had decided on a complete rebuild. This was less than a year after the Duchene deal, when they obviously judged the Sens to be contenders and buyers.
At the 2018-19 deadline, they moved out Duchene, Mark Stone, and Ryan Dzingel and then, a week later, fired head coach Guy Boucher, eventually replacing him with D.J. Smith.
The Senators haven't been back to the playoffs since 2017.
Perhaps whatever curse or plague the Senators picked up in Sweden in 2017 can be reversed this week in their return visit. Based on Ottawa's crazy first month, on and off the ice, the curse seems as strong as ever.