It isn’t going to be easy for the Ottawa Senators and new coach Travis Green.
Green’s hire has already been met with widespread criticism among Senators faithful. Watching from afar, it seems like there’s a sense that the Senators organization didn’t quite live up to the “best in class” standard that fans were promised in selecting Green to be the 14th coach in franchise history.
We still have four months before Green opens his first training camp and runs his trademark, gruelling 40s bag skate and already fans and some commentators are up in arms about the hire.
First 40s bag skate of #Canucks camp. Nate Schmidt making sure he makes a positive first impression. pic.twitter.com/AHP1lKSLKX
— Thomas Drance (@ThomasDrance) January 4, 2021
Evidently, Green will face a steep climb in ingratiating himself to fans in the nation’s capital. That’s in part due to the baggage attached to the recent history of the Senators franchise.
Now we all know the score here. It isn’t exactly a secret.
Like in Vancouver, there are no Stanley Cup champions banners hanging above the ice at the poorly located and rapidly aging Canadian Tire Centre. The Senators’ most pronounced legacy is still the shadow cast by the years of neglect and underfunding typical of Eugene Melnyk’s bizarre ownership tenure.
The acquisition of the franchise by Michael Andlauer brought a sense of hope and renewal for Senators fans in the fall, but patience appears to be waning after an unsuccessful 2023-24 campaign that felt like a setback from beginning to end.
Throw in the trauma from the mass exodus of star talent for budget reasons during the latter stages of the Melnyk era, the foolish, false promise of multiple “Hot Pierre Summers,” and a complete lack of playoff appearances since 2017, and you’ve got a Senators fan base that’s understandably fed up with years of fitful rebuilding, stalled progress and outright embarrassment.
It’s through this lens that the decision to hire Green is being cast by many as underwhelming. As a signal that the same old skinflint Senators haven’t altered their preferred, budget-conscious way of doing business in the Andlauer era, because the club pursued and hired a more affordable option on the coaching market.
This is the situation that Green is walking into, but of course, the past isn’t on him. What comes next very much will be.
And if there’s anyone sharp and hard-driving and detailed enough to guide the Senators into the upper portion of the loaded Atlantic Division, it just might be Travis Green.
Because this isn’t really about the Senators not entering the bidding for top candidates, such as Craig Berube or Dean Evason, a pair of excellent bench bosses who, it’s worth noting, Green outfoxed in the bubble playoffs.
What it’s really about is bringing some substance to an organization that, if the past few Senators offseasons have taught us anything, desperately needs to start making the right moves instead of the flashy ones.
Hiring a head coach shouldn’t be about winning the press release or the news conference, after all.
And ultimately, no one really remembers how a hire is initially received. I primarily cover the Vancouver Canucks, and probable 2024 Jack Adams winner Rick Tocchet was roundly booed when he was introduced in his first game as Canucks head coach. That was only 16 months ago.
That reaction wasn’t about Tocchet. It was more about the baggage of how Bruce Boudreau had been undermined and then terminated in slow motion over multiple, painful weeks. I can promise you that Tocchet isn’t being booed in Vancouver today. At the moment, in fact, he can’t even buy his own drink in this town.
First impressions matter, but only to a point. At the end of the day, a coach is judged on progress and results.
Finding the right leader for your group isn’t about landing the biggest name. It’s about identifying the right person to help your team progress. And Green absolutely could be that coach for the Senators.
The evidence is there, if you consider his coaching resume in context.
After a lengthy NHL career that spanned nearly 1,000 games and more than 450 points, Green cut his teeth in coaching with the Portland Winterhawks, who won the WHL championship in his first season behind the bench as head coach. It was a springboard campaign for Green, who was promptly hired by the Canucks to run their expansion AHL outfit in Utica after just one season as a WHL head coach.
In the Mohawk Valley, the Utica Comets were undermanned. Vancouver had spent the previous six seasons in a contention window, trading draft picks every deadline. The top NHL prospect on their roster was Frankie Corrado. In truth, they also weren’t the most aggressively funded American League team, which matters a ton in an uncapped league.
And that first Comets season got off to a brutally difficult start. Green lost his first 10 games as a professional coach.
By the end of that year, however, the Comets started to play a recognizable brand of structural hockey typical of Green’s teams. They ended the year with points in 15 of their final 21 games.
The very next season, with Jacob Markstrom in net, Green’s Comets were a juggernaut. They won 47 games and made it to the Calder Cup Final, losing out to a stacked Ontario Reign team led by Tyler Toffoli and Tanner Pearson.
If you look over Utica’s rosters during Green’s tenure, the Canucks’ organizational lack of quality prospects and unwillingness to spend significantly on AHL veterans is evident. Playing often with cobbled-together lineups filled with players on amateur tryout deals, Green’s Comets teams routinely punched above their talent level.
After four years in Utica, Green was promoted — amid interest from other NHL-level clubs — to take over for Willie Desjardins in Vancouver.
The Canucks roster that Green inherited was an unholy mess. Their best players were either extraordinarily young, such as 20-year-old Brock Boeser and 22-year-old Bo Horvat, or long in the tooth, such as 36-year-olds Henrik and Daniel Sedin and 33-year-old Thomas Vanek. Others, such as Chris Tanev, who only played 42 games, spent much of the year injured.
It was a dark time for a rebuilding Canucks franchise, and despite a hot start to the campaign, the results eventually came to reflect that.
This is the problem with solely using a coach’s win-loss record to evaluate performance. The 2017-18 Canucks iced one of the least talented rosters in the league. It’s unfathomable that they outperformed the Senators that season, given the talent discrepancy. They did it, however, because they were organized and structured and somehow managed to be only just below average as a goal-prevention outfit at five-on-five, despite the severe limitations of the roster.
Seventy-three points with that Canucks lineup might look bad in the career win-loss column, but it represented progress for Vancouver.
And this is really the thing about Green. The reason this could work in Ottawa is that he’s an outright workhorse.
This is a coach who’s constantly crushing video, and on the phone. He’s not just open to analytics, he’s got a real feel for them, and made Canucks director of analytics Aiden Fox one of his key confidantes and collaborators, even informing line combinations, player deployment and tactics, to an unusual degree.
He’s wildly detailed in his approach to game planning and pre-scouting, which shows up in inventive ways in how he deploys his players in the matchup game.
There’s another side of the coin to Green’s drive. Because he puts in the work, he expects it of others. And his occasional impatience with players, staffers and media members who don’t meet his high expectations can be perceived as arrogance. In Vancouver, anyway, that definitely wore out a variety of people over time.
On the other hand, Green’s teams almost always have the right players out on the ice at all moments. And that isn’t an accident. That’s the edge he works so hard for.
In Green’s second Canucks season, the club improved to the point where they were just about a .500 team. And his open-mindedness stood out.
During that 2018-19 season, Green took a 170-pound rookie forward in Elias Pettersson, who had been the best player in the SHL the prior year while playing exclusively on the wing, converted him to centre right out of the gate at training camp and gave him top-six minutes from Day 1.
It was a gutsy coaching decision that paid off. Pettersson won the Calder Trophy that year. It also arguably changed the course of franchise history.
The very next season, Green took a 5-foot-9 rookie defender in Quinn Hughes and immediately gave him top-four deployment. By December, Hughes was playing matchup minutes on a regular basis.
It seems obvious now, but how many NHL head coaches are really open-minded enough to throw an undersized 20-year-old defender into the fire like that on a playoff-calibre team?
That season, Vancouver’s roster finally levelled up and was in the playoff mix when the pandemic hit. And this is where Green did his best work, and also where his Canucks tenure took a turn for the complicated.
Unsatisfied with the team’s defensive play despite their year-over-year improvement in the spring of 2020, Green and his staff spent lockdown running diagnostic video work on some of the NHL’s best defensive teams. With those principles in hand, Green overhauled how the club played in the defensive zone during the mini-summer training camp that preceded the bubble.
Also at that camp, Green held game day simulations to prepare his group for the postseason. The club would head to the rink for weird quarantined morning skates, then play an intense scrimmage that evening at 7 p.m. or 7:30 p.m. to mimic the lifestyle the club would encounter in the bubble.
Green’s Canucks bested Evason’s Minnesota Wild in four games in the play-in round, then knocked off the defending champion St. Louis Blues in six games in Round 1. Then they shockingly took Pete DeBoer’s Vegas Golden Knights to seven games in the second round as heavy underdogs in that series.
In the Vegas series, Green’s Canucks collapsed aggressively, leaning on the defensive-zone changes implemented during lockdown. It was an exceedingly negative approach, but against a far superior team, it nearly worked. And was widely, and successfully, copied by the Wild and the Montreal Canadiens during the 2021 Stanley Cup playoffs the next season.
It’s at this stage of the story that Green’s work and impact in Vancouver turned. In his first three seasons, the club had improved in linear, impressive fashion while integrating high-end young players into significant roles in the lineup.
In the fall of 2020, however, the roster was gutted for budget reasons. Every unrestricted free agent the club had that offseason — including key leaders in Markstrom and Tanev — was permitted to walk.
Extension-eligible for the first time coming off their entry-level contracts, the club never seriously considered getting Hughes’ and Pettersson’s second contracts done early. And Green was tasked with working out the final year of his contract as a lame duck.
That all-Canadian season was an unmitigated disaster. A gutted roster assembled with penny-pinching in mind struggled in the opening month of the campaign, surrendered boatloads of scoring chances, lost Pettersson to injury 20 games in and then found their footing briefly before a massive COVID-19 outbreak waylaid Vancouver’s entire season. Green himself was out for weeks with a host of severe symptoms.
Vancouver finished last in the all-Canadian Division. It was the first time in Green’s tenure that the Canucks had failed to improve year over year.
The next season, Green attempted to get back to playing the sort of structural hockey that he prized. And he actually succeeded at five-on-five, but the club was done in by a cataclysmic penalty kill and a complete inability to score — driven in part because Pettersson and Hughes missed training camp, and in Pettersson’s case especially, didn’t hit their stride until well after Green’s tenure ended ingloriously 25 games into the season.
Following Green’s dismissal, the club went on an extraordinary 57-game run with Boudreau behind the bench, nearly making the playoffs. Locally and nationally that run was seen as a repudiation of Green’s coaching and personality, but though the club benefitted from a breath of fresh air behind the bench that permitted everybody to turn the page on two extremely dysfunctional years, Boudreau likewise benefitted from inheriting the structure Green had put in place. Boudreau simply turned the dial a bit to be somewhat more run-and-gun, leaning on down-ice pressure and emphasizing a punt-and-hunt style in which the team wouldn’t even attempt to break out with possession.
The next season, with no structural backbone whatsoever, the club’s defensive form regressed to its lowest point. Boudreau wasn’t the answer, no more than Green had been the problem.
Tocchet has sorted it out in Vancouver, at long last. Fundamentally, however, the blue line, the club’s penalty-killing personnel and Vancouver’s depth contributors needed to be almost entirely rebuilt to drive the sort of results the Canucks have finally achieved this season.
In a new-look Senators organization with a progressive general manager to collaborate with in Steve Staios and a young, talented roster struggling to take the next step and combine their skills in the service of winning games, a hard-driving, open-minded, pathologically hardworking coach like Green seems like an ideal fit — no matter how underwhelmed Senators fans were by the press release this week.
Travis Green is a coach who deserves another chance. He may not be the marquee name fans wanted, but he could be precisely what this Senators team needs right now.
(Photo: Minas Panagiotakis / Getty Images)
