The Ottawa Senators’ plan is for next season is all about change. But there will not be any changefor the man in charge behind the bench as general manager Pierre Dorion said on Tuesday during an interview with TSN 1200 that Guy Boucher — and his full staff — will return.
Dorion and Boucher met on Monday and the result of their chat means the head coach will work the final year of his deal. The decision makes sense since it wouldn’t be like owner Eugene Melnyk to allow a coach to get paid for a year and not be working for him.
“They came up with a game plan and we’re really happy with the direction the staff wants to go,” Dorion said.
The Senators finished with 31 fewer points this past season than 2016-17 when they made it to within a goal of reaching the Stanley Cup Final. Things fell apart quickly, and a three-way deal that sent Kyle Turris to Nashville and Matt Duchene to Ottawa didn’t improved things. Once the season started to slip away, rumors surrounding Erik Karlsson’s future with the franchise bubbled over, but the captain stayed with the team through the trade deadline. This summer, however, could be a different story.
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Back to the changes. During their meeting, the GM wanted a gameplan moving forward from Boucher, who will also take over duties running a bottom-five power play. What Dorion heard pleased him, and so the staff stays in place, but not before Dorion passed on a few specific things he’d like to see.
First, Dorion wants the head coach to play the kids more with Colin White, Logan Brown, and Thomas Chabot, among others, seeing the ice more right at the start of the season, rather than after playoff hopes have evaporated. The future is now for the Senators, so rather than treading water with highly-priced veterans, they need to develop those players at the NHL level and determine if they can cut it.
The other change Dorion wants is more practice time, something he mentioned at his end-of-season press conference.“Rest is a weapon. If I hear that one more time I’ll go crazy,” Dorion said in April. He’s going to get that wish after it making it very clear in his chat with Boucher.
“Our intentions, and they were discussed with the coaching staff right after the year, is that we’re a skating team,” he said. “We need to practice. I think speed was Guy’s mantra when he came on board, and I think we derived a bit from it last year and we need to skate hard in practice to play as hard and as fast as much as possible, and they understood that.”
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Sean Leahy is a writer for Pro Hockey Talk on NBC Sports. Drop him a line at phtblog@nbcsports.com or follow him on Twitter @Sean_Leahy.