If you’ve been following hockey the last twelve months or so, you’ve probably seen a mention or two of the Ottawa Senators and their seemingly endless buffoonery. From owner Eugene Melnyk openly announcing right before the Heritage Classic game that he may move the team elsewhere, to Mike Hoffman’s girlfriend supposedly trolling Erik Karlsson’s wife, to Karlsson openly admitting he may look at signing a contract elsewhere after his current deal expires, to the team plummeting to 29th overall one year after pushing Stanley Cup champion Pittsburgh to game seven of the Eastern Conference Final this team has pretty much done everything wrong since my last physical. I’m not here to criticize anyone in the Sens’ organization, however. I understand why Melnyk is upset; attendance is down, mostly due to, in my opinion, the fact that many public servants working for the federal government, haven’t been paid in months (to all you Americans out there, yes, this is actually true) due to a major malfunction in the “Phoenix” pay system. And I don’t know for a fact if Hoffman’s girlfriend really made all those nasty comments about Karlsson’s wife. All I know is that the Ottawa Senators are a bloody mess right now. Like five rounds of getting-punched-in-the-face-by-George-St.-Pierre-on-a-crapload-of-steroids-bloody-mess. You might be surprised to find out that chaos and disorder have long been a tradition in the Nation’s Capital. In fact, it is a tradition that dates all the way back to the day it picked its first roster.
The current-day version of the Ottawa Senators were born in 1992, and from day one, they just seemed to embrace the chaos, making one bone-headed decision after another. How they bungled the 1992 expansion draft so badly is beyond anybody’s guess.
What? You say you don’t remember the Senators screwing up the expansion draft? Well, let’s hop aboard our trusty DeLorean time machine and travel back to the final days of the Bush Sr. administration to take a look at said draft.
The Ottawa Senators were led at the draft by this man…
Sweet fancy Moses, that is one badass-looking dude. I think I own more cats than he has teeth (We’ve got three, by the way).
Anyone that scary would have to be awfully serious about drafting the biggest, meanest team this side of the Charlestown Chiefs.
What happened, Mel?
Right from the get-go, Bridgman just seemed out of place in Ottawa, partly because he had no experience as a general manager, and he was never able to put together that rough and ready group of hockey players, partly due to the fact neither he, nor anyone else in the Senators organization knew how a laptop worked. While the Sens were bright enough to put all their draft research on said laptop, they negated that bit of initiative and forward thinking by forgetting to charge the laptop’s battery ahead of time. When the Senators arrived at the draft, they realized their laptop was nothing more than an expensive plastic-and-microchip-filled paper weight.
Forgetting to charge the battery was not particularly dumb in and of itself, but forgetting to bring a charging cable along too? That was pretty freakin’ dumb! It was also pretty dumb that they didn’t have a written back-up of their research at a time when laptops were still pretty primitive, and had absolutely no Internet connection. So all of the Senators’ picks were made from memory, which led to such memorable blunders as selecting Todd Ewen from Montreal, not realizing they had already selected Sylvain Turgeon from the Habs as well. Since Tampa had already drafted goaltender Frederic Chabot, the Habs had already lost the maximum two players from their roster. This kind of thing happened over and over and over throughout the draft, so it is not really surprising the Senators drafted so poorly, and it might explain why they finished their inaugural season 10-70-14. Bridgman was fired April 15, 1993, after just one year on the job. How many expansion team general managers get fired after one season? That’s how badly the Senators screwed up that year. According to Wikipedia, these are Bridgman’s “accomplishments and events during this term”:
- Team entered league and began play for the 1992-93 season
- No playoff appearances
Yup, that’s it.
While Tampa chose some fairly decent veteran players including Chris Kontos, Rob Ramage, Doug Crossman, and the surprisingly skilled Brian Bradley, the Senators drafted a bunch of duds. Well, to be fair, there were a few good players like Peter Sidorkiewicz, Sylvain Turgeon, Brad Shaw, Mike Peluso, Mark Lamb, and Laurie Boschman, most of the Senators were not exactly household names.
Think fast: give me one detail about John Van Kessel’s career.
Yeah, I couldn’t come up with anything either. In fact, until I looked at the actual list of players from the 1992 draft, I had no idea Van Kessel even existed.
And that’s how the Sens’ draft went. Darren Rumble, Dominic Lavoie, Brad Miller, Ken Hammond, Kent Paynter, Mark Freer, Blair Atcheynum… boy, I’m sure someone was sent out to Best Buy (or whatever techie stores existed in 1992) the minute the draft ended to stock up on laptop batteries to make sure the 1993 Entry Draft went better than this.