20 Years Later: The Rise And Fall Of One Of The Greatest Teams In Senators History

“That was probably the best team I played on in my time in the NHL.”

As the words flowed from Chris Kelly’s mouth, a measured perspective was offered with a smile, then a pause. It lasted only a brief moment, but to anyone watching, it was easy to see a flood of memories wash over the Boston Bruins’ assistant coach.

It was high praise from a well-respected veteran who went to three finals and won a Stanley Cup.

The Ottawa Senators of the late 1990s and early 2000s were characterized by strong two-way play. Strong two-way play and heartbreak. The kind of unmistakable, soul-sucking anguish that left fans questioning whether their faith in sport will ever be rewarded.

The 2005-06 iteration was no different.

Twenty years later, with the Olympic Winter Games ironically being held in Italy again, this is the story of the 2005-06 Ottawa Senators, one of the deepest and most talented teams in franchise history that ultimately fell short of winning hockey’s ultimate prize.

The groundwork for the Senators’ emergence as an Eastern Conference power was laid over the better part of the previous decade. Strong amateur scouting and player development were the hallmarks of a small-market team that had to allocate its limited resources efficiently.

The Senators could not spend at the level of a Detroit, a Toronto, or the New York Rangers to bring in established, expensive, high-end talent, so they relied exclusively on mechanisms to acquire young, cheap talent who also offered the organization years of team control.

Under the tutelage of Jacques Martin, an excellent ‘X’s and O’s’ coach, the Senators' head coach ushered in an era of structure and defensive accountability, preaching a message of taking care of your own end first before creating offence off of it.

Between clinching their first playoff spot in the 82nd game of the 1996-97 season and winning the Presidents' Trophy with 113 points in 2002-03, it always felt like the organization was naturally building towards a championship.

Unfortunately, three agonizing defeats to the provincial rival Maple Leafs were interspersed in between those seven seasons, so that when the heavily favoured Senators bowed out to Toronto in the Eastern Conference Quarterfinal, changes had to be made.

The sale of the Senators out of bankruptcy to Eugene Melnyk was finalized in August 2023, and with it brought about a confidence and swagger the organization had never known.

With promises to spend and a penchant for taking public shots at the Toronto market, no owner in Senators history conducted themselves the way that Eugene Melnyk did. Thanks to the sensitivities that naturally form when a city is wedged between two major Canadian markets like Ottawa is, the owner’s bravado and brashness were a welcome change.

A fourth consecutive postseason defeat, though, was unacceptable to Ottawa’s new Toronto-based owner.

The first order of business was to fire Jacques Martin in April. Two months later, they replaced him with Shawville’s Bryan Murray, who resigned from his general manager’s role in Anaheim to come home.

"I wanted very badly to come back to coach," Murray told reporters at the press conference to announce his hiring. "I wanted to come back to a hockey country where hockey meant something. I'm very, very excited.

"Today, there are 10 or 12 teams that think they have a chance to win the Stanley Cup. We have to be one of them. The core is here.”

The core was there, but the hockey was not.

Following the expiration of the NHL’s Collective Bargaining Agreement on September 14, 2004, NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman announced two days later that the start of the season would not proceed, pointing to a stalemate in negotiations with the NHLPA.

On February 16, 2005, he announced that the season was formally cancelled.

At the heart of the issue was a dispute between the owners and players regarding how much money the owners were losing and how a large share of the league’s gross revenues was tied to paying player salaries. To address those problems, the owners adamantly demanded the introduction of a hard salary cap, which aligned with their goal of employing a mechanism linking league revenues to player salaries.

Five months later, a new CBA was ratified in late July, announcing the return of NHL hockey. As part of the new agreement, a hard cap was established, with lower and upper limits that teams had to abide by.

Heading into the labour stoppage, fewer teams in the league needed a salary cap more than the Ottawa Senators. The irony is that the introduction of the $39-million cap ceiling may have inadvertently cost the organization its first Stanley Cup.

Few teams in the league boasted as much talent as the Ottawa Senators had, and at least in the first few formative years of Eugene Melnyk’s stewardship of the franchise, there was a willingness and ability to spend on the roster.

The first casualty of the new cap system was Marian Hossa.

The Senators were put into a difficult spot with the talented forward.

“We realized you can only keep so many people with a hard cap,” stated Roy Mlakar, former president and CEO of the Ottawa Senators. “We had so many good young players that were coming to the point where we're going to have to plan for the future, and John Muckler was no rookie, as far as being the general manager was concerned, and having the ability to work alongside Peter Chiarelli, who had tremendous knowledge of the CBA and of the way it was going to work, we knew we had to make some hard decisions.”

During the 2003-04 season, the Senators had a payroll of $39.5 million. Even with the NHL and NHLPA agreeing to a 24 percent salary rollback, which was applied to all existing player contracts for the 2005-06 season, it would still be challenging to fit in more expensive contracts.

As a restricted free agent with arbitration rights, the winger tallied 36 goals and a career-high 82 points during his 2003-04 season while providing strong two-way play.

Marian Hossa was going to get paid.

Hours before Hossa’s arbitration hearing was scheduled to begin, general manager John Muckler signed the winger to a three-year, $18 million contract. A few short hours later, Muckler traded Hossa with defenceman Greg de Vries to the Atlanta Thrashers for Dany Heatley. As part of the trade, the Senators announced that Heatley had inked a three-year, $13.5 million contract of his own.

It was a back-pocket deal that devastated an unsuspecting Hossa.

“The fact of the matter is, Don (Waddell), the general manager of Atlanta was in that hotel (where Hossa’s arbitration hearing was taking place),” explained Mlakar. “He had talked about a (Hossa contract) with John under the terms and conditions that Donnie could deliver Dany Heatley. He agreed to pay the money that John negotiated. We knew the term and Don Waddell accepted it, and when the contract was signed by Hossa, we had a deal. In (Hossa’s) defence, he thought he was coming back to Ottawa on a new deal. But, John Muckler had him traded for Heatley if he could agree to the contract.”

For Heatley, Ottawa represented a blank slate.

“It was just a fresh start for me, personally,” admitted Heatley. “I had a lot to prove coming off my situation.”

Weeks earlier, the 24-year-old requested a trade through his agent, Stacey McAlpine. Two years earlier, he was sentenced to three years probation for his involvement in a car accident in September 2003, which claimed the life of teammate Dan Snyder. Heatley suffered an ACL, MCL and meniscus tear to his knee from that accident.

During the lockout, the winger was struck in the face with a puck while playing for HC Bern in the Swiss League. The impact broke an orbital bone in his face, necessitating surgery and ultimately leaving Heatley with a permanently dilated eye.

“There was pressure coming off some injuries that people were questioning,” said Heatley, explaining how he felt pressure to perform upon arriving in Ottawa. “Of course, you're in a Canadian hockey market. You're traded for a pretty good player who did a really good job in Ottawa before he left. There were huge expectations. I had a lot to prove.”

It was the kind of trade that could send shockwaves through a dressing room, but if the lockout had an unanticipated positive impact, it might have mitigated any possible feelings felt by Hossa’s teammates.

“I think the trade was made a little bit easier by the fact that we were coming out of a lockout,” Chris Phillips stated while describing the impacts the trade had on the team. “Some of us were not in the city, and the league wasn't going on. We hadn't played in months, and we weren’t going to play for another few months. So it was not the normal course of business when it happens in-season or during the offseason, when you are connected and know everything that's going on.”

Heatley was not the only significant change to the roster. The other was in goal.

During the 2004 offseason, the Senators signed Dominik Hasek to a one-year, $2-million deal that included an option. Ottawa’s underlying talent allured the goaltender.

“I was motivated, above all, by how good that team was in Ottawa,” Hasek explained. “I also felt that with my performances, I could help them win the Stanley Cup.”

The then 39-year-old had already amassed a Hall of Fame resume, winning a Stanley Cup, the Hart Trophy and six Vezina Trophies.

Ottawa also represented an opportunity to reunite with John Muckler, the former general manager of the Buffalo Sabres, with whom Hasek enjoyed success during his tenure there.

“Of course, he played a big role,” stated Hasek. “(Muckler) knew me very well, not only as a goalie, but also as a person. We had a very good relationship from our time in Buffalo.”

Although the lockout meant that Hasek would return to play as a 40-year-old, together with Dany Heatley, the pair of newcomers brought something observers believed the Senators lacked.

Swagger.

“It was pretty awesome when (Hasek) came to town,” said Wade Redden, recalling the excitement he had at the time. “Everyone was so excited and pumped. Obviously, we'd seen lots of him from his days in Buffalo and been on the wrong side of his games. But it was exciting. We had a really good team, and then to add a guy like that. It was like, ‘Okay, let's do this. Let's go!’”

“If you actually think about it, who are you going to get for Marian Hossa?” asked veteran centre Bryan Smolinski. “You get Dany Heatley, an unbelievable personality who came into the room and walked with swagger coming from Atlanta, because he was a goal scorer. He walked in and made his presence known just by how he worked, how he practiced, and his love of being with the guys.”

“(Heatley) had a confidence to him that I think was good for our group,” stated Redden. “He just had a swagger, and he was a perfect fit to play with Spez, too, who loved passing, and Heater loved shooting everything. I can’t remember if it was early in the year or at the end of training camp, but a Toronto fan came up to him at the bar and bought him a drink. He mentioned something about the Leafs, and Heatley took it and threw it in the corner, and said, ‘We’re going to go 8 and 0 against them.’ That was a funny story, but he just had that confidence and swagger that fit in great with our group. He was a big piece for us.”

“Yeah, I won't deny that,” Heatley responded. “But, I'm not going to comment further.”

The Senators would only win seven of their eight games against the Leafs that season, but that confidence bled into the group.

“I think we had more of a group swagger or confidence than any individual,” stated Heatley, while downplaying the confidence he brought to the group. “We fed off each other. We fed off each other's confidence more than we did our own. That's how I felt. I felt confident being on the ice with anybody. You felt confident that those guys were going to do their job, and they were confident players as well.

“It was more of a group confidence in swagger. We were a tight group. When we were on the road, we'd all go to dinner together a lot. It was fun to be a part of. There were times when you'd be driving to the rink, and as a scorer, you know you're going to get, like, four or five good looks. That doesn't happen very often with teams.”

When the 2005-06 Senators arrived at the rink, it was never a question of whether they could win; it was a matter of asking by how much.

But, to get to that point, the Senators needed the right person pulling the strings, and that individual was Bryan Murray.

The 63-year-old Shawville native was overseas at the World Championships in Prague when he learned from the Disney Company, owners of the Ducks, that the Ottawa Senators had called wanting permission to talk to Murray about their vacant head coaching position.

When he debated the merits of the job, he obviously understood how talented the assembled group in Ottawa was.

The core of the 2002-03 Presidents' Trophy team was still in place, and strong amateur scouting had put the team in a great position. The draft produced 15 players who appeared in 30 or more games for the Senators in 2005-06, including seven first-round picks.

Several other first-round selections like Alexei Yashin, Marian Hossa, and Jakub Klepis were used as trade capital to land Jason Spezza and Zdeno Chara, Dany Heatley, and Vaclav Varada, respectively. Coupled with the fact that the lockout allowed the Senators to play and develop many prospects during the work stoppage, who they had designs on being NHL regulars at the resumption of NHL play, it put the organization in a really advantageous spot.

Talent notwithstanding, the Senators’ head coaching position offered an unmistakable element that could not be addressed elsewhere.

“There’s a sense of pride,” Murray told Chris Stevenson, author of 100 Things Senators Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die. “I’m the coach of the local NHL team. I know there will be days when you don’t win a hockey game, when you will be analyzed and criticized. That’s part of our game. There’s a chance here for a real sense of pride for the whole area if this team could ever be a champion.”

It certainly helped that Murray had a strong resume to call on.

Before arriving in Ottawa, Murray was the seventh-winningest head coach in NHL history.

“He was just a great human being,” described Heatley. “Bryan was an old school guy, and obviously a local Ottawa guy. He knew a lot of things about the league and the game, but he was definitely a player's coach, an old school players' coach. He would jump, and he'd make fun, but he was serious about winning and hockey, and I really enjoyed it.

"He treated you like a man. He treated the team like men and just let us do our thing. If something needed to be said, he would say it, but for the most part, he knew how to manage our group. We had some guys that obviously accomplished things, some veterans and some young guys, but he managed us really well.”

The contrast between Jacques Martin and Murray was readily apparent.

“Bryan was different, definitely compared to Jacques,” emphasized Martin Havlat. “He would give his offensive players more freedom. When he got to the team (after the lockout), we had so many great players. It was so much fun for him.”

“It was two different styles,” echoed Chris Neil. “Bryan inherited a team that was well-structured and well-coached on the defensive side of the puck, and Bryan gave us a little more leeway to be more offensive, with a harder forecheck, which paid dividends for me and my game. I love being physical, getting in on the forecheck. Bryan loved it. They'd flush guys out behind the net, and I could catch them in the trolley tracks. He opened up for the offensive horses, but we still had that defensive mindset in our own end, which Bryan inherited from Jacques.

One of the best decisions Murray made occurred in the preseason.

After scoring six goals in seven preseason games, the unheralded Brandon Bochenski was making a name for himself. Born in Blaine, Minnesota, Bochenski was Ottawa’s seventh-round pick (223rd overall) from the 2001 NHL Draft. He followed up an impressive three-year collegiate career at the University of North Dakota by recording 34 goals and 70 points in his first professional season during the lockout in Binghamton.

Bochenski was one of eight Binghamton products who were looking to make the jump from the AHL to Ottawa’s lineup as regulars. During the preseason, he looked comfortable riding shotgun on a line with Heatley and Spezza. Bochenski benefited directly from the organization's effort to build chemistry between Spezza and Heatley by playing them together as much as possible.

Spezza (3 goals, 16 points) and Heatley (six goals, 15 points) finished the preseason as the first and second-highest scorers. Bochenski would open the season on the Senators' roster, but it was Murray’s decision to use Alfredsson in certain situations during the preseason that would pay dividends.

In the season opener and his team trailing in the third period, Alfredsson replaced Bochenski on the team’s top line and scored twice in the final frame, with Heatley assisting on Alfredsson's second goal, to send the game to overtime. Overtime failed to produce a goal, so the game proceeded to the first shootout in NHL history, where Alfredsson recorded the first goal, and Heatley got the shootout winner.

That initial success carried over to the next few games, leading to the infamous ‘Pizza Line’ moniker.

At the time, the Senators had a sponsorship deal with Pizza Pizza wherein if the Senators scored five or more goals in a home game during the regular season, ticket holders would be entitled to a free slice of pizza. After the Senators surpassed that threshold in each of the team’s first three home games, the pizza chain moved quickly to alter the conditions of the giveaway, raising the required goal total from five to six.

From the preseason to the regular season, the goals and points kept coming for Heatley.

Heatley would put up 17 goals and 38 points in the Senators’ first 22 games. It represented the second-longest point streak to begin a career with a new team in NHL history, trailing only Wayne Gretzky’s 23-game mark with the Los Angeles Kings.

It was a stretch of greatness that we may never witness again.

The Senators’ record during Heatley’s 22-game point streak was a resounding 19-3-0. It still stands as the greatest start to a season in franchise history.

During this span, Jason Spezza led the NHL in scoring with 11 goals and 41 points, while Daniel Alfredsson was second with 20 goals and 40 points. As a team, the Senators scored 102 goals while allowing 45, averaging 4.64 goals and 2.05 goals against per game.

They were a wagon.

“We never talked about how well we were playing,” Spezza recalled. “One of the things that I liked, that Bryan Murray always talked to me about, was that as long as the three of us were going to play together, we could never complain about secondary scoring or worry about getting help from the lineup. If we were going to play together, we had to produce. And if we were going to be a line, then we had to drive the offence.

"I thought it was a great coaching job by him, because often you hear when teams go through struggles, they lean on secondary scoring. He right away, kind of squashed that and said, ‘All right, if we're going to play you guys together, you have to carry the load of it.’ It put a good pressure on us and also an expectation that we were fortunate to get a chance to play together. We never talked about it, but we knew our roles and responsibilities. If we didn't win our matchups every night, we probably wouldn't win games. And we went into every game thinking we had to win our matchup with whoever we were playing against.”

The ‘Pizza Line’ never had to worry about secondary scoring because it showed up in droves.

The Senators' offence was bolstered by the combination of Peter Schaefer, Bryan Smolinski and Martin Havlat. Mike Fisher and Chris Neil provided a mix of physicality and secondary scoring, while Antoine Vermette immediately brought speed and two-way aptitude to the group. The fourth line of Vaclav Varada, Chris Kelly and Brian McGrattan played reliably while offering a layer of physicality and pugilism that head coach Bryan Murray believed in.

It is not often that a rookie centre tallies 10 goals and 30 points while playing exclusively in a fourth line capacity, but that was exactly what happened to Chris Kelly.

“I think a lot of times, because we got up so much, that I probably got more ice time than most fourth line guys normally do,” said Kelly as he described reasons for his unlikely production. “We played Toronto eight times that year, and my first NHL goal was in Toronto. I think it was our seventh goal, and I couldn't even celebrate it. But it was fun being on that team. I got more ice time than most fourth line guys would have because of our offence.”

Ten players on the Senators scored 15-plus goals that season and likely would have had more had Martin Havlat not been suspended for kicking Hal Gill during the October 15th game against Boston. In the second period with Havlat below the goal line, the Bruins defenceman pinned the Senators forward’s back to the Boston goal.

“Kicking was the only option I had left,” Havlat explained. “I was trying to defend myself. The only part of me that was free was my foot that was hanging there. I wasn’t penalized on the play, but I got suspended, and nobody was really happy about that. I got a five-game suspension, actually, because it wasn't the first time.”

In his return game, Havlat popped off, recording a four-goal performance against the Buffalo Sabres. The only thing more impressive than ‘Mach-9’s’ offence was captain Daniel Alfredsson’s third period hat trick that allowed him to finish with four goals and six points in the Senators’ 10-4 win.

“Alfie had to catch up in the last period,” recalled Havlat while laughing about his team’s performance. “He stole the show at the end, but we scored 10 goals. It was a special night for me, after the suspension, and I was so serious that game. Everything I touched went in, but then I got hurt against Montreal, and everything changed.”

In that November 29th game against the Canadiens, Havlat suffered a separated shoulder. It was an injury that would require surgery, putting the rest of his season in doubt.

After scoring 31 goals and 68 points, Havlat was expected to shoulder that secondary scoring burden, but his injury afforded the organization the opportunity to elevate another rookie, Patrick Eaves, to absorb some of Havlat’s minutes. The winger would go on to become the fourth player in franchise history to record 20-plus goals as a rookie.

“It was at the point as a franchise that is hard to get to,” said Spezza, the team’s number one centre. “We had a young fourth line. And our third and fourth line guys had the capability to be more, and they all became more. Antoine Vermette became more. (Kelly) became more.

"Our depth was just incredible. It was a four-line team playing in an era where not as many teams were that deep. We definitely felt going into every game that we were going to win. To get that kind of swagger, you have to earn it, but by being a young team, we were probably a little bit naive about things, and it worked in our favour.”

“We had very high swagger,” Bryan Smolinksi acknowledged. “We knew in our locker room; I don't think many others realized that we had four lines. We had a very good (blue line), and we played a heavy game, like we weren't going to get pushed around. We had a legit heavyweight in Brian McGrattan, but we had team toughness. And I think everyone realized that, you know, throughout the year. And that was one thing that we really took to heart. The knock was that Ottawa was easy to push around. If you just beat us up a little bit, we were going to cave. We took that perception and tried to be really tough throughout the year with physicality and speed. There were not a lot of teams that could play with us.”

The Senators strived towards team toughness, but it was a game in late October that helped set the tone.

Senators rookie Brian McGrattan was nine games into his NHL career when he faced the Maple Leafs on October 29th. It was the third meeting of the season between the Senators and Maple Leafs, with the first two decided by shootout. The scores in those games were too close for there to be much on-ice acrimony, but with Ottawa staked to a 4-0 lead in the early stages of the second period, an aging Tie Domi challenged the young McGrattan to fight.

One right hand and Gene Simmons-like tongue protrusion later, McGrattan single-handedly let everyone know there was a changing of the guard in the Battle of Ontario. After those years of bullying, it was like a weight had been lifted. All of Ottawa channelled years of frustration through McGrattan’s one haymaker into a moment of pure cathartic bliss.

“It was another defining moment,” said Wade Redden, while recalling the fight. “It was a key moment, organically, that you look back on that kind of gives everyone a sense of belief of, ‘Here we are.’”

“At the time, I was still living at the hotel,” McGrattan told the hosts of the Coming in Hot Podcast. “That fight was somewhere within my first 10 games, and that's the moment that maybe cemented my role. With the rivalry that the teams had leading up to that, the team they had in Toronto, and how soft those Sens teams were. The Sens teams were better, but they were way softer. Just beating Tie there, and it was a pretty decisive win on the scoresheet, too. We beat them either seven or eight to nothing, and then I beat Tie.

"I grew up a die hard Leaf fan, and Tie Domi was one of my favourite Leafs. Being able to fight him and Toronto being my childhood team, and it was a pretty decisive win, which made it better. Fighting is not all about winning or losing, but when you beat a guy of Tie’s stature and the history he's had, it's a pretty big moment for our team and the Ottawa organization, knowing that they were not going to get pushed around.”

The Senators were not pushed around through their first 56 games, cruising to a 37-14-5 record. Not only were they the league's highest-scoring team with 221 goals, but they also allowed the fewest with 133.

A microcosm of the Senators’ dominance was a game in late January against the Montreal Canadiens. Ottawa dictated the play for the entire night, but their puck possession in the second period led to five consecutive penalties to the Canadiens. The Senators’ power play made them pay, with Daniel Alfredsson scoring two goals on the man advantage. By the time the final horn sounded, the Senators held a massive advantage in shots on goal, directing 40 shots at Cristobal Huet, to the Canadiens’ 12.

That mark still stands as a Canadiens' record for fewest shots in a game.

“What can I say about tonight’s shutout?” Dominik Hasek quipped after the game. “It was the easiest shutout I’ve ever had in the NHL. I think I’m embarrassed to get a shutout like that.”

It was the kind of moxie and swagger that the Senators were looking to cultivate, but one month later, that positivity hit a speed bump when Hasek got injured at the Olympics in Turin, Italy...

Coming soon: Part two of The Rise And Fall Of One Of The Greatest Teams In Senators History

Graeme Nichols
The Hockey News