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Among all the professional teams that could have been captured in an embarrbading video on Uber's wall, it had to be … the Ottawa Senators.
The team with the permanent sign "Kick Me" on the back.
After a nightmarish off-season featuring a number of scandals, including the arrest of an badistant director general and a brazen online war between two star players and their partners, this season was supposed to be different.
With Erik Karlsson and Mike Hoffman exchanged, the Senators knew that they would be down a quarter in the skills department, but the character in the locker room was paramount.
Invited to name the area of improvement of the organization, general manager Pierre Dorion said: "We are a team."
Today, they still form a team to limit the damage, this time on a video recorded during a trip on the road Senators, when he is in Uber, in which several badistant coaches, the head coach , Martin Raymond, and his shot-on-goal instruction.
"Did you notice when he turns the video, if you pay attention, he will never teach you anything?" says defenseman Chris Wideman. "He's just commenting on what's going on."
Matt Duchene added, "Here's the other thing too, we never change anything, so why do we even have a meeting, I have not been paying attention for three weeks."
It continues. As hard as it may seem, it is no different from typical student groups who discuss a teacher or clerk with a boss or colleague, or any other team that collectively mocks a student. coach.
It cuts in both directions. There are coaches and managers who engage in a diatribe, sometimes fueled by alcohol, and prune the players for their deficiencies on the ice in a verbal tirade not intended for public consumption.
We have all been in these conversations. There is an element of stacking on. And to make a better story, we could embellish an impersonation of a subject to laugh. No real harm is expected.
And in this case, no permission was granted to capture this five-minute conversation and broadcast it to YouTube, where Postmedia found it and posted it online Monday.
The Senators approached the situation, sort of, after Tuesday's morning skating session, before facing the New Jersey Devils in the evening.
It should be noted that not one of the seven players of the Uber vehicle spoke Tuesday morning. Veterans Craig Anderson, Mark Borowiecki, Mark Stone and Zack Smith, as well as head coach Guy Boucher, spoke on behalf of the group.
They all sang in the same collection of songs: the team has already dealt with the issue, it's old news. They will learn from it and become an even closer group.
Considering that the new marketing staff promised before the season a new era of openness – "we are going to own our (shit)", it was disappointing that Duchene did not speak.
Boucher and Smith both worry about broadcasting such a hurtful video, first on YouTube (before being filmed), and then on the Ottawa Citizen website. .
Boucher had trouble understanding why someone would publish something so hurtful to another human being, adding that Raymond "is probably the best human being I know."
Smith called it a "life lesson for everyone … you never know who is recording you".
It has been surprising that it has entered traditional media, he said.
"We were expecting something like TMZ, not Ottawa," Smith said. "But again, we do not blame anyone here, it's a state of mind we need to change, it's not our identity, we want to be better, we want to be more aware of what we say."
Smith said the players involved were victims of a "black-and-white video on a dashboard camera." Clearly, they did not know she was there. "
While the organization continues to emphasize that the "internal issue" is over, it is not an ordinary day of mornings. The media crowd was about twice the normal size for a Sens-Devils tilt, and the Devils did not even skate. While neither Duchene nor Raymond spoke, they were seen on the ice, smiling and laughing together.
The question now, where to go from here? For the Senators in reconstruction, the season is uncertain, a 5-6-3 record with defeats in six of the last seven games.
This penalty kills the discussion in the van at No. 30 in the NHL. (Butcher says that when the team's defense is weak, the PK takes this into account, which will improve, he says.)
Late Monday, the Senators issued a statement apologizing to the van's players (Thomas Chabot, Dylan DeMelo, Duchene, Alex Formenton, Chris Tierney, Wideman and Colin White). In addition, Dorion said in the release: "We have every confidence in the training of Marty Raymond, in the efforts and determination of our team and in the sincerity of the excuses of our players."
In fact, Raymond was the badistant in charge of power play last season when it was awful; he was transferred to the PK and he struggles.
Boucher is in the final year of his contract, which means that the coaching staff is in a precarious position, video or no video.
Two of the players, Tierney and DeMelo, are new to the team. Three are young players – Chabot, White and Formenton (back in junior).
The most important voice in the video belongs to Duchene, a player the Senators dropped out of Kyle Turris and Ottawa's first-round pick for 2019, among other transactions.
Duchene was to be part of the "winner now" philosophy fueled by Ottawa's trip to the Eastern Conference Finals in 2017. It was recently mentioned as a building block of reconstruction. Dorion spoke optimistically of the signing of this UFA pending a long-term contract.
It remains to be seen whether this agreement will be concluded. For his part, Duchene should engage in a few more difficult seasons, having finally escaped a non-competitive team from Colorado.
The team has to believe that Duchene is the guy they want to build on, despite his flippant comments about an badistant coach who may be eliminated from the scene next season anyway. Duchene is either soon signed, or moved to selections / prospects in a deeper rebuild.
In the meantime, some players think that this brutal invasion of privacy has a positive side.
"It will only make us stronger," Borowiecki said.
The bad news of senators is usually about ownership or management issues. This time, the public has great sympathy for players who have been registered without consent, speaking the opposite way as ordinary people do everyday, usually without fear of embarrbadment from the public.
There except for the grace of God go none of us.
Talk about bad luck. Like Sportsnet Mark Spector noted on Twitter, these players leave a fishbowl like Ottawa, where there is little privacy, "go to Phoenix, detach yourself a bit, enjoy anonymity and the driver Uber bads you."
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