It could still happen. The last time the Senators made changes to their scouting staff it was announced in early September, so I guess we'll see. A lot of the guys Armstrong hired in Arizona only became available because Terry Pegula freaked out and fired Buffalo's entire amateur scouting staff in the summer of 2020. A lot of this stuff never reaches the public sphere, so we have no idea who might be available, or even what the status of Ottawa's current amateur staff is - if these guys are locked into long deals they may not want to fire them and have to pay out a large chunk of cash.
One thing I don't agree with is that the Sens have been drafting in this manner for 10 or 15 years. I think the change is more recent than that, and I've sort of narrowed it down to 2 factors:
- Brain drain.
- Somewhere around 2014 or so the Sens started losing a ton of scouts. Tim Murray left to be GM in Buffalo and he took Greg Royce with him, Bob Lowes left to be Director of Player Personnel in Vegas, Vaclav Burda left to be Chief European Scout in Edmonton, Lew Mongelluzzo left to work for New Jersey, Bill McCarthy retired. All of that happened within a period of 2-3 years, and almost none of those guys were replaced with established scouting talent.
- Change in philosophy coming from Pierre Dorion
- At the outset of the rebuild, Dorion gave an interview where he laid out what the strategy was going to be, and a big part of it was that they weren't going to be drafting for skill in the later rounds.
- "And at the same, we’ve talked to our amateur staff, and we’re not always going to draft the highest skill guy. We’re going to draft a player that helps us win the most, and that comes with character. Those are intangibles that we’re always going to try and do. Easier to say now, but sometimes when you get in the fifth, sixth, seventh rounds sometimes you try to hit a home run with a skill guy. We’re going to do less and less of that now. Just because at the end of the day most of them don’t ever pan out.”
So I think from about 2018 onwards, you can start to see a clear change in their approach to the draft. They aren't taking 'skill' players and they rarely take anybody under 6' tall. The lifeblood of the Senators used to be that they could crank out NHL players in the later rounds of the draft - J.G. Pageau, Mark Stone, Mike Hoffman, Derek Grant, Mark Borowiecki, Ryan Dzingel and others. Since Drake Batherson in 2017 that well seems to have run completely dry and the team is really feeling it. Combine that with how many high picks they've whiffed on [Thomson, Bernard-Docker, Tychonick, Jarventie, Sokolov, Boucher, Roger, Nordberg] and you find yourself in the situation the Sens are in now.
