We finally learned how long the front office expected Brady Tkachuk’s departure from the Ottawa Senators on Wednesday night, a month after he did so.
Steve Staios, the general manager, talked on The Sick Podcast and acknowledged that the split had been developing for a considerable time.
Staios stated, “Over the past year and a half, when it appeared to me that it was heading in that direction, it became quite obvious to me as we were going through this.”
Tkachuk has joined the Panthers, but they are still not among the top teams in the league.
Zoom out to his previous ten games, and it appears a little better. 8 total points, 6 assists, and 2 goals.
Why wait till after a difficult conclusion to really pull the trigger if Staios anticipated this for a year and a half?
In the same period, Ottawa also changed coaches, recruiting Andrew Campbell in December.
A year and a half is a long time. You know something is amiss for months before the tire finally goes flat, just as you would feel a slow leak in one.
Ottawa’s front office has been under Staios’s direction since November 2023. He dealt a forward this past season who scored 59 points this summer.
Over the course of 60 games, that output included 22 goals and 37 assists.
However, he started to cool down later in the season. In his last five games, Tkachuk had a minus-4 rating and didn’t record a point.
Despite this, Ottawa concluded the year with a strong performance. The Senators finished with 99 points, good for ninth overall, with a record of 44-27-11.
Currently, Florida is in a different situation. The Panthers are tied for 25th in the league with 84 points at 40-38-4.
Although head coach Paul Maurice and general manager Bill Zito took over a proven scorer, the outcomes haven’t yet lived up to the hype.
Regardless of the reasoning behind it, it’s a difficult sell to give a top producer to a team that finished 15 points behind the one he just left.
Florida won three of four games against Ottawa this season, winning 6-3 in March before losing the finale 5-1.
Whether that 18-month period of tension becomes a footnote or the beginning of something larger for both teams will not be determined until puck drop this autumn.
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