Why the Belleville Senators are Ottawa's only hope

TORONTO - Early on the morning of Feb. 22, a few hours before the Ottawa Senators traded point-per-game center Matt Duchene to Columbus, the team recalled rookie forwards Drake Batherson and Logan Brown from its AHL affiliate in Belleville, Ontario.

The moves, minor as they were in the larger scheme, made sense: The Senators needed fresh legs in anticipation of trading their top three scorers. Within hours, Duchene was told to take his gear across the Canadian Tire Centre hallway to the visiting Blue Jackets' room. Then Ryan Dzingel and Mark Stone were scratched that night before a 3-0 Columbus victory.

Batherson and Brown were in the NHL for three days, drawing sparse minutes as Ottawa lost two games. Then the front office sent them back to Belleville, a bastion of positivity in an organization that's seen better days.

“Whatever is going on up there, that’s up there,” Brown says. “We’re down here, and right now we’re just trying to focus on getting into the playoffs and going on a run.”

Less than two seasons since they came within a goal of playing for the Stanley Cup, the Senators have become one of the NHL's most downtrodden franchises.

They're last in the league by a comfortable margin, and the Sens don't have their first-round selection in the upcoming draft, part of the cost to acquire Duchene in November 2017. The team has shown a recurring flair for the tragicomic ever since - including prior to an outdoor game on Parliament Hill when owner Eugene Melnyk said he’d consider relocating his team if flagging attendance didn’t improve.

Much happened in Sensland between that ultimatum and the recent collapse of Melnyk’s bid to build a new arena on federal land downtown. Billboards with the "MelnykOut" hashtag were installed around the city. The owner sat down for an infamous interview with defenseman Mark Borowiecki. Duchene and some teammates were filmed deprecating one of their coaches in an Uber in Arizona. The hits kept coming.

In a 15-month span, the Senators traded their top five scorers from the team that made the Eastern Conference Final in 2017, bottoming out and setting in motion a rebuild Melnyk has vowed will result in five years of “unparalleled success” from 2021 to 2025. Luminous youngsters Thomas Chabot and Brady Tkachuk only account for two spots on the depth chart, so Ottawa’s lineups in the interim are bound to look a lot like the present-day Belleville squad.

It’s fortunate for Ottawa, then, that as the big club excised its last remaining veteran stars, Belleville went on a tear. Between Jan. 19 and last week, the
B-Sens didn’t lose in regulation for 17 games, a remarkable points streak that vaulted the team from the depths of the AHL’s North Division into playoff contention.

Were Belleville aligned with any other NHL team, its surge up the standings might not mean as much. But ahead of a transformative roster reset, the contrast between the Senators’ grim outlook in the short term and the optimism flourishing one rung down the organizational ladder is striking.

More than perhaps any other team, Ottawa is banking on wins in the AHL translating directly into future NHL victories. Even if the equation is rarely that seamless, the composition of Belleville’s roster makes the gamble more understandable.

“From an organizational perspective, the good news is all our best players are young guys,” Belleville head coach Troy Mann says.

In his first pro season out of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League, Batherson, 20, is spearheading the B-Sens’ frantic playoff push.

Known prior to this year for scoring seven goals in seven games as Canada won gold at the 2018 world junior hockey tournament, the winger has been Belleville’s best offensive threat while scoring a team-high 55 points. He's been hot lately, too, recording 26 points in the 15 games he played during the team’s long points streak.

The two games Batherson missed during the streak came when he and Brown, a hulking 21-year-old center who scored 17 points during that run, were promoted to Ottawa. The B-Sens did well to emerge with wins, showcasing their depth beyond those two marquee names.

“If you go to the rink and you expect to win, you’re going to win,” Brown says. “The whole team, we all kind of came together, and I think the past couple months we’ve been playing some really good hockey.”

Asked to quantify the potential on Belleville’s roster, Ottawa assistant GM Peter MacTavish says he thinks a dozen Sens prospects have “very good” shots to become established NHLers.

That list includes Batherson and Brown, along with fellow top-six forwards Filip Chlapik, Nick Paul, and Jack Rodewald. On the blue line, Christian Wolanin and Andreas Englund could contribute, and in goal there's Marcus Hogberg and Filip Gustavsson. Lastly, three young players the Sens acquired this season in momentous trades - Rudolfs Balcers (for Erik Karlsson), Vitaly Abramov (for Duchene), and Erik Brannstrom (for Stone) - have potential, too.

The extent to which Belleville grads will feature in Ottawa’s rebuild should become evident at training camp next September. All of those young players could get the chance to contend for a permanent role with the Senators. They would join Chabot, Tkachuk, Colin White, Maxime Lajoie, and Christian Jaros, all of whom are 22 or younger and logging NHL minutes this season.

“There are a lot of players in Belleville who could be playing in the NHL right now,” MacTavish says. “The organizational philosophy and goal this season is to have them develop as a young group together, and grow together, have success together, hope they make the playoffs together and then see what happens once they make the playoffs.

“There’s a significant number of those players that we see with great futures in Ottawa.”

In the coming years, MacTavish will be able to test the thesis that winning together in the AHL breeds cohesiveness and trust that carries forward to the NHL, especially if Belleville’s recent push leads to a playoff berth. After losing two of three games since the end of the points streak, the B-Sens are now two points up on the Utica Comets for their division’s fourth and final postseason spot.

“We’ve got a really good team. I think if we get in, we can surprise some people,” Brown says.

“You do that, and then you get used to the pro-style playoffs. It’ll definitely be a new experience. I think it’ll be huge for us to get that experience and to carry it on into the NHL one day, hopefully.”

Speaking the day before his team beat the defending AHL champion Toronto Marlies 5-3, Mann says he was reared as a coach in the Washington Capitals’ minor-league system to believe that winning and prospect development go hand in hand.

Two years after he guided the Hershey Bears to the 2015-16 Calder Cup final, Mann noted, two of his best young forwards - Jakub Vrana and Chandler Stephenson - participated in the Capitals’ charge to a championship.

Hershey’s 2009-10 team, which went 60-17-3 and won the Calder Cup in Mann’s first campaign as an assistant coach, supports the theory even more. Several players from that roster later turned into productive NHLers, including three who won the Stanley Cup with the Capitals last June: John Carlson, Jay Beagle, and Braden Holtby.

Outside of the points streak, of course, the B-Sens haven't resembled a 60-win powerhouse. And there's another key difference between Hershey then and Belleville now: In 2010 and 2016, and nearly every season in between, Washington was among the NHL’s strongest teams, whereas Ottawa will be lucky to clamber out of last place over the next month.

Even if Belleville’s best players wind up making an NHL impact soon, one hole in Ottawa’s rebuilding blueprint is a lack of surefire elite talent, a necessity to contend. Mann’s Bears helped build the Capitals’ Stanley Cup team, but it was led by Alex Ovechkin, Evgeny Kuznetsov, and Nicklas Backstrom, none of whom played a minute in the AHL.

This is where the legacy of Ottawa’s trade for Duchene could continue to sting. By holding on to their first-round draft selection last June, the Sens snagged Tkachuk, who is fourth among NHL rookies in scoring. But the Senators had to give Colorado a pick that has the best odds of becoming the first selection after this year’s lottery, and now Ottawa can't build around consensus top prospect Jack Hughes. (That pick could still fall as low as fourth in the lottery even if Ottawa finishes last.)

There are, of course, worse ways to remake a franchise than stockpiling talented youngsters and counting on some of them, at minimum, to develop into trustworthy NHLers.

That logic was manifest on Monday when Belleville staged a rousing comeback on the road against the Marlies, a game in which Abramov scored in the second period and Batherson and Paul, after their hosts curtailed them until late, combined for three goals during the final seven minutes.

Thirteen games remain in Belleville’s regular season, and in a stretch drive that has been imbued with unforeseen magnitude.

“It’s paramount that we win. That’s what we’re trying to (do). When the team is struggling at the NHL level, to me, one of the two teams has to make the playoffs,” Mann says.

“It would be a great thing for our organization if we can make a push here in the next six weeks and get into that four spot. I think it would do a lot for the organization, knowing that we’re in a rebuild and it’s probably going to take a couple years.”

Nick Faris is a features writer at theScore. He’s on Twitter @nickmfaris.