Ottawa Senators confident of continued improvement next season
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Though the Senators were eliminated from the National Hockey League playoffs by the Toronto Maple Leafs in Game 6 of the first-round series on May 1, the faithful cheered their heroes off the ice after experiencing the big dance for the first time since 2017.
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Fans were excited because they knew there were better days ahead, and, as fans returned to Canadian Tire Centre on Tuesday night for the second Season Ticket Holders spring members summit, the organization remained confident that would be the case.
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'We're just getting started,' Dave Poulin, the Senators' senior vice-president of hockey operations, told the fans. 'This has been fun to grow with you.'
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This is a busy time of year for Steve Staios, the president of hockey operations and general manager, and the rest of the staff. With NHL free agency set to start July 1, the off-season is going to continue to ramp up after the club held its amateur and pro scouting meetings in the past three weeks.
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Poulin noted the Senators had heavy lifting to do before the NHL draft on June 28-29. He said the organization was studying the free-agent market and was also trying to determine which players on the current roster they wanted to keep.
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The Senators are in negotiations with forwards Claude Giroux, Nick Cousins and Adam Gaudette and goaltender Anton Forsberg. It's anybody's guess if any of those players will return, but Forsberg and Gaudette are doubtful.
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There will be make changes, but Poulin said the growth would have to come from the core. A lot of that will be about consistency from the likes of Brady Tkachuk, Tim Stutzle, Drake Batherson, Dylan Cozens, Shane Pinto, Jake Sanderson, Thomas Chabot and Ridly Greig.
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'We talked about the group learning in the playoffs and playing in the playoffs for the first time,' Poulin said. 'We have to carry that experience into the next year, and we have to increase our consistency, and we have to take our bandwidth to a higher level.
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'When I talked about hockey players, when I was a coach, when I was a manager, as a player, they have a bandwidth, and we want them in that bandwidth, but we want them in the top end of that band, and you'll see some players that have huge highs, then huge lows, then huge highs, then huge lows, and as a group we have to get used to playing here on a more consistent basis that will eliminate the lows, increase the highs overall as a team, become more consistent.'
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