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Home > Hockey > NHL Teams > Ottawa Senators
Ottawa Senators
NHL, the National Hockey League is a premier professional North American Sports League played in indoor stadiums. It’s divided into two conferences, each comprising of three divisions of ice hockey teams. The league was established in 1917 in Montreal, Quebec and it is composed of 30 teams out of which 24 teams based in U.S. and 6 in Canada. They have a regular season and playoffs leading to the Stanley Cup, which is the NHL Championship final.
Ottawa Senators enjoyed a great season in 1901, winning seven of their eight regular season games. The closest call was a 5-5 tie with the Montreal Victorias in Ottawa, on January 19. Ottawa clinched the championship when they defeated the Quebec Bulldogs 1-0 on February 23 but, unfortunately for them, the Montreal Shamrocks had lost the Stanley Cup to the Winnipeg Victorias and due to the lateness of the season Ottawa did not enter a challenge for it.
Two major events occurred for the Ottawa Senators in January 1996 that are Jacques Martin became their head coach and the team moved into its new arena the 18,500 seat Palladium in Kanata, a suburb of Ottawa. While Ottawa finished the 1995-96 season with a poor record, it marked the start of an amazing franchise turnaround. Daniel Alfredsson became the first Senator to win the Calder Memorial Trophy, the NHL Rookie of the Year award. Alfredsson, selected 133rd overall in 1994, was also selected to play in the 1996 NHL All-Star Game.
Later, the Senators made the playoffs for the first time in the 1996-97 NHL season. They settled the seventh seed on the last game of the regular season thanks to a late goal from Steve Duchesne against Dominik Hasek, then of the Buffalo Sabres, giving the Senators a 1-0 win. The Senators then faced the Sabres in the first round of the playoffs where they lost in seven games.
The Senators won their first playoff series in the following 1997-98 NHL season, defeating the New Jersey Devils in six games. Despite defeating the heavily favoured Devils in the opening round, the Senators' lack of depth and experience was easily exposed in the second round against what became one of that season's Stanley Cup Finalists, the Washington Capitals, who quickly disposed of the Sens in five mostly one-sided games.
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