From rookie of the year to captain of the firing line, Daniel Alfredsson remembers a decade with the Sens
Jeremy Milks
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photo: Aaron McKenzie Fraser
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It's only the second day of training camp, but already there's an edge to the proceedings on the ice. New head coach Bryan Murray is standing at centre with a glare that defies his usual amiable nature. Instructions are shouted and a whistle blown, sending dozens of players into a seemingly chaotic drill of two-on-ones that miraculously ends with no one smashing into each other and a heavy shot on net every seven seconds.The players look like they're playing hard but it's only started. Murray lines up the team at the end boards, yells something which gets lost in the vacant rafters of the Corel Centre, and sends them into a series of retch-inducing skating drills. Stops and starts, blue line to blue line, and then laps.
Some guys are bent over, gasping for breath. Most assemble across the Sens logo at centre ice to do some final stretches, but there is one player who is gliding silently around them, finding his own equilibrium after such a grueling practice. He skates by the Sens newest acquisition, Dany Heatley, who has the unenviable task of replacing one of the team's most popular players, Marian Hossa. Daniel Alfredsson gives him one of those re-affirming taps with his stick on Heatley's pants and keeps cruising around his exhausted team. It's eerily quiet on the ice.
He comes right off to do a photo shoot with us, promptly shakes everybody's hand, and sits down, ready to go. Someone asks him how practice was as he wipes his head with a towel. "Hard. Lots of skating ... but we needed
it."He is surprisingly relaxed, telling an old story about a nightmare photo shoot he once did for hours on a mountain top in full hockey gear and skates. As he is posing on the bench, the team's resident happy-go-lucky kid, Jason Spezza, comes up from behind Alfredsson, gets into one of the pictures with a huge trouble-making grin and Alfie can't help but laugh. After all, he was once the young guy on the team, with a future filled with promise.
PAST MISTAKES
Ottawa has already had two franchise players but both found a way to fail in the end, almost spectacularly. Alexandre Daigle was brought into the league with as much fanfare as possible, thanks to a huge contract, but he quickly became more adept at controversy than the actual game. He was photographed in a tight nurse's uniform for a hockey card company and almost caused an international incident by joking about carrying a bomb on board a team flight. He was to be the face of the team and the bilingual city of Ottawa, but he was soon dispatched to Philadelphia and then bounced around from team to team, dating Pamela Anderson and Sheryl Crow before retiring for Hollywood.
Alexei Yashin was the backup plan and he almost worked out. He had superb skills and a dedication that Daigle lacked, but combined with oddball agent Mark Gandler the two destroyed any good will with their contract squabbles with a low-revenue, debt-ridden, Rod Bryden-owned team.
After Yashin was sent to New York in 2001, the team stitched the "C" for captain on the jersey of their 133rd overall, fifth-round choice back in 1994. Many felt the switch should have taken place long before that.
A COLD DRAFT
Strangely enough, the quiet kid from Goteborg, Sweden had no idea he would one day play in the NHL. "I didn't even know I got drafted. Someone had to call me the next day and tell me."
His first season was in 1995-96 and he arrived in Ottawa to find the team in turmoil, having missed the playoffs in their first three seasons, including 1992-93 where they re-wrote the record book as far as losing goes. They went through three coaches that year, including Dave "Sparky" Allison who was rumoured to have held a séance in the back of the Civic Centre to summon the ghosts of Senators past, when they ruled the league in the 1920s.
"I was the only guy from Sweden, but my English was pretty good already. A lot of guys really helped me that first year. Sean Hill was great. My first roommate in camp was Dave McIlwain. He liked the room really cold and left the windows open all night and I was freezing to death but I didn't dare say anything."
Freezing or not, Alfredsson won the Calder Trophy as rookie-of-the-year and played in his first all-star game, which would not be his last.
The next season would be different, symbolized in the first game when Steve Duchesne sent Alfredsson a "suicide pass" up the middle where Alfredsson was crushed by a Montreal forward. In the Senators' losing tradition, such a transgression might have gone by the wayside but Duchesne, not known for fighting, stuck up for his young teammate by dropping his gloves for a scrap.
And at that moment a playoff team was born.
RUDE AWAKENINGS
Fast forward to the 2002 season. Alfredsson was now the captain and on the firing line. His team had grown to be one of the best in the league but faltered in playoff time. They were swept by the Sabres in 1999 thanks to current teammate Dominik Hasek and lost again the next year to the Leafs in six games. The biggest disaster awaited them as the 2001 edition fell in four straight to the Leafs and the whispers became roars as fans thought the team was too soft, too European.
The final game of the 2002 season, right before the playoffs, the Sens took on the Canadiens when Alfredsson shocked fans by dropping the gloves with Canadian hero Doug Gilmour, echoing Duchesne's example. The club carried this momentum into the first round where they dispatched the rough and tumble Flyers, much of it due to their willingness to play it physical.
Alfredsson just sort of laughs when reminded of the Gilmour fight, but takes exception when I claim it was his first.
"I had a round with Darius Kasparaitis once."
I ask him how he did.
"I didn't lose."
The next series was again against the Leafs and featured "the goal," where in game 5 with the series tied at two apiece, Alfredsson, in a memorable moment, hit superpest Darcy Tucker along the boards-some say it was a dirty hit from behind-and went in and scored the game winner.
Alfredsson winces at the mention of it.
"It was a big goal because we won the game but we didn't win the series..." He trails off and you can almost sense sadness in him. After all, he has been through the hard times. When Bryden and the team went bankrupt a few years ago, Alfredsson was always at the centre of events, maintaining the face of the team. He initiated a players' campaign to buy empty Corel Centre seats and give them to charity. He faced the microphones after every heartbreaking loss to the Leafs, including a devastating game 7 collapse in 2004.
"I just try to lead by example and work hard at all times and I demand that from all the players as well."
Going into this season with a new coach, a new goalie in past foe Hasek, and a new haircut (the lioness locks are gone), Alfredsson looks like he means business as he shakes my hand and disappears down the hallways of the silent Corel Centre. Soon it will shake with all the hopes and dreams of the fans and a determined captain ready to fulfil his promise of a Stanley Cup.
While I might be true that Daniel Alfredson is a class act, and that the Senators might win the Stanley Cup, I must admit I still have a bone to pick with the NHL and its players.
These people are so greedy they took a year off because they couldn't get that extra 5, 10, or more million for playing hockey. It's hockey, for goodness sakes! They are not brain surgeons, or rocket scientists, they are jocks! Is hockey really so important?
Granted, team sports are a means of encouraging a sense of community unity and belonging; they tend to promote voter participation, believe it or not, and democracy. But still. How can we let ourselves go crawling back to the Corel centre after what the players and the NHL have done? They have hung their greed out for everyone to see, and yet we are rewarding that behavior by participating in their circus called Hockey.
I don't know. What ever happened so 'spirit of the game'?
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Christina DeCurtis
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{21 votes}
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I like Daniel Alfredsson, he is a great player and he brings the senators together as a team.
As a talent he is great and deserves everyones respect. He definitely is a franchise player but the team has to do more than just make the playoffs. finishing first and not making it to the stanley cup final is not going to cut it, they have been too good for too long just be a
playoff team. Alfredsson can definitely help do that as he has in the past, with the team he as around him this year, it has to be the year they take the next step. I hope it works out for him because he definitely deserves to have a taste of playing in the big dance.
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Ritesh Patel
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{2 votes}
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| Alfredsson needs to light the lamp again this year. |
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Daniel Alfredsson may have received the most ice time on the power play but I wish he would:
1) not be on the blueline because he doesn't shoot enough from there, he should be parking himself in front of the net or in the slot (He may have been a defenceman back in his Swedish hockey days, but he is more effective as a forward with the Senators).
2) play when the team is shorthanded or when the team is 4on4 because he excels when he is chasing the puck and when there is more open ice to skate.
I wonder what his reaction would've been if he had not been considered the franchise player and therefore, the highest salary on the team?
Go Sens Go.
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Aaron O'Brien
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{2 votes}
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After all that's gone down I still find it hard to get all jazzed up about this season. This isn't like that year that the "Dallas" producers wiped out as some sort of dream...there was no hockey last year and nothing can make up for how and why that happened in the eyes of a lot of former fans. I still play the occasional street game so I know my passion for the game isn't dead but after all the red tape and vitriol I'm not exactly embracing the NHL as I used to. There's a long way to go before that happens.
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Pedro Eggers
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{17 votes}
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Appearance doesn't make the man, but we should take a moment and thank Alfredsson for hat he has done for our home-town-team! A new look for the Sens and their Captain may be just what my favourite team needs. If it's not then I gues we'll endure another year without a victory. Taking in and cutting the right people was a very careful proceedure for the Sens this year. They are out to please the fans, and Alfredsson is the key to bringing the fans back after the stalemate last year. They shot, they scored, and let's support them to the finale!
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Amie Revell
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{3 votes}
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If there's anyone who wants to bring Lord Stanley to Ottawa, It's Alfie. forget about all those other leaches, I mean Superstars, like Yashin , Daigle,Rhodes etc... the list goes on. many a so called Senators hero have come and gone but the mainstay has been Alfie with his cohort Wade redden. He loves to play hockey and has respect and big expectations to bring the cup to the team and fans who welcomed him to Canada. Sometimes he has it rough during the play-offs, but who does he have backing him up, our bumbling falldown Franken- Chara or some rookie or has -been minding his net! It was Alfie, along with players like Redden , Randy Cunneyworth who started to bring the Sens to the play-offs. He has been through everything from losing key players after trades, scandals, a strike or two, the management going bankrupt a couple of times ( usually just before the play-offs) and now losing his favorite coach, and mine, Jacques Martin, and he's still holding out to bring the cup to Ottawa. Should be an interesting season, can't wait! Go Krusty Go!
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David Fairhead
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{5 votes}
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Ger, you say: "He might not be the best player on the ice,...". Alfie finished 7th in the league in the 2003-04 season with 32 goals and 48 assists for 80 points in 77 games played. So if Martin St. Louis, Ilya Kovalchuk, Joe Sakic, Markus Naslund, Marian Hossa, or Patrick Elias are on the ice i guess you could say that. As for the comment from Steve Landry about the power play I can tell you that in 2003-04 the Senators had the 1st overall power play goals with 80, and powerplay percentage with 21.6% and Daniel Alfredsson logged the most time of any player on the Sens pp including Hossa.
Go Sens
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Patrick Eaves
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{1 vote}
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| Oh Danny Boy, Lead Us To The Holy Grail......... |
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Great article about our loyal captain Daniel Alfredsson and the fact that he has developped into the Ottawa Senators best captain up to now. He is thoughtful and respected by his colleagues. He leads by example and loves the game of hockey.
He is amicable and approachable and doesn't seem to possess the kind of pompous ass "star athlete" qualities that other sports athletes sometimes fall into. He has been one of our best playoff performers (even though some have criticized him for becoming invisible).
He represents all of the qualities that Ottawa Senators players should work towards becoming and I wish him many years of success and somewhere down the line, a Stanley Cup ring on his finger to celebrate all of what he has given us here in stodgy-podgy O-Town.
I can't wait to see the chemistry this year with the Heatley-Spezza-Bochenski line and look forward to watching #11 lead his team onto the ice again for another year.
My only negative comment is to keep him cheering from the bench for the power play. As the power play organizer, he has been less than productive and he excels more in short-handed situations than the power play. (Every player has to have a little something or other that they're not the greatest at).
Interesting as well that those golden locks are gone, previously an Alfredsson trademark and the result of more than a few oohs and ahhs from the female admirers in the crowd.
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Steve Landry
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{8 votes}
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Alfie epitomizes the accessibility that this league will need if they're ever to win back their fan base (not to mention their half-interested fans in places like Nashville and Phoenix) after a season-long hissy fit. Being a casual hockey watcher, I can understand the frustration that some feel with this game when 'big-show' players, whose interests and talents seem to lie in abstract areas like 'spirit' and 'leadership' and 'talking to the media' dominate the sport. The other, uglier side is one of caveman slashing each other in the face with sticks, fighting each other like professional wrestlers (or, like Darcy Tucker, launch themselves into the visiting team's bench). Alfie sits in that comfortable, accessible grey area between - he'll fight, but isn't known for it. He became known for scoring, which seems ideal.
But I argue that he's an accessible player because he was selected so low in the draft and because he's player who apporaches the game with equal parts hard work and finesse. It opens up the league to those of us who aren't interested in the Lindroses or Lemieuxs or Crosbys - who ostensibly belong to everyone. Alfie is the kind of player who makes having a favorite possible. You don't have to be an Ottawa fan - there's an Alfie on every team, usually overshadowed by that team's Daigle or Yashin. Ultimately, players like Alfredsson bring back the very human element to a game that had become, at the very least, a distant discussion of cold numbers and rule changes.
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Natalie Linklater
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{6 votes}
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This guy is a great ambassador for our team. I hope he stays long with team, he's a real leader and if anyone is able to motivate the sens it is Daniel Alfredsson. He's also a great player who can lead the team to great victories throughout the season!! And when we pay the big bucks to go see our sens play, what's better than driving home with a win on our minds!!
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Brian Fung
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After a year without my sens, I'm glad they're back!!! I can't wait for the first game, and that new coach will, I think, bring great things to the team. Hopefully, he will even bring us the Stanley Cup we deserve so much. Go sens Go!!!
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Roxane Gibault
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{2 votes}
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Just to note an error in this article: Alfredsson became captain for the year that Yashin was sitting out, and when Yashin returned, Alfredsson remained as captain, with Yashin as an assistant. He was not named captain following Yashin's departure.
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Tristan Maack
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{3 votes}
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THis is a guy Ottawa really needs. it's going both ways. he is a team player. He might not be the best player on the ice, but to be a leader you don;t need to be like that. We've had alexander dud, Alexei Cashin and the strike tarnishing the team enough. let's turn over a new leaf...ah, Sen i mean...2 weeks left until the season starts ...I can just hear the Corle centre cheering now...WOoHoo!
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Ger Madden
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{4 votes}
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