Senators fans vent and point fingers at owner Eugene Melnyk over Erik Karlsson trade
In 1988, Oilers owner Peter Pocklington dealt the sport's marquee player, Wayne Gretzky, centre Mike Krushelnyski and defenceman Marty McSorley to the Los Angeles Kings.
Bruce Deachman, Ottawa Citizen
Updated: September 15, 2018
Now we know how Edmonton fans felt 30 years ago.
In 1988, Oilers owner Peter Pocklington dealt the sport’s marquee player, Wayne Gretzky, centre Mike Krushelnyski and defenceman Marty McSorley to the Los Angeles Kings, for centre Jimmy Carson, first-round draft pick Martin Gélinas, three additional first-round picks, and $15 million — the equivalent of about $28 million today.
It became known as The Trade, and it left Oilers fans devastated and in tears.
A similar veil of tears, anger and frustration fell on Ottawa after Senators fans learned Thursday that franchise player and captain Erik Karlsson had been dealt, along with minor-league forward Francis Perron, to the San Jose Sharks for centre Chris Tierney, defenceman Dylan DeMelo, prospects Josh Norris and Rudolfs Balcers, first- and second-round picks, plus an additional draft pick that’s a conditional first- or second-round selection in 2021. Oh, and zero dollars.
Reaction on social media and elsewhere has been loud and, by and large, angry, as fans have taken to chat rooms and Twitter to vent. Late Friday morning, Karlsson tweeted, “Thank you Ottawa for making this my home. All my love to the fans, community and former teammates. You will be dearly missed. On to the next chapter now. Shark nation, I’m coming for you.” That message prompted such responses as, “When you win the cup, please come and whack (Sens owner Eugene) Melnyk over the head with it,””Love you EK ❤️ thank you so much for everything you’ve done for the team and the city. We didn’t want this 😣,” and “We all wish you the best and hope that, when you win the cup, you will drive up and down Melnyk’s street with it all day long.”
Some, like Shaila Anwar, took action. Within about five minutes of the trade announcement, the public servant and co-host of TSN1200’s That’s What She Said, whose Twitter handle is “I am from Erik Karlsson’s Forever Home,” called the club to cancel season tickets she has had since 1994.
“Marketing a sports team is all about selling hope or selling championships,” Anwar said Friday. “Those are the two things that get people to care.
“But what are the Senators going to sell now? They can’t sell hope, and, as much as they may say this was a hockey trade, they got nothing to replace front-line talent, a two-time Norris trophy-winner who carried the franchise, and the city and his hockey team, on his broken leg and almost got them in the Stanley Cup finals — a team that nobody would have picked to get that far.”
Anwar likened Thursday’s trade to an onion: “Every layer of this trade, you peel it off and it still kind of stinks and it kind of makes you want to cry.
“It’s philosophically bad, it’s objectively bad, it’s demonstrably bad, it’s bad on multi-levels. It’s bad on the ice, it’s bad off the ice, and it’s bad for the long-term effects of the Ottawa Senators. I have serious concerns about how they’re going to come back from this.”
On Friday at work, Anwar wore a Senators shirt with a big X through the logo, over which she wrote “The Ottawa Senators are dead to me.” People, she said, were coming to her or sending condolence texts and emails, “like a death has occurred in the family because they know how seriously I take it.”
Like many Twitter inhabitants, Anwar pointed her finger at the short-armed, deep-pocketed Melnyk. “He can say all he wants that he saved the team, but my take on it is this: He bought the team 15 years ago and it’s been a slow, progressive death.
“Not everybody drops dead of a heart attack. Some take a long time, and (Melnyk) is killing the Ottawa Senators franchise. This is a franchise that can’t afford to lose the fan base that they have, and I don’t know how they recover from this. Nobody’s going to buy tickets today because Eugene Melnyk saved the team 15 years ago.”
Another one-time die-hard fan, Scott Wells, agreed. He compared Melnyk to former Montreal Expos owner Jeffrey Loria, who presided over that club’s demise in the early 2000s.
“They slowly traded their best players, didn’t get enough in return, the club went downhill and (Loria) kept making promises and never did anything and basically ran it into the ground.
“I don’t think Melnyk wants to move the team. He just doesn’t want to put money into it, at least until he sees what happens with LeBreton, but he’s not going to change his modus operandi.”
Dealing Karlsson, Wells added, would send a message to other veteran Senators players that the team wouldn’t be competitive. “It’ll come down to (Mark) Stone and (Matt) Duchene, and Duchene left Colorado because he didn’t want to deal anymore with a brutal rebuild.
“With Karlsson leaving, you’d hope there be enough of a return to kickstart things here, but there’s nothing here to kickstart or improve the team.”
It speaks volumes, Wells added, that the online reaction to the trade from fans of the Toronto Maple Leafs and Montreal Canadiens was sympathetic. “Instead of riding us, they’re saying they feel sorry for us, it’s got so bad.”
Like Anwar, Wells says he’s disinclined to continue to buy tickets to the handful of Senators games he typically attends each season. “I’m happy to watch the Senators on TV with some friends.
“There are going to be some really, really long nights.”
That said, in 1990, two years after the Gretzky trade, the Oilers, led by Mark Messier, won the Stanley Cup. Senators fans may be wondering if Messier can still skate and if he’d be willing to move here.
bdeachman@postmedia.com
https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local...karlsson-trade
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