Ottawa Senators Mid-Season Grades

Feb 5, 2023 - 12:00 PM

While the Ottawa Senator are (hopefully) enjoying their extended time off, now is a great time to take stock of how the season has gone to-date. Who’s performed above your expectations? Who’s been a disappointment? We’ll be running our mid-season grades feature starting on Wednesday this week, and as always we want to incorporate the community’s input.

The only criteria for player inclusion here is a minimum of ten games played. It means that Jake Lucchini is going to get a grade while Josh Norris (and Ridley Greig) won’t. Ultimately, I decided that anything less than ten games was just too small a sample size to evaluate. Sorry Josh, hopefully you are healthy again next year!

Whenever we run this feature there’s always a debate about how you are supposed to assign grades. I’ve always viewed this exercise as something akin to giving a star rating to a movie, or a book; that is to say, there’s a strong element of subjectivity.

My personal approach is to consider my expectations of the player, as well as the role that they’re being asked to play, while also allowing that the best players are given the biggest opportunity for a reason. So, for example, while I believe Erik Brännström has been great in his role, he is on the third pair for a reason. He can’t get an A because if he was worthy of an “A”, he would be on the top pair. But all of that is just my own personal approach to these things. Part of what makes this exercise interesting each year is to hear how folks approach their own evaluations.

We’ll be closing the voting by Tuesday afternoon, so be sure to get your ballot in before then!

https://forms.gle/boabxeHjrUj9opQH7