Does Melnyk have any plans to move the Ottawa arena, by the way? It is nigh-criminal that the Sens can't sell out a crowd in the second round but it makes sense when you consider that the arena is on the very fringe of the city.
I ask because my knowledge of the Sens is restricted to the "talking points", i.e. Melnyk is a penny pincher and talks too much. If there's a plan in place to change the situation, I haven't heard it.
Melnyk IS a penny pincher who talks too much. But the plan is to build a new arena closer to the downtown core. The National Capital Commission has a huge tract of land it wants developed at LeBreton Flats. Two groups were bidding on ... well, on the right to negotiate with the city to see if anything could be done with it, I guess.
The Sens-backed group won (with some grumbling from the Montreal-based group that was shut out), and now they've started to talk about thinking about deciding what to do with this project. The city will be embarking on phase II of the new commuter train network in 2018 (or thereabouts), so there's already a lot of construction planned for the next 5 years or so.
There are a lot of reasons why the Sens haven't been selling out (Ian Mendes wrote a good article on the topic here
http://www.tsn.ca/there-s-no-playoff-fever-in-ottawa-only-sens-malaise-1.737420), but one reason that is not discussed as much (because of our inherent sense of inferiority, I suppose) is that there are a lot of Leafs and Habs fans here. In spite of there being a basin of roughly 1.3 million inhabitants in Eastern Ontario/Western Québec, at most 60% of these would be potential Sens fans (that's my personal estimate: about 20% for each for the Leafs and the Habs, the odd Penguins, Caps, Oilers, or Bruins fan here and there). So Ottawa is not just a small NHL market, it's even smaller as a Sens market if that makes any sense. Places like Edmonton and Calgary must have similar problems, but there are Cups in their past and I would think that must make a difference. If the Sens had won in 2003 or 2007, perhaps it would be different?
Don't get me wrong, planting an arena halfway to Peterborough was a spectacularly idiotic idea: I used to go to 1 or 2 regular season games a year, plus 1 or 2 in the playoffs when they made it, but I got sick of spending 3 or 4 hours in the car whenever I would attend. So a downtown arena would be great. Would it be enough to transform this city into the kind of market that can support an NHL team year-in, year-out? I imagine that it could, but I think we would be back to square one after 10 more years.
I guess we'll see soon enough.
