Are the Ottawa Senators the New Maple Leafs?

Remember how fun and easy it was to make jokes about the Toronto Maple Leafs? Dave Nonis would give Colton Orr a two-year contract, or an assistant general manager would tell a local sports radio station that punching someone in the face was more important than scoring goals, or the team would take a 4-1 lead in a Game 7 and, well, you remember those days.

The Leafs could have won Canadian comedy awards.

Then they hired Brendan Shanahan, who employed analytics people and hired Kyle Dubas and Mike Babcock, and tanked for Auston Matthews and dumped every rotten contract on the books. Now here they are in a wild-card spot with 21 games to go in the season. Maybe the old regime would've paid a king's ransom for a third-line center or a mediocre defenseman, but not this one.

Instead, they send a second-round pick to the Tampa Bay Lightning for Brian Boyle, who brings playoff experience, penalty-killing ability, and a reasonable amount of offense for a bottom-six center/winger. It's a good move even if the Leafs don't make the playoffs. It's responsible, savvy, and inexpensive.

I miss laughing at a team from Ontario, especially around this time of year.

Oh hey, Ottawa Senators!

Guys, what are you doing? Look, I'm with you. You see an opening in the Atlantic. We all do. The Canadiens are flailing. The Lightning are selling off pieces in February. The Bruins are… no one knows what they are. Same for the Panthers. This may be your best chance at winning the division or finishing second and grabbing some of that sweet playoff revenue for hosting two, three, or four first-round games.

But this is what you do?

Alexandre Burrows has nine goals in 55 games this season. For comparison, Boyle has 13 goals in 54 games and the Leafs did not have to sign him to a two-year extension to get him. They also didn't have to give up a 19-year-old point-per-game prospect in the Swedish league (Jonathan Dahlen) to facilitate the deal.

I won't pretend to have any type of special insight on Dahlen. He's 19 and plays in Sweden. I don't have a DirecTV Swedish Elite League package where I watch every game. But the people who make a living studying prospects seem to think he has potential to be a good NHL player down the road. It's an odd gamble by Senators GM Pierre Dorion when you consider this deal hardly guarantees the team a playoff berth.

Burrows turns 36 in a month; Boyle just turned 32.

Burrows will be 38 years old when his $2.5 million cap hit comes of the books; Boyle will be anywhere between two and four months older when he's no longer the Leafs' responsibility.

Trading Dahlen for Burrows isn't quite a vintage Leafs transaction worth instant mockery, because you get what they're doing. But it's a lot for a guy at the end of his career when it may not result in the Senators even reaching the playoffs. They're one four-game losing streak from finding themselves in a dire situation, and they might have to find ice time for Burrows the next two years? And if Burrows-Dahlen becomes a lighter version of Martin Erat for Filip Forsberg, that's how jobs get lost.

These trades are a glimpse of what to expect in Ontario in the future.

The cash-strapped (or stingy) Senators will do whatever it takes to slip into the postseason and play one round before calling it a season. While some teams would consider it a failure to be consistently on the fringe of the playoffs and to be dumped out after one round, the Senators see a decent prospect and a two-year extension for a 36-year-old as a fair price to pay for that postseason gate.

The Leafs have so much money that they'd probably pay Burrows not to play if it helped with their long-term goal of winning a Stanley Cup. They're not trading a decent prospect and giving a bottom-six forward a contract extension as some sort of signal to fans that they're trying to win. The past regime cared about gestures and appeasing fans; this one does not.

Two teams in similar places in the standings with similar hopes of going deep in the playoffs acquired somewhat similar players, but Ottawa paid a lot more for the inferior player while Toronto exercised—sigh—prudent judgment, because it knows this very young team is slightly ahead of schedule and a playoff trip isn't worth overpaying for.

We may not have the Leafs to mock anymore, but maybe we can take solace in the idea that the two-year extension for Burrows is the great first episode of a new Canadian comedy show. Hopefully, the Senators will bring us some of the laughs the Leafs did.

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