Pierre Dorion's legacy could still prove positive for Senators

OTTAWA — Taking the pulse on social media, which can be risky, most Ottawa Senators fans weren’t upset to see GM Pierre Dorion walk out the door. 

In fact, many would have held the door open for him to leave as general manager, and offered to drive him to the airport — if he didn’t live just down the road in suburban Orleans. 

Will those same fans be tipping a cap to Dorion in a few years time if Sens captain Brady Tkachuk is hoisting a Stanley Cup and passing it along to Claude Giroux, then Tim Stützle and Jake Sanderson — all players acquired and secured long term during Dorion’s tenure as GM?

My guess is yes. 

This is the yin and yang of assessing a GM’s influence on a team. Almost always, there are brilliant moves, obvious moves, strokes of luck (thank you, San Jose, for stinking in 2019-20, handing Stutzle to Ottawa), mediocre moves and bad moves. 

Boo!!!! to the trade of Mark Stone to Vegas for Erik Brannstrom and a second-round pick that became Egor Sokolov. 

Yay!!!! to the deal that sent Erik Karlsson, after years of brilliant play in Ottawa, to San Jose for what turned out to be Stützle and Josh Norris. 

Nice job locking up the young core at reasonable prices. 

Not so good, that quest for goaltending and defence that brought the burden of contracts paid to Matt Murray (still on the books) and Nikita Zaitsev. Perhaps the latest goalie, Joonas Korpisalo, will pan out. 

On it goes. Yin and yang. 

Dorion was fired by the Senators on Tuesday evening for costing Ottawa a first-round draft choice over the Evgenii Dadonov no-trade list fiasco, but new owner Michael Andlauer admitted that the deception to the Vegas Golden Knights and then, the Anaheim Ducks, was a last-straw offence, a final strike against Dorion. Andlauer, on the job since only Sept. 22, was already palpably upset over Dorion’s handling of the salary cap this summer, when he was unable to fit RFA centre Shane Pinto onto the roster. 

If you think of a GM’s job as the overseer of staff, judge of hockey talent, manager of money and communicator to media, it’s probably fair to say that Dorion was an excellent scout. That’s his background. His forte. He came by it naturally as his late father was a successful judge of talent. 

The rest of it? To be kind, he was less suited to it. Working within a skinflint regime, he could have used more staff, but why then did he not lean on, entrust, the staff he did have?

Under Dorion, staff came and went like sports tourists. Pierre McGuire, SVP of player development (a hire forced on Dorion by then-owner Eugene Melnyk), assistant general manager Peter MacTavish, chief scout and later assistant general manager Trent Mann, AHL Belleville coach Troy Mann. And more. 

That is a lot of turnover considering it all happened under Dorion’s watch, and not during the tenure of Bryan Murray as GM from 2007-16. Dorion worked for Murray that entire time. 

It hit me Wednesday that Dorion is the first NHL GM to be fired in Ottawa since John Muckler in 2007, after the Senators reached the Stanley Cup Final. That’s an astounding run, considering the instability that has so often marked this franchise. Murray moved “upstairs” in 2016 because he was ill with cancer. He died in 2017. 

Murray was Ottawa’s seventh GM and Dorion, the eighth. They were by far the longest-serving GMs in franchise history. 

Since 2007, the Senators have had eight head coaches. And two GMs. In 16 years. 

Not coincidentally, Murray and Dorion worked for mercurial owner Melnyk for most of that time, until Melnyk’s death in March 2022. Many others would have passed on that, ahem, opportunity. And would Dorion have had a chance to be GM anywhere else? Perhaps. But he stepped right into this one and was fully accepting of Melnyk’s varying moods and tight budgets. 

Not the easiest boss in the world, but Dorion signed up for that challenge and paid consequences for it. 

Since Melnyk’s passing, Dorion has had full control, no meddling owner to blame while reporting to a board of directors that did not cast the same shadow over him as Melnyk. We can hardly say it has been a peaceful year and a half at the end of a six-year stretch without a playoff appearance. 

One major difference between Murray and Dorion: Murray nurtured young hockey minds, took pride in finding the next good young coach or a future GM like his nephew Tim Murray or a chief scout like Dorion. 

Dorion did not foster the same goodwill among staff. Did not empower them. That is the feeling of many. Even Andlauer, new to Ottawa, picked up on that by speaking to hockey staff here in recent weeks. 

“I do feel there are people who care greatly, who want to do more in this organization,” Andlauer said. “And that’s for Steve (Staios) to assess and take it from there.”

Staios, hired on Sept. 29 as the president of hockey operations, will be the interim GM while he searches for a full-time candidate.

Though generally pleasant to those who have covered this team over the years, Dorion would sometimes disappear for weeks on end during a rough patch, apologizing when he emerged to deliver a state of the union scrum. 

He didn’t have Murray’s innate sense of knowing when a crisis, real or imagined, required a leader’s visible message of calm, honest discourse. Things would get better, we always felt, because Murray said they would. He believed it, or at least sold us on the idea. 

Dorion might have been lacking in that area and others, but on his watch the organization drafted some excellent talent, with a few glaring misses. 

On the day Brady Tkachuk lifts that Cup, may we all live to see it, Dorion’s unshakeable belief in an eight-goal scorer out of Boston University will not be forgotten.