Can Travis Green Get Even More Out of the Senators Without

I'm starting to wonder if we've been looking at Travis Green the wrong way. When Ottawa hired him, the move wasn't exactly greeted as a brilliant coaching decision. Green had been through the Vancouver experience, and there were plenty of questions about whether he was really the guy who could take the Senators where they wanted to go.

Well, here we are. Ottawa has made the playoffs in consecutive seasons under Green. They haven't exactly set the world on fire once they got there. Two first-round exits aren't the kind of thing that gets a coach a parade. But I'm not sure that's the most interesting part of what Green has done.

Green has the Senators playing like a team.

The interesting part is that the Senators have often looked like more than the sum of their parts. That's something I pay attention to. A coach doesn't magically turn a mediocre player into a superstar. But a good coach can sometimes get a young team to play with more structure, confidence and consistency than you might expect.

Green seems to have done some of that in Ottawa. Now comes the really interesting test.

Brady Tkachuk is gone. That's not just losing a good hockey player. Tkachuk was a personality, an emotional leader and a pretty important part of what Ottawa was becoming. When you take that kind of player out of a young team's lineup, you don't simply replace his goals and move on.

Who’s the next emotional leader for the Senators?

Somebody has to become the next guy. Maybe that's where Green earns his money. Ottawa's younger core now has to take another step. Tim Stützle can't just be a talented young star anymore. He has to become one of the players who drives the team. Jake Sanderson has to keep growing. The rest of the young group has to become more consistent.

And Green has to convince them that losing Tkachuk doesn't mean losing the team’s identity. That might not be easy. But maybe that's exactly what makes this season interesting. If Green can get Ottawa back into the playoffs without Tkachuk, while getting more out of the younger players, then I think we have to start talking about his coaching differently.

Can Green get the Senators to play better than they look on paper?

Maybe he isn't simply the guy who got the Senators over the playoff hump. Maybe he's the guy who figured out how to make a young team better than it looked on paper. And that's a much more interesting coaching story. The next step, of course, is the hard one.

Getting into the playoffs is one thing. Getting the Senators to actually win a round is another. But if Green can get this younger Ottawa group to take another step without Tkachuk, we might find out that his biggest accomplishment in Ottawa wasn't making the playoffs.

It was preparing the Senators to become a better team after one of their most important players left.