Ottawa Senators: It’s time for Eugene Melnyk to sell the team

The Ottawa Senators deserve a much better owner than Eugene Melnyk.

The world of sports has been littered with awful owners. There’s James Dolan, who has consistently allowed his New York Knicks to trot out unacceptably horrible lineups for years. Of course, there’s Jeffrey Loria too, who was so incompetent, he nearly got two MLB teams moved. None of them can hold a candle to Ottawa Senators owner Eugene Melnyk.

Since taking over the Senators in 2003, the Senators have been a below average team if you look at point percentage. Any time they’ve had success, it usually hasn’t been sustainable. Sure, they made it to the Stanley Cup Final in 2006-07, but they got swept.

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In a span of 18 months, the Senators traded arguably their best player in franchise history (Erik Karlsson), their best player (Mark Stone), and a fan favorite (Jean-Gabriel Pageau). Since their Eastern Conference Final run in 2017, only the Detroit Red Wings have a worse record.

But I’m not here to talk about the on-ice issues. As bad as they are, they are merely the tip of the iceberg. A monumentally giant iceberg. As bad as Melnyk has been for the Senators on-ice product, he’s been a flat out embarrassment off the ice.

Even before he bought the Senators, he was one of the few human beings alive who could say he had two countries investigating him for fraud. The very money Melnyk used to buy the Senators in 2003 is shady at best.

Oh, and remember how he traded Karlsson in 2018? Well, that wasn’t even the first time he parted ways with a franchise legend. In fact, he got rid of Daniel Alfredsson twice. Alfredsson should have been a Senator for life. Melnyk made sure it didn’t happen. That alone puts him among the worst sports team owners in history.

Melnyk has been famously cheap, as the Senators traditionally have a fairly low team salary and cap hit. However, he’s been taking it to a new level over the last few years. It’s been so bad, whatever this video is supposed to be probably doesn’t even crack the top five most humiliating things to happen during that time.

Melnyk’s latest foul, however, is why we’re here. It’s why Melnyk needs to sell the Senators. The final straw that has broken the camel’s back came when the team surprisingly decided to cut ties with their charitable foundation. Everyone wondered why this happened. What could have caused such a sudden, unexpected breakup?

Rick Gibbons of The Ottawa Sun shed some light by digging deep into the foundation’s finances. It shouldn’t be surprising that Melnyk was right in the middle of it. Last year, The Organ Project, the one decent thing Melnyk has done for the city of Ottawa, raised a shade under $1 million. $100,000 of that (in addition to $15,000 in sponsorships) came from the Senators foundation.

The Organ Project didn’t invest much of that $1 million it raised.

So what happened to all that money? Again, according to CRA filings, The Organ Project invested barely $5,000 of the nearly $1 million it raised on organ donor awareness. For those without a calculator, that’s 0.49 per cent, or less than half a cent for every dollar raised.

Now, this charity issue has a lot of layers, and the charitable foundation is certainly to blame for some of this. But it’s telling that there’s another problem in Ottawa and yet again, Eugene Melnyk is right at the center of it. This has quickly become the norm. Melnyk embarrassing himself and the Senators organization has become a tradition.

Listen, I know what it’s like to have a terrible owner. I’m a Baltimore Orioles fan. Peter Angelos is the only Orioles owner I’ve ever known. If I posted my honest thoughts about him on this website, there would probably be no fewer than 10 naughty four-letter words. The Orioles under Angelos have far more often than not being a huge disappointment, and even a huge joke at times.

I’ve been an Orioles fan since 1993. Do you know how many seasons of .500 baseball I’ve seen during that time? I can count them on two hands. Nine times. How many times have the Orioles made the postseason* since 1993? Just four times. 1996, 1997, 2012, and 2014.

*Nothing happened in 2016. 

That’s why I know Senators fans deserve better. Ottawa fans, when they have a competitive team, will show up to games. This is a fact. But I can’t see how Senators fans are going to be willing to trust anything Melnyk does after this latest fiasco. They’re actively rebelling against him, and I can’t blame them. This wasn’t just a rash decision, either. It’s been building for a while.

Senators fans, you all deserve so much better. You guys rebelled against your owner by raising more money for organ and tissue research in one day (over $18,000) than Melnyk’s foundation did in one year ($5,000). And you know what? I respect that. Speaking from experience, I know a bad owner when I see one. And I can’t think of a worse owner than Melnyk.