TEMPE, Ariz. -- When 71-year-old Jacques Martin took his spot behind the Ottawa Senators bench on Tuesday, it had been more than a decade since he served as a head coach, since 2011-12, a lifetime in the span of many hockey players’ careers.
By his side was Daniel Alfredsson, the Hall of Fame player and all-time leading Senators scorer who was still the team’s captain last time Martin was a head coach in the NHL with the Montreal Canadiens.
And while there was certainly hope that the Senators, who came into the game mired in a four-game losing streak that led to the firing of coach D.J. Smith, would receive the new-coach bounce that other teams across the NHL have experienced this season, that wasn’t exactly what happened.
There was no immediate jolt, no new lease on the season.
Instead, after the Senators built up a 3-0 lead against the Arizona Coyotes on Tuesday at Mullett Arena, chasing starting goalie Connor Ingram, they let the Coyotes come storming back with three goals in the third period, including two in the span of 33 seconds. J.J. Moser scored first at 9:14 before Clayton Keller tied it 3-3 at 9:47.
The disappointment was capped at 16:27 when the puck bounced off the skate of Travis Hamonic and in, earning the Coyotes the 4-3 win and the Senators their fifth straight loss.
“Couple of areas that we need to be better at,” said Martin, who previously served as Ottawa coach from 1996-2004. “I addressed the team after the game, from the standpoint, the effort was there. It’s just that we need to understand a couple areas. Our puck management needs to be better. A couple other areas that we’ll address.”
That, indeed, is where Martin will go to work.
Because the Senators will not get a freebie. They will not start with a four-game winning streak, like the Minnesota Wild did with new coach John Hynes after he took over on Nov. 27 following the firing of Dean Evason.
“It’s going to be a process,” Martin said. “We have different areas that we need to be better at. It’s not going to happen all in one day. I think what I want to see is a progression as we move along here.”
They will not throw out what the Senators were doing under Smith, who was let go along with assistant coach Davis Payne on Monday. Not yet. Not now. There is so much to sort out, so much to work through, so much to improve.
So, so much to do.
“You have to work with what’s already established,” Martin said. “You can’t change everything. You want to bring some adjustments in some cases, maybe some change of system at some point, but I think you want to make sure you don’t overload the players. I think, to me, it’s a couple of areas that I feel that we need to be better, and we’ll address them tomorrow.”
For Martin, there is no time limit. No deadline. But improvements need to be made. Progression needs to be seen.
It’s not something the Senators themselves don’t already know.
“When something like yesterday happens, it’s that much more real,” defenseman Jakob Chychrun said. “There is accountability, and there’s going to be. We saw that from management, and now, at the end of the day, it’s on us as the players to turn it around. At the end of the day, they made that change for us. If we don’t continue to hold up our end of the bargain -- it’s our job now to run with the change they felt they had to make.
“It’s on us as players to go out and turn this thing around now.”
And while “now” wasn’t on Tuesday against the Coyotes, the Senators will get another chance Thursday when they head to Ball Arena to face the Colorado Avalanche (9 p.m. ET; ALT, TSN5, RDSI).
“We need to just learn from our mistakes, take accountability as a group and responsibility for the way we’ve been playing and fix it,” captain Brady Tkachuk said.
There remain aspects of the Senators to be excited about -- their youth and talent, their enthusiasm, their energy. Martin mentioned all of those and more on Tuesday, before he had coached the team for the first time. He mentioned that they need to manage the game better, something he reiterated later after he had suffered his first loss with them.
That will be on Martin. It will be, too, on Alfredsson, the player whose name is catnip to Senators fans.
Asked what he can offer the team, Alfredsson said: “The emotions of a game, the ups and downs, that you stick with it. I think we have struggled a bit with when we are having a moment or a stretch in a game where we’re hemmed in our own end, we don’t respond great all the time. How to handle that, so we don’t dig ourselves deeper in a hole or change the momentum. Stuff like that will be where I’m most useful.”
He looked comfortable behind the bench on Tuesday, even though the move to an NHL staff is new for him.
But even his presence couldn’t bring the stability that the Senators need. At least, not in one day.
The Senators players believe their effort has been there, they just have to channel that to the right places. They believe that some of what’s gone wrong is fixable, including their discipline, their intelligence in some areas of their game.
They have the tools. They have to execute.
“When changes like this happen, it starts with the coach and then, if things don’t get figured out, then other things happen,” Tkachuk said. “For us, we want to win as a group. We want to win with the guys that we have. We just need to learn from our mistakes, hold ourselves accountable for the mistakes that we’ve made here in the last little bit.”
Because changing the coach can only do so much. Ultimately, for the players, it’s up to them.
“With the roster that we have, I think we had high expectations -- we still do -- for this team and when you don’t meet those, changes are going to be made,” Chychrun said. “We still have a lot of belief in this room. It’s still early in the year. We have a lot of games in hand. Things can change fast in this league.
“That’s our mindset is we’re not out of this thing and we need to just take it one day at a time. And work on the areas that we need to work on and things that we’ve been lacking in our game that’s been contributing to these losses, and turn this thing around. You never know what’s going to happen.”
