What We Learned: Ottawa Senators improved again, but...

You could make all the jokes you wanted about the Ottawa Senators last season, and I encourage the behaviour.

After a summer of saying, "This is it, this is the year," they fired their weirdly popular GM for biffing the legalities of a trade so badly the league took away a first-round pick. Then six weeks later, they fired the coach everyone knew they were going to fire. At the time of that coaching change, the Sens were four games below .500 (11-15-0), but his successor was barely more effective in terms of "winning" — they went just 26-26-4 in the final 56 games of the season. Also, one of the team's better young players, Shane Pinto, missed half the season due to some boo-boos around gambling stuff, which was the kind of thing that was bound to happen for the league and just an unfortuna