from Ian Mendes of The Athletic,

On Nov. 28, the Ottawa Senators gathered at Canadian Tire Centre with their season teetering on the brink of collapse.

The previous evening, the club had been served with an embarrassing 5-0 beatdown at the hands of the Florida Panthers, the worst home shutout loss in D.J. Smith’s tenure behind the bench in Ottawa. The calls for Smith’s job reached a feverish pitch in the marketplace. The currency from winning two overseas games in Stockholm had quickly expired.

As the players gathered inside the arena on that Tuesday morning, they weren’t exactly sure what tone was going to greet them. Lopsided losses can sometimes lead to a coaching staff delivering blunt and blistering criticism to the players, complete with video evidence to support their case.

But instead, Ottawa players found a calm and communicative coaching staff waiting for them.

“It wasn’t a meeting where you come in and the coach kind of gives it to you,” Drake Batherson told The Athletic. “It was more of a meeting saying, ‘Let’s change a few things up.'”

Smith and his staff identified two key areas where they wanted the club to improve. They wanted Senators players to hang onto more pucks in the offensive zone and felt too many turnovers were occurring beyond the other team’s blue line. And they wanted to be sharper, crisper and more organized when breaking the puck out of their own zone.

In that Nov. 28 practice, Smith called his players over to the dry-erase board next to the home bench on four separate occasions. The practice had a classroom feel to it, which was an extension of the earlier meeting.

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