Ottawa Senators management just completely botched their handling of the scandal that recently exploded around the team and it may well cost them their season.

Maybe they should take some notes from how the National Hockey League team is run just down the 417 highway from them. Let’s just put this politely and say it is impossible to imagine Montreal Canadiens management handling a controversy as badly as the Sens handled the spit storm around Linus Ullmark.

The Canadiens are set to face off against the Senators at the much-loved — NOT! — Canadian Tire Centre just outside of Ottawa on Saturday (7 p.m., City, SNE, TVA Sports) and it’s a huge game for the Habs given that they are coming off two straight losses to the Buffalo Sabres and the Washington Capitals. The race couldn’t be tighter in the Atlantic Division. A couple more losses and the CH could be on the outside looking in at the playoff teams in a few days.

It’s not a big game for the Senators because, as of Friday afternoon, they sit dead last in the division. At the start of the season, there was a lot of talk about how the Sens were a team to watch this year. I wrote a column in early October saying that it looked like the Senators were shaping up as Montreal’s No. 1 rival. Many felt the Sens were probably a little ahead of the Canadiens in their rebuild/retool/reset and that they’d likely be neck-in-neck with Montreal.

Well, they aren’t. And things are going south now that the team has been mired in a bizarre scandal surrounding the personal leave of Ullmark, their No. 1 goaltender. He was granted a leave of absence on Dec. 29 for unspecified personal reasons. When Ullmark, 32, left the team, he had a very respectable 14-8-5 record, a 2.95 goals-against average and an .881 save percentage. He skated with the team on Friday for the first time since his leave began. This week, the Sens signed veteran goalie James Reimer to a one-year deal.

Last week, someone posted anonymously on social media making some pretty slanderous allegations about Ullmark and his teammates. The post got picked up quickly by Senators fans and was becoming such a hot topic that within hours the Senators management team decided to issue a strongly worded statement attacking the post and the people circulating it.

The statement said that the rumours were “completely fabricated and false stories” and went positively ballistic in describing the people circulating them as “the lowest forms of trolls and sick people who scour the internet.” Geez, how do you really feel about these folks?

As soon as management’s statement hit the Internet, the story suddenly became a thousand times bigger. Soon enough, Hockey Night in Canada’s Elliotte Friedman was discussing it at length on his very popular 32 Thoughts podcast (he actually thought management did the right thing) and it was all over every major sports media outlet in Canada. And the players were asked about the rumours, with captain Brady Tkachuk furiously saying it was “f—ing bulls–t.”

In short, it was a huge mistake for Senators general manager Steve Staios and his colleagues to do this, and I can guarantee he didn’t put out that angry statement without running it past Michael Andlauer, the former Montrealer who owns the team. You just know that the folks who run the Canadiens — Geoff Molson, France-Margaret Bélanger, Jeff Gorton and Kent Hughes — would never put out a statement like that. It just fuels the flames.

It’s too bad. I thought when Andlauer took over in 2023 that this guy who grew up in N.D.G. would finally be able to move the franchise away from the endless controversies that marked the years when it was owned by Eugene Melnyk. Need I remind you that Chris Wideman, who later joined the Habs, and a few Senators teammates were caught on a video in an Uber trashing assistant coach Martin Raymond in 2018? Wideman was soon traded out of Ottawa.

Then there was the ridiculous soap opera surrounding rumours that Sens forward Mike Hoffman’s fiancée, Monika Caryk, was harassing defenceman Erik Karlsson’s wife, Melinda. That also led to Hoffman leaving town, traded to San Jose.

And Melnyk never seemed particularly good at dealing with any of this. The season after these two scandals, Melnyk gave a season-opening interview where he said, “Right now, we’re in the dumpster.”

And don’t for a second think these off-ice dramas don’t impact the play on the ice. Just look at the Vancouver Canucks, who have quite literally imploded ever since the locker-room spat last season between stars Elias Pettersson and J. T. Miller that led to Miller being traded to the New York Rangers and the Canucks going into the dumpster, to paraphrase Melnyk.

Again, compare those controversies with the Canadiens and feel good about being a Habs fan. This is the most united dressing room I’ve seen in decades. I remember someone close to the team telling me around the time of the 100th anniversary celebrations in 2009 that the room was sharply divided between the English players, the Europeans and the francophone Quebecers. Ten years ago, there was the infamous rift between P.K. Subban and some of the other players.

But today, they really act like a family. Did you see them celebrating Alexandre Tessier after his contract extension this week? Or the images of the entire team on the ice giving high-fives and hugs to Lane Hutson after he signed his big contract? They love each other and they love their coach, and that’s no small part of the reason the rebuild is ahead of schedule. It’s also why they’re near the top of the division and the neurotic Senators are in the basement of the Atlantic Division.

bkelly@postmedia.com

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