Respect Is Earned: Tim Stutzle Hopes To Help Ottawa Finally Return To Post-Season And Beyond

The Ottawa Senators talk a lot these days about ‘Winning The Day.’ In fact, it’s such a big deal for them that we’ve used capital letters and put it in quote marks. It’s not exactly the big ‘BELIEVE’ sign that Ted Lasso taped up in the AFC Richmond dressing room, but it’s definitely a thing. Sometimes, it looks as simple as taking a day off when you need it or grinding through a tough practice when you’re not really feeling it. Other times, it’s about taking a puck under the visor and coming right back with a bunch of stitches above your eye and blood in your eyeball.

‘Winning The Day’ is one of those team-unifying slogans that people keep repeating until they believe it. It’s all about establishing a culture, whatever that means. “Sometimes, you hear all these phrases and clichés and you don’t really understand what it’s all about,” said Senators goalie Linus Ullmark. “But it’s about going about your day trying to be better. If you do that, you might not win every single game, because that’s totally unreasonable, but you’ll be in every single game.”

And sometimes, when you win the day, it resembles a hockey masterpiece, a symphony of skill and speed and efficiency that can take your breath away. It looks like the Senators’ 3-0 win over the Toronto Maple Leafs in mid-November, a game that makes you believe all the hype about this group of young and growing players might really be accurate. It’s the kind of game that has coach Travis Green’s head resting a little more comfortably on his pillow, knowing that the seeds that were watered with the hard lessons that come with lots of losing and immaturity before his arrival are starting to take root. “As much as (the young core) is part of the answer to winning,” Green said, “they’ve been part of the problem as well.”

Harsh, but true. That’s almost always to be expected when you commit to a strip-it-down-to-the-studs rebuild the way the Senators have.

Just under eight years ago, the Sens came within an OT goal of the Stanley Cup final. Then, they imploded. Since then, only the Detroit Red Wings and Chicago Blackhawks have worse records. The result has been forming a group of a bunch of young players who are all high draft picks and have had previous success doing it their own way but are generally clueless about what it takes to win in the best league in the world. And you often can’t surround them with stable, veteran leadership, because what 30-something guy wants to go to a team that’s going to take another five years to be good? So, you get a group of young guys who lose so much that maybe it comes just a little too easily to them.

Then, at some point, those lessons crystallize, and those young players start to get it and take it upon themselves to start developing winning attitudes. Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, Marc-Andre Fleury and Kris Letang went through it in Pittsburgh. Patrick Kane, Jonathan Toews, Duncan Keith and Brent Seabrook endured it in Chicago. And some nights, it looks as though the Senators are fully prepared to follow that blueprint. Other nights, not so much. They’re still learning to win the day.

In his fifth season in the NHL, Tim Stutzle is an enormous part of that progression. And judging by the first quarter of the season, he looks ready to accept the responsibility that comes with being an elite player.

At 22, Stutzle is continuing to grasp the concept of placing as much importance on a board battle as he does a highlight-reel play. The sublime skill and speed have always been there, even through all the losing. That turnover in the neutral zone might have been cute when they were terrible, but now, it can be the difference between winning a game and losing one. And Stutzle is catching on. “You can be a star in the league and be a winning player, and you can be a star in the league and not be a winning player,” Green said. “And I think he’s starting to understand that. There’s scoring hockey, and there’s winning hockey. There’s more to winning than just making nice plays.”

Stutzle is beginning to live by that ethos. So, too, are the likes of Brady Tkachuk, Jake Sanderson, Josh Norris, Shane Pinto and Ridly Greig, all of whom are 25 or younger and four of whom, coincidentally, are sons of former NHLers. There has been growth, to be sure, but there is room for more.

In the next game after the aforementioned win over the Leafs, the Sens gagged up a two-goal lead in the third period, then Stutzle failed to take away a lane to the net in overtime, which Flyers rookie Matvei Michkov was more than willing to exploit on the winning goal. Then, in the game after that one, the Senators were schooled by Carolina and Stutzle had a goal called back on a chintzy interference call that would have had him apoplectic a couple of years ago. “You just realize more what it takes to win,” Stutzle said. “To be honest, all I care about is winning hockey games. Obviously, we haven’t been very successful at that, and I want to change that. It has to come from everyone, and I feel like we have a different mindset this year. When I came up, I wasn’t known as a guy who could play on both sides of the ice, but I’m really trying to work on that. I’m fortunate to play for a coaching staff that helps me be better every day, and I’m blessed to have teammates who cover my ass when I need them.”

"As much as (the young core) is part of the answer to winning, they've been part of the problem as well." – Ottawa coach Travis Green

Maturity comes in all forms. And for Stutzle, much of that has to do with his body language and demeanor on the ice. When Stan Mikita was a little older than Stutzle is now, he was known as a hothead, both among fellow players and officials. In the space of two seasons, he piled up 300 penalty minutes, one fewer than ‘Terrible’ Ted Green for the league lead. But Mikita decided after the 1964-65 season that he would change his approach to the game entirely, and within two years, he won the first of two straight Lady Byng Trophies to go along with the Hart Trophies he won in those same seasons.

It hasn’t been that dramatic for Stutzle, but his reputation has clearly preceded him. Even though he hasn’t taken an embellishment penalty in more than three years, you didn’t need to be a lip reader last season when former Leafs coach Sheldon Keefe referred to Stutzle as “the f---ing biggest diver in the NHL.” And there was no reading between the lines necessary a couple of seasons ago when Brendan Gallagher of the Montreal Canadiens talked about Stutzle’s penchant for acting as though he’d been assaulted, only to be out there on the same power play. “There’s kids watching, and we’re role models,” said Gallagher at the time. “If I were a teammate of his, I’d tell him to smarten up. It’s just not a good look. Very talented player. Very good player. He needs to stop laying on the ice. It’s embarrassing.”

"All I care about is winning hockey games. Obviously, we haven't been very successful at that, and I want to change that." – Tim Stutzte

So, it’s a thing for sure. (Interesting side note: Stutzle is represented by Claude Lemieux, but the guy only does his contracts so don’t go jumping to conclusions, Judgey McJudgeface.) But the fact remains that since Stutzle entered the NHL in 2020-21, he has had only two embellishment penalties called against him. He’s sixth in the league in penalties drawn in that time, and only Connor McDavid and Elias Pettersson had better net penalty numbers than Stutzle. (Net penalties are the difference between penalties taken and penalties drawn.) Stutzle hasn’t exactly channeled his inner Mikita, but it’s clear he is making a more concerted effort to stay on his feet, and when he falls, he gets back up more quickly.

But there’s also the notion that the maturity has been physical as well as mental. When he came to the NHL at 18, he was just a kid, and a rather scrawny one at that. Is it possible that Stutzle kept falling down because he simply hadn’t spent enough time in the weight room? “Since I was a kid, I wasn’t that stable on my feet,” Stutzle said. “I come into the league, and I’m 18 playing against guys who are 30. It wasn’t that I was trying to draw a penalty; it’s that I wasn’t strong enough to stay on my skates. I feel like now I can get into battles and I can win more battles, and I really worked on that over the summer. If we have a 2-on-1, why would I dive? It doesn’t make any sense.”

If you think he fell down a lot in the NHL, you should have seen him in the German League as a 17-year-old playing against men. Former NHLer Andrew Desjardins played with Stutzle for Adler Mannheim in 2019-20 and noticed how often he would get knocked to the ice. But unlike countryman Leon Draisaitl, who was playing in the WHL at the same age, Stutzle elected to stay in Germany and play the pro game, eschewing a full ride at the University of New Hampshire.

Stutzle would stay on the ice every day after practice for at least a half hour, working with Mannheim coach Pavel Gross on his game. “My parents obviously wanted me to go to college,” Stutzle said. “But I believed I could play a big part in Mannheim. (Gross) told me, ‘Listen, you’re going to get a chance, but if you don’t use it, I can’t play you.’ I took that on myself, and it worked out for me.”

It worked out for his teammates, too. That season, Mannheim had a veteran team with a lot of players who had kids, and Stutzle was often delegated to babysit, not that he had any objections to his player/babysitter role. “He’d play on the trampoline with the kids for hours, while we played flip-a-cup,” Desjardins said. “And it wasn’t a negative thing for him. I think he actually enjoyed it. He wasn’t much older than some of the kids at the time.”

Kids, though, they grow up so fast, eh? Joe Sakic was minus-102 in his first three seasons with the Quebec Nordiques, then look what happened. When Green took the job with Ottawa, he made it abundantly clear to Stutzle and the Senators’ other young stars what would be expected of them in all areas of the ice, and he’s been pleasantly surprised at the lack of pushback from them.

It turns out they want to stop losing. Wanting to and doing exactly what it takes to are different things, as they are finding out. But Green is optimistic. “We talked about what it takes to win, and I think, to a man, our so-called younger players probably haven’t bought in as much as they needed to in the past, and they haven’t gotten to the level they want,” said the Senators coach. “But when they do, I really like their game.”

In a game in early November, Norris was coming down on a 3-on-2 with Tkachuk and Stutzle. Norris tried to saucer a pass to Stutzle, but the puck hit Ryan Pulock’s stick and flew up under Stutzle’s visor, hitting him just above his right eye. After getting stitched up, Stutzle returned to the game despite blurry vision caused by blood build-up in his eye. That, however, didn’t stop him from setting up two third-period goals. Just as importantly, Stutzle got up on his own seconds after it happened and skated to the Senators’ bench without help.

That’s progress. “The guys think I look pretty nails,” said Stutzle after the mishap. Tough as nails? He’s working on it.

This article appeared in the Nov. 25, 2024, World Junior Championship issue of The Hockey News. In this edition, we feature wall-to-wall coverage of the 2025 World Junior Championship, complete with previews of all 10 teams plus some of the most prominent players involved. Also in this issue, we shine the spotlight on San Jose's Tyler Toffoli, Philadelphia's Travis Konecny and a team from Haida Gwaii that really goes the extra mile.

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