Mendes Monday Musings

I should have known we were destined for a low-scoring, goalie-friendly game on Sunday afternoon in Quebec City.

Just moments before they went to centre ice to drop the puck for the ceremonial faceoff, Patrick Lalime greeted Martin Brodeur with a huge hug and a smile.

“La première étoile, the first star!” Lalime yelled emphatically, as he grabbed his fellow netminder.

Prior to that, Lalime was deep in conversation with his longtime head coach Jacques Martin outside of the Senators locker room.

The early 2000s Senators-Devils energy was pulsating through that hallway and probably zapped all the offensive firepower from both locker rooms in the process.

But Saturday wasn’t the first time I saw Lalime in Quebec City over the weekend. On Friday, I had an opportunity to watch Lalime and his former teammate Antoine Vermette spend time at the CHUL et Centre Mere-Enfant Soleil – the children’s hospital here in Quebec City.

Then on Saturday, several of our key players – including Thomas Chabot, Tim Stützle, Brady Tkachuk, Linus Ullmark, David Perron and Claude Giroux – visiting a local food bank in Quebec City and you’ll see that our visit here extended well beyond hockey. The Senators Community Foundation dropped off cheques for $10,000 at each of these spots too.

On Monday morning, Chabot was planning on heading back to his old elementary school to speak to the students and donate some floorball equipment on behalf of the organization.

The Sunday afternoon win over the Devils was nice, especially when coupled with a handful of small wins off the ice here in Quebec City.

(I highly doubt we’ll be able to make such a strong community impact when we roll into St. Louis for a few hours to play the Blues later this week).

Trivia time: I had a chance to spend some time with Vermette in Quebec City and figured I would work him into this week’s trivia question.

Antoine Vermette scored 13 career shorthanded goals with the Senators. Can you name the only three players with more shorthanded goals for Ottawa than Vermette? (Answer at the bottom of this column).

Media roundup: Looking back at some interesting and fun Senators stories you might have missed over the past seven days.

1. One thing you’ll notice moving forward is more contributions in the content sphere from myself and Sylvain St. Laurent on our website. We’re both ex-journalists with 20-plus years of writing and reporting under our belt and we should use that experience to enhance the storytelling on our platforms. Good example: This piece from Sylvain last week, in which he spent some time with Thomas Chabot in his hometown in advance of our team visit to Quebec City. You’ll learn how Thomas failed a high school exam after not doing an assigned reading and what the punishment was from his dad. (I hope Thomas tells this story to the elementary school kids he visits on Monday).

1. We decided to grant another one-on-one interview with Michael Andlauer last week – with the caveat being the reporter had to actually be taller than our owner. Kudos to Alex Adams of Sportsnet for reaching that bar and pulling off this interview with Michael about his two-year anniversary of being the team owner. I appreciated the Q&A format and I especially liked Michael’s answer about what he learned about his initial visit to Quebec City earlier this year.

1. It was very fun to attend the Amazon Prime Video screening of Brady Tkachuk’s episode of Faceoff, which will drop on Friday of this week. Our Jackson Starr landed a red carpet interview with Brady and chatted with him about the process of having a camera on him all the time at various points last season.

1. I’ve often told Linus Ullmark that I would have loved to have interviewed him as a reporter. I think I would have enjoyed his style, which demands reporters bring their A-game for questions. He’s not a cliché guy with his answers and he forces reporters to do the same with their line of questioning. It can make for some interesting interactions, but Linus’ genuine and caring side was on full display when speaking about using his pads to raise awareness for childhood cancer with the media last week. Postmedia’s Bruce Garrioch captured the story nicely here. If you have the time to watch all of Ullmark’s media session, start watching at about the 1-minute mark of this video and I promise you’ll have a greater appreciation for his perspective.

Streaming pre-season games and local TV blackouts:

I mentioned in my debut column last week that I want this weekly piece to be a little bit of everything. Sometimes we can get fun and silly. Other times, it might take a more serious tone.

And I think we must delve into a sensitive topic here and talk about our broadcasts, because they were certainly a topic of conversation over the past week.

Our first regional broadcast on TSN 5 took place on Tuesday in Toronto and sure enough, my mentions on social media were peppered with Sens fans saying they were blacked out from watching the game – even though they live in the heart of Ottawa. This was an issue that has been plaguing our fans for several years and it looks like it’s back again for 2025-26.

Trust me when I say this is a frustrating problem for both us and TSN and if there was a ‘magic button’ solution, we would have pressed it long ago.

So what’s going on? The main issue seems to be rooted in IP addresses for fans watching games on television. I didn’t know this until I hunted around for answers last year, but your IP address could be tied to another place in Ontario – even if you live in Orleans, Kanata or Barrhaven. There’s a chance your IP address pops up as something emanating from Kitchener, Toronto or Windsor – and therein lies the problem.

Your internet cable provider thinks you’re trying to watch a TSN 5 game from out-of-market, even though you live within a stone’s throw of Canadian Tire Centre. If you try and stream the game on your phone – using regular data – you’ll be fine because it will register that your device is in Ottawa. But try watching the game off Wi-Fi on that same phone and boom, you’re back to the same problem. It might think you’re in Kitchener.

So what are the solutions?

1. I’ve been told some fans have had success by contacting their internet service provider and asking them to “whitelist” their IP address.

1. Watch the game using your cable provider’s app on your phone using data – and stream to your television. But this only works if you have unlimited data on your phone and your television allows mirroring.

If anybody else has ideas or solutions for how they’ve solved this issue, please send an email to [email protected].

I’m not going to rest until every single one of our fans is able to access our games in our viewing region. It’s 2025 and watching regular season NHL games should be the most frictionless experience and I’m genuinely sorry you’re dealing with this technical glitch.

Now speaking of technical glitches, that brings us to Sunday’s game against the Devils from Videotron Centre.

This game was always scheduled to be broadcast on TVA Sports 2 in French, while our English rightsholder – TSN – decided not to show this game. As an important caveat, our organization doesn’t dictate broadcasting schedules or which networks decide to show which games.

Last week, we approached TSN, the Devils and the NHL about the idea of streaming this game on our website. All three parties were in agreement and we were hoping to execute this for our fans on Sunday. We even planned to have our radio play-by-play team of Dean Brown and Gord Wilson provide the commentary for our streaming feed. But given the technical issues we might be facing, we didn’t want to promote this or promise this in advance – only to have something malfunction.

And sure enough, we faced a lot of glitches. Our on-site team and the technical team back at TSN 1200 probably spent the better part of six hours trying to figure out a solution on Sunday. Without getting into all the boring technical stuff, I will simply say we could not provide TSN 1200 with a feed they felt comfortable with having Dean and Gord call the game from back in Ottawa.

So around 1 p.m. on Sunday, TSN 1200 made the decision to not air the game on radio. That left us in a further conundrum: Should we try and just stream the game with no commentary on our website? (For those wondering, we would not have the ability to stream the French play-by-play, since those rights belonged to TVA Sports and they were already doing the game on their network. The only reason we could even think about going down this road was because TSN wasn’t doing the game, leaving the English feed open for us).

We decided to go ahead with this plan, hoping we could just use the in-arena audio as the background sound. Fans would be able to hear players skating, passes hitting the tape and the music in the arena. Alas, there was an issue with that – leaving us with a video feed, but with no audio.

We still decided to move forward and show the game because our thought was, “Anything is better than nothing.”

Still, we took some heat and complaints on social media. We don’t run a massive production truck with a staff of 40 people to put a game on television. We’re basically trying to stream a live event using a singular transmitting box and a small handful of staff.

I thought showing a feed of the game – without any sound – was better than no feed at all. And if there is any criticism for that, it should be pointed squarely in my direction. We’re going to be in the same boat for Thursday’s game in St. Louis, which is not being broadcast on television by any network – including the Blues home feed.

We’ll try and find a solution that works, but please know we’re trying our best behind the scenes on this stuff. And we want the same thing as you: More access to the team and a frictionless viewing experience.

Random thoughts:

Sticking with broadcasts for a moment, the Islanders are unveiling some new strategies for their television and radio coverage this season. The most intriguing thing is their ‘AltCast’, which is set to feature Cal Clutterbuck and Josh Bailey providing some casual commentary and candid stories for select broadcasts this season. Think of the ‘Manning Cast’ – only hyper-localized for the Islanders audience. I love this format and would like to explore options for something similar in Ottawa down the road.

The Devils lineup in Quebec City featured a handful of familiar faces for Sens fans. Connor Brown, Angus Crookshank and Evgenii Dadonov all suited up for New Jersey. And the Devils brought an Ottawa flavour behind the bench too, as Matt Carkner – who is the assistant coach for New Jersey’s AHL team in Utica – was helping coach the Devils squad in Quebec City.

Trivia answer: Antoine Vermette scored 13 career shorthanded goals with the Sens, a figure that is only topped by: Daniel Alfredsson (25 career shorthanded goals), Mike Fisher (14) and Zack Smith (14). If you guessed Jean-Gabriel Pageau, you wouldn’t be far off, since he’s tied with Vermette at 13 career shorties with the Sens.