Sitting beside Thomas Chabot in the locker room comes with a lot of benefits for a young defenceman like Jordan Spence, but one of the downsides occurs when a throng of media enters the room after a practice and forces Spence to get undressed elsewhere.
On Tuesday, Spence ended up across the room in Warren Foegele’s stall, as his old teammate from Los Angeles remained out on the ice working on some skills after the practice had ended. He fielded questions there from a much smaller media contingent than the one that surrounded Chabot.
As he spoke about his career season, the emotions from the team clinching a playoff berth on Saturday, and the excitement towards playing playoff games in a Canadian market, he was briefly interrupted by Nick Cousins.
“Attaboy Spenny!” chimed in Cousins as he walked past, trying to break a straight-faced Spence.
A few minutes into the conversation, Shane Pinto entered the room and seemed perturbed that he had a new stallmate.
“You can’t sit here,” said Pinto, deadpanning, failing to get a reaction out of Spence. “Why are you sitting here?” he continued, which finally made Spence crack a smile and tell him to stop.
It was a series of interactions that underscored the “25 best friends” mantra in the Sens’ dressing room — and far from the first time this year that someone’s media availability had been interrupted by some non-media members.
In a now-viral moment from November, Tim Stützle and Drake Batherson were distracting Claude Giroux so badly that he had to stop his interview to tell them to be quiet. They even got the usually straight-faced veteran to crack a smile in front of the cameras.
Be it the veteran Giroux or the newcomer Spence, everyone is a piece of the puzzle in Ottawa.
“You could really see the gel on this team, the chemistry that they have,” said Spence, who arrived in Ottawa for training camp this fall after having spent his entire professional career with the Kings organization.
“Once I got in, luckily I knew some of the guys, especially Drake [Batherson], Dylan [Cozens], all these guys, it was so easy to get to know everybody. Now, being here for the full season, it feels like we’re all one big family, we can do anything we want. We can hang out, we can go to dinners, and it’s really easy. So I’m really happy to be here and be able to have this connection and also have these playoffs.”
A few days before, the players were gathered together in a meal room at their hotel in New Jersey watching a pivotal Devils-Red Wings game, rooting for the Devils to come out on top so that they would clinch a playoff berth.
It was fitting for a team that had been through so much together to be on the road and therefore together when they found out that they had clinched a playoff berth. The coaches were there as well, in a meeting room attached to the meal room.
“It was a nice moment after, everyone in both rooms coming together and enjoying the moment,” described Travis Green, who has led the group through the trials and tribulations of the season.
“It means a lot, we’re here to win. It’s all about winning and getting into the playoffs and competing for a Stanley Cup. We had to come a long way from January… says a lot about our group, about how they played, their belief, and being a good teammate for each other, and those are the three things we talked about a lot, and just sticking with it.”
As the weather gets warmer and the games get bigger, the hidden weapon of a team’s close bond can help carry a team to great heights — just ask Ernie Clement about the “power of friendship” the Toronto Blue Jays used on their way to the World Series last November.
“When you talk about a team, there’s a lot of components that go into a game, and it’s playing like a team, it’s not one line, it’s not Pints’ line, it’s not Timmy’s line, it’s not Cozens’, we’ve got a really good fourth line, I think we win and lose as a team,” said Green.
“And that’s probably why our team, I think, is as close as they are. They understand that as well and there’s no egos in the room.”
