Senators president Cyril Leeder in middle of playoff ticket frenzy — where he belongs

Such is the state of global chaos, folks are watching evening newscasts and shrinking retirement accounts with hands over their eyes. 

In one little corner of the world, however, things are unfolding as they should. The Ottawa Senators are a playoff team once again and club president Cyril Leeder is in the middle of the hubbub. 

It’s Sunday afternoon and the Senators have just shut out the Columbus Blue Jackets, Ottawa’s second zero in as many days. Leeder spends the game day, as usual, putting out logistical fires and attending to staff and client needs for the first couple of periods before settling into a 100-level suite to savour the third-period action. 

He’s at ice level now, in the hallway greeting a group of media retirees and semi-retirees invited to the game by communications VP Ian Mendes. Leeder patiently visits with the media mob while awaiting cameo appearances by franchise icon Daniel Alfredsson and former head coach Jacques Martin, who also chat amiably with the media regulars who once covered their deeds. 

When that group of yesteryear journalists rode the media/scout elevator down, Dave the Elevator Pilot eyed the assembled and quipped: “What year is this, 2001?”

Cy of relief

In the days leading up to Ottawa’s first playoff series in eight seasons, the president and CEO is being tugged in a hundred directions at once and couldn’t be happier about it. 

Weirdly, Leeder wasn’t a part of the Senators most recent playoff run in 2017 because he was let go in January of that year in a fit of pique by mercurial owner Eugene Melnyk. (Leeder’s perceived sin: he stood up for his staff through thick and thin. With Melnyk, there was both). 

As a co-founder of the NHL club and a top executive in the organization from Day 1, Leeder found himself watching from the outskirts as the 2017 Senators took a wild ride to the Eastern Conference Final. 

“It was very different for me that year,” says Leeder, sitting in a meeting room inside the Senators offices. “I was still a bit raw, having left the group and so, yeah, it wasn’t as fun as it should have been.”

Of course, Leeder still saw a lot of games. Various corporate partners of the Senators invited Leeder to the Canadian Tire Centre as their guest because they thought it outrageous that Leeder wasn’t part of the organization any more. 

The ousted exec took on a management role with the Myers Automotive Group and was quite content for several years. He spurned numerous other business offers and might still be there if Michael Andlauer hadn’t bought the Senators in the fall of 2023. 

Andlauer righted a lot of wrongs, built bridges to player alumni estranged during the Melnyk era, and wisely wooed Leeder to come back and finish the job of leading the business side of the Senators operation and getting a new arena built. 

The hockey side has been an even greater focus of the new group. 

With the building up of hockey operations with general manager Steve Staios and senior VP Dave Poulin, “the group they have there is great,” Leeder says. “Michael also has a good group of partners, they’re certainly contributing in a meaningful way to the organization.”

In the latter years of the Melnyk ownership, the Senators were a lean operation bordering on skeleton. What started as a selloff of player talent in the name of a deep rebuild bled into hockey operations and management, which was an embarrassingly thin group in terms of scouts and other staff. 

While they’re not done building yet, the Senators have more depth in all areas. 

“There’s more horsepower, for sure, throughout the organization,” says the soft-spoken Leeder. 

Fans who grew up knowing the roots of this club breathe a Cy of relief that Leeder is back, one of the true local drivers of this team.

On Tuesday, the Senators officially punched their ticket to the post-season on a rare assist from Montreal. 

By Wednesday morning, Leeder was in front of the cameras, outlining plans for Ottawa’s second season. 

“It’s fantastic. It’s exciting,” Leeder said. “It’s long overdue. We’re all walking with a little jump in our step this morning.”

A community just emerging from a deep and relentless winter is ready to wear its team colours on the Sens Mile on Elgin Street. A Senators flag will be hoisted at City Hall. Some 80,000 rally towels are en route to the nation’s capital. 

Nothing says Ottawa like a Senators playoff season. 

This is a thirst that can’t be quenched any other way. 

How Senators can fill building with own fans if facing Leafs in Round 1

Ottawa Senators president Cyril Leeder discuses the strategy to help fill their building with their own fans, especially if they’re facing the Toronto Maple Leafs in the first round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs.

Playoff tickets tied to season seats

NHL business staff will tell you they have to operate regardless of wins and losses on the ice. Also true: more wins than losses sure helps the bottom line. 

Job 1 for Leeder is improving on season ticket sales, which continue to lag behind the competition in the National Hockey League, even as the team shows the ability to compete against the league’s best. 

With that in mind, the Senators are giving first dibs at playoff tickets to current season ticket holders, as well as anyone who signs on for full or half-season packages for next season.

“We’re well below the league average (11,000) on season seats,” Leeder says. “So, that has been our priority. We make no bones about that.”

That fan frenzy we all sense in the community is reflected in seat sales. The Senators have sold close to 600 season ticket packages since March 1. It’s the best uptick in sales since that last playoff foray, in 2017. On Tuesday alone, the Sens sold 50 season ticket packages and handled more than 200 inquiries after the playoff spot was clinched. 

From a business perspective, this Senators roster is not aging, it’s appealing — a few veterans sprinkled through the lineup with the experience to settle the group in a playoff battle, but a young enough core that the Sens should be a contender for years to come. It’s similar to the way the rising talent in the late-1990s with Alfredsson, Marian Hossa, Martin Havlat, Wade Redden and Chris Phillips et al. launched a playoff contender from 1997 through to 2009. 

With one main difference. Alfie, Phillips and Hossa et al. didn’t have to wait 500-plus games to reach the post-season, as current leaders Brady Tkachuk and Thomas Chabot have endured. 

When the puck drops in Game 1, these guys are going to be “like gorillas coming out of a cage,” as Russian goalie Ilya Bryzgalov said of Team Canada at the 2010 Olympics.  

Leeder feels bad for other team once Brady’s ‘unleashed in playoffs’

Senators president Cyril Leeder is very excited to see Brady Tkachuk in the playoffs for the first time in his NHL career, and says “I’m not feeling to good about the other team, because Brady’s going to get unleashed in the playoffs.”

11,000 season tickets the goal

Spring emotions can spur September spending.  

Leeder believes the club can get to 11,000 season seat holders in two to three years. A competitive team will elevate numbers as it did in 2007 and 2008, when the Sens were a sellout nearly every game. 

If the Senators face the Maple Leafs in Round 1, fans can expect a much more favourable allotment of Ottawa fans in the stands compared to the regular season. That’s because season ticket holders are not only expected to hang onto their existing seats for the playoffs, they have also been offered access to two additional seats, at a discounted price, for every home game. The only proviso: the tickets cannot be resold on the secondary market. 

“It’s bad karma to pick your opponent, so we’re not going to do that,” Leeder said on Wednesday. “But I think a lot of fans would like to see the Battle of Ontario. That would be a lot of fun.”

Ottawa seat holders routinely sell off their tickets to Leafs and Montreal Canadiens home games during the season, using the resale profits to help pay for their other tickets. That’s not going to fly in the playoffs, where the largesse of the organization to offer extra seats comes with the caveat that they can’t be resold. The team will track these tickets to be sure they stay in hands of the fans that had access to them, along with their families and friends. Violators could lose their seat privileges. 

“One of the main benefits to being a season ticket holder is playoff access at the best price,” Leeder says. “If you go on the websites for Winnipeg or Edmonton right now, they’re selling new season seats. Get yourself guaranteed access to playoff tickets. And that’s kind of the message you want — get the best seats for the best games.”

If season ticket holders and pals gobble up most of the seats, it won’t leave much available for public sale. The few single-game tickets that surface will disappear in a heartbeat, likely around April 15 to 18. Otherwise, fans who have friends in high places (such as the 300 or 400 level) or even better, down lower, might want to cozy up to them if they want to see some playoff hockey. 

Ottawa Senators president Cyril Leeder outlines the plans for the team’s new arena at LeBreton Flats, discussing why the timing is right, and how long until ground will be broken at the new site.

LeBreton deal inches onward

On the arena front, there isn’t a lot that is new. The Senators and the National Capital Commission continue to work toward a land sale agreement, expected to be completed sometime in 2025. 

According to Leeder, the land sale is the “easy part” of the development project, with an end goal to build a new NHL arena on the LeBreton Flats site, west of Parliament Hill. 

From there, agreements to come include the cleanup of hazardous waste on the site, negotiating an Indigenous land claim, and all the myriad approvals involved with a $1-billion-plus project. 

Leeder estimates the club will spend another five years in Kanata at the current rink, allowing time for all the approvals and a two- to two-and-a-half-year construction effort. 

Unfortunately, the Senators are losing their chief operating officer and chief financial officer in Erin Crowe, who has been their point person on the LeBreton project. Crowe will soon start up with Soccer Canada in a similar COO/CFO role. 

For now, the Senators will soldier on at the Canadian Tire Centre, doing enough maintenance and repair to keep the building at an NHL level, without the sort of massive overhaul it would take to make this home for another 30 years. The erstwhile “Palladium” that opened in January 1996 turns 30 next season. 

“This is a good building,” Leeder says. “If we were going to stay here long term, we’d have to invest a lot of money to kind of bring it up to today’s standard. But it’s been good for us and the fan experience here is still pretty strong.” 

Never stronger than at playoff time. 

Bring it on.