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No doubt during his plane rides and car trips to here, there and everywhere, Dorion is taking calls — we’re guessing many of them from Melnyk, now also serving as president and CEO of the Senators — considering any and all options about captain Erik Karlsson’s future. The Karlsson decision will have a domino effect on other current Senators players, possible trades, the signing of free agents, how X and Y might fit into the team’s internal salary-cap structure and so on.

You can praise or critique Dorion’s body of work all you want, but never question his work ethic.

A few hours after Dorion left the Senators arena, the Francis news came out of PNC Arena in North Carolina. Dundon has begun his pursuit of a replacement for Francis with one eye on radically redefining the general manager’s role. Francis’s record in trades was spotty and his biggest free-agent signings — Scott Darling and Victor Rask — didn’t pan out. The Hurricanes didn’t make the playoffs in his four-year tenure.

Dundon, though, softened the blow by suggesting Francis had too much on his plate, telling The Athletic that “the GM job in hockey gets pretty big, their responsibilities tend to get far-reaching,” and that Francis had been weighed down by trying to do too much.

“It’s like everybody has the idea that the GM is just talking to other GMs and trying to make trades and looking for players in constructing your roster, but the truth is they have to do so much more,” Dundon said. “If someone has a better fit for us and we have a better fit for them, at the same time you’re worried about Europe and you’re worried about scouting. There’s just so much to worry about. I was just trying to give this organization more throughput and maybe have a GM that just got to have more resources around him to focus on that one part of the job.”