(Hello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend’s events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it.)

The Ottawa Senators’ second home game of the second round was a sellout, which makes sense because it was an important playoff game on a Saturday.

But the first home game fell about 2,000 seats short of a sellout, which is a sad commentary on a whole lot of the things wrong with that organization.

Everyone recognizes that there are a lot of reasons why this whole situation is a mess, but a big one has to come down to ownership of this team being arguably the worst in the NHL. And there are plenty of people who would say it’s not even particularly arguable, that Eugene Melnyk — who is perfectly content to simply make the playoffs every year forever because you don’t actually have to spend a lot of money to do that — is for-sure the worst owner in the league. I get it.

But the take that popped up more than a few times after that first game failed to sell out, and did so by a fairly large margin, is that the fans somehow owe it to the Senators to come out and support them in this pivotal second round of a playoff series. After all, Ian Mendes asked at TSN, hadn’t they delivered on all their promises early in the season?

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One has to consider, though, what kind of a promise “we’ll make the playoffs and try not to get smoked” actually is, and whether the circumstances by which the Senators went above and beyond those initial expectations are really all that praiseworthy.

By some measures, the Senators are one of the more successful franchises in the League. Okay, not by attendance or winning anything or developing good players, necessarily, but they’ve made the postseason 16 out of the last 20 seasons. Some ask whether that should count for something with fans.

Now, I’m obviously not a Senators fan (thankfully) but the “16 times in the last 20 years” argument seems extremely disingenuous because I really can’t be asked to care about a 77-point team from 20 years ago when Ron Tugnutt was the starting goaltender. Especially because the four playoff misses in that 20-year span are in fact over the last nine seasons. And this is only the second time since the team lost in the Cup Final that they’ve even made it to the second round.

Which, any team can win in the first round every once in a while, and that’s certainly evidenced by the AHL team they beat in the first round this season. So to even hold that up as a sign of success is, shall we say, disingenuous. If we’re taking the playoffs as some sort of proof of overarching team quality, even if you finish seventh or eighth, how close to winning the Cup were you, really?

If people want to stay away from an organization with a bad owner and a rink an hour outside of town on a weekday, hey man, I get it. Especially because it’s not like the Rangers should be in any way a draw at this point. Moreover, it’s not like anyone should be deluded to thinking this Senators team is really all that good. It all runs through Erik Karlsson, of course, and if you’re holding your breath that this team will be meaningfully competitive in the near future, one need only look at the CapFriendly page.

Number of guys on this team on an ELC right now: Two. And it’s Ben Harpur and Colin White, not exactly meaningful contributors. Now, they have some good prospects that will likely be with the club next season, in Logan Brown and Thomas Chabot. But that’s it. And if this is a team committed to keeping the cost of the roster down, how on earth is that conducive to getting more competitive?

And things are only likely to get worse in the near future. Dion Phaneuf is 32 and signed forever. Marc Methot makes $4.9 million and has two more seasons after this one. Bobby Ryan is signed until he’s 35. You can go on like this, but the number of guys on the wrong side of 30 signed to big-money, long-term deals is irresonsible at best if you’re trying to say simultaneously that it’s important to keep costs under control and also pay Bobby Ryan $7.25 million.