Not long after the final buzzer sounds on the Ottawa Senators’ season Saturday night, the search for a new head coach will begin in earnest.

Ottawa general manager Pierre Dorion has put together a list of possible candidates since coach Guy Boucher was fired on March 1, but the club will hold off on pursuing anybody until after the final game against the Columbus Blue Jackets at home next weekend and the exit interviews are completed.

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While Senators’ owner Eugene Melnyk wants to bring in a president of hockey operations to help Dorion with the decision-making in this rebuild, the timing of the hiring shouldn’t have an effect on the hiring of a head coach and the expectation is it will be business as usual in the search.

Though Dorion joked with Marc Crawford “if he goes 18-0 he’s got the job,” the reality is the 58-year-old veteran NHL coach has emerged as a serious candidate because since he’s taken over he’s made an impact on the approach and the way this team plays.

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He deserves to be in the mix of names you’re going to hear, which will include Belleville coach Troy Mann as a candidate. Of course, if Mann wants to give himself a better chance at getting the coaching post then it’s imperative he gets the club’s AHL affiliate to the playoffs this spring.

The Senators will look far and wide because they want somebody who can help develop the young players and take them to the next level. There will be no shortage of names speculated, but right now Crawford is getting the chance to make a first impression.

In 14 games behind the bench, Crawford has a 6-7-1 record which is pretty decent given the depth of this roster.

“He’s carried on the same way he did when he was an assistant coach,” said centre Zack Smith, who returned from a back injury. “It’s commendable that he hasn’t changed or turned into a more aggressive or negative coach because that tends to happen when guys become the head coach.

“It’s been great and it’s been interesting to see how the coaches react from the assistant coach to the head coach, because it’s quite a different mentality. He’s the same lighthearted guy he was at the start of the year and that’s been good.”

The day Crawford took over, he assembled the leadership group on a Friday night at the club’s hotel in Tampa and talked to them about what they could accomplish in the final five weeks. He wanted to hear how this group could salvage what was left of the season.

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“That meeting was nice because it was a reset and I don’t know if we could have done that with the exact same staff and have it feel the same,” said Smith. “When there’s a new head coach, and you sit down and he says, “What we do want our identity to be and we need to make something out of these 18 games and we can’t just coast through it.’

“It was nice to sit down. A lot of it was a refresh on stuff you forget about during the year and there was some new stuff. It’s helped. We might have been out of the playoffs but we have a lot of talk about how we want to play and a lot of it’s about building it up for next year. That’s all we have.”

Crawford listened, took the input and has tried to give the players a say. It was interesting to see veteran Mikkel Boedker scratched Saturday.

“Mainly it’s been the players themselves,” Crawford said. “We’ve talked a lot about, ‘What is it that you want?’ For me, that’s not my input, that’s their input and maybe we’ve put a platform where they’ve been able to really focus in on that (aspect).

“To be truthful the timing was right because we were out of the playoff race and we weren’t in a do-or-die situation so we could focus on that type of talk and that type of improvement. At the end of the day, it’s them that need to play the way they need to play to help their careers, to help us to be a more competitive team.

“Right now, we have to play like that because the talent disparity between us and a lot of the opposition teams is fairly great. We’ve got to be accurate in how we play and the systems that we’re playing.”

Crawford’s message is getting through and that’s the best he could hope to achieve in a short period of time.

bgarrioch@postmedia.com

Twitter: @sungarrioch

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