With the Ottawa Senators firing head coach DJ Smith in December and moving Jacques Martin into that role, the search for a new head coach effectively started before Christmas. With so much turnover in that role across the league, there was no shortage of applicants, and Ottawa finally made their decision by hiring Travis Green:

It was later announced that Green had signed a four-year contract, though given how many coaches have been fired this season before their extensions even kicked in, it should be viewed as a two-year contract with team options for the third and fourth where Green gets paid regardless.

Green is most known for his tenure behind the bench with Vancouver from the 2017-18 through the start of the 2021-22 campaign. His four full years with the Canucks resulted in them tied for 26^th in the league by points percentage with a record of 125-132-32.

The Sedin twins were running out their NHL careers when Green took over in 2017 and when they retired, there wasn't much depth on the roster. The 2018-19 season was the rookie outings of Elias Pettersson and Adam Gaudette, the second year for Brock Boeser, and Quinn Hughes would play a few games at the end of March. There were solid veterans on the blue line like Alex Edler and Chris Tanev, but there was not a lot of depth up front (yet) with Bo Horvat being the only notable piece of their future who had established anything.

All that is to say that while Green's tenure in Vancouver largely did not go well, his first couple of seasons really didn't have much there to work with.

HockeyViz helps show us how he changed the team's approach as his young players grew into their roles. The 2018-19 season – with a bunch of young forwards and the Sedins now retired – show a team that really did not push the pace (anything to the right of the vertical line is high-paced offensively, anything below the horizontal line is allowing a lot defensively):

Just one year later, we can already see the team starting to push the pace more while staying below average defensively:

That change shows up in their offence as the team went from 24^th by both 5-on-5 shot attempt and goal rate in 2018-19 to 11^th and 12^th, respectively, by those same measures in 2019-20. While their scoring declined a bit in the Bubble season, that was also a year where Pettersson missed over half the games. Not having their top forward for 55% of the season hurt considerably.

Green did basically the same thing in his short tenure behind the New Jersey Devils bench towards the end of the 2023-24 season. The team pushed the pace about as much as they did under Lindy Ruff, so this is a coach who wants his players attacking, even if it sacrifices some defence along the way.

This should be good news for fantasy managers. Ottawa was largely a big letdown offensively this season and though the issue was more on the power play than at 5-on-5, that he should get the Senators pushing the pace more is good for the fantasy values of their top young stars.

Of course, the other big issue with Ottawa was their defence and goaltending. They were very famous for defensive lapses, and Green-coached teams often were not great, or even good, defensively. Maybe there'll be a mandate from his bosses to focus on that first, but for now, this is good news for the forwards and offensive-minded defencemen. It just probably isn't good news for Joonas Korpisalo or Anton Forsberg.