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Major red flag on Pierre Dorion caused team sale to fall through!
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Major red flag on Pierre Dorion caused team sale to fall through!

What a mess in Ottawa!

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HockeyFeed

On Wednesday, the Ottawa Senators and Pierre Dorion parted ways as new team owner Michael Andlauer now looks to focus on getting the club back on track after an embarrassing punishment from the NHL stripped the Sens of a future first-round pick.

In the press conference on Wednesday, following Dorion’s resignation, Andlauer questioned why it took so long for the league to issue a ruling. Visibly frustrated, he maintains he was not informed about either Shane Pinto’s sports betting investigation, which first surfaced in the summer and resulted in a 41-game suspension, or the 591-day old Evgenii Dadonov trade dispute, before his purchase of the team closed on Sept. 21.

The new owner, who put up a record price at nearly $1 billion when he purchased the Senators earlier this season, hinted at some controversy in the sale with a subtle attack on NHL commissioner Gary Bettman:

“Maybe they didn’t want to disrupt [it] to make sure the seller got the best price possible.”

However, Andlauer must have known something could be coming to the Senators and still put up the money to make his dream of owning an NHL franchse come true.

Despite meeting with club executives and Dorion.

According to Shawn Simpson, one of the groups who was very close to buying the Senators had a bad feeling when it came to Dorion and that’s ultimately why they stepped out of the running to become owners in Ottawa:

“Spoke to one of the groups today that was very close to buying the Sens. They said that when they met with Dorion, he told them he only had 30 minutes and could only talk hockey. That was a major red flag for the group.”

Simpson did not mention who was part of that group, though fans are well aware that big names were linked to the purchase of the Senators, including Snoop Dogg and movie star Ryan Reynolds.

I’m not sure what the future holds for Dorion, who was the seventh-longest tenured GM in the league at the time of his exit. Talks have since emerged that his tenure was littered with miscues, and certainly it was a major red flag for this buying group to step out of the process…

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