No 2017 outdoor game at Parliament Hill for Ottawa Senators

When the NHL celebrates its centennial in 2017 and Canada parties it up for its 150th birthday, an Ottawa Senators outdoor game on Parliament Hill will not be one of the numerous events to be held.

According to a spokesman for Heritage Minister Melanie Joly, the government has decided against hosting an outdoor game due to the feasibility of such an event. The Senators were obviously bummed to hear the news.

“Despite the hard work of the NHL and the government of Canada over the past 18 months, the Ottawa Senators are disappointed for all Canadian hockey fans that we will not have the opportunity to witness an NHL outdoor game on Parliament Hill,” the team said in a statement.

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“To host a game on Parliament Hill would have been iconic and historic and, in our view, the best way to cap off the year-long celebrations in 2017 to honour both the league’s centennial and Canada’s 150.”

The Senators have been trying to bring an outdoor game for over a year now with owner Eugene Melnyk and Mayor Jim Watson backing the idea. The hope was for the team to host a game against the Montreal Canadiens around the 100th anniversary of the NHL’s first ever game, Dec. 19, 1917. But unlike a traditional venue, hosting a game on Parliament Hill would bring its own set of logistical issues.

Seating, security and space issues would be big hurdles to overcome, and then there’s the cost, which the discussions didn’t even get to during this process.

“I don’t think we even got into the cost analysis because we wanted to see if it was feasible from a logistical standpoint first,” Pierre-Olivier Herbert, Joly’s press secretary, said via Don Butler of the Ottawa Citizen. “We were going to go into cost assessments later but we didn’t get to that.”

Where will the Senators turn next? There is TD Place Stadium, which is scheduled to host the 2017 Grey Cup next November and can house more than 30,000 seats. If the team wants to make an outdoor game happen during Canada 150, that looks to be their only option remaining.

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Sean Leahy is the associate editor for Puck Daddy on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at puckdaddyblog@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter! Follow @Sean_Leahy