The great Corey Locke Experiment is over and while Locke’s treatment in his three games with the Ottawa Senators has been met with indignation in some corners, the fact is if the Senators were looking for a 26-year-old journeyman as the answer to their offensive woes, their troubles are deeper than we ever could have imagined.

Or perhaps not. Their troubles are actually acutely deep. Yes, Locke is a former scoring champion and MVP in the Ontario Hockey League. Yes, he was leading the American Hockey League in scoring at the time of his recall, a status he did not relinquish in his three-game stint with the Senators. Yes, he is creative and talented and probably earned a chance to show his stuff to the NHL team.

But Locke is also trapped in hockey purgatory in many ways. You could make the argument that the former Ottawa 67′s star is among a long line of players in hockey history who are too good for the minors, but not good enough for the NHL. Hockey purgatory has claimed many victims. Among those taking up permanent residence are/were Bruce Boudreau, Steve Maltais, Darren Haydar, Brett Sterling, Rich Chernomaz, Jody Gage, Donald MacLean, Fred Glover … the list goes on.

These players are all respectable in their own right, but often don’t have the size, strength and/or skating ability to withstand the rigours of the NHL. They often start their NHL tenure with a bang, but almost always fade away after a while. There’s little doubt the Senators expected that from Locke, who is already in his fourth professional organization.

The fact is, neither the Senators nor Locke ever really intended for him to be anything more than a fill-in guy. Otherwise, instead of commanding an enormous AHL sum of $250,000 a season and just the NHL minimum of $500,000 on a two-way deal, if Locke truly believed he was more than an AHL commodity he would have taken less to play in the AHL and more to play in the NHL. If the Senators had agreed, they would have been happy to pay it.

You could argue that with three games of fourth-line duty, Locke probably didn’t get much of a chance to show whether or not he belongs in the NHL. And he did manage to record his first NHL assist. But Locke probably never envisioned himself as a saviour. And the Senators didn’t either.