An Ottawa-based musician has gone viral after the Ottawa Senators banished him to Taipei for the National Hockey League playoffs, following accusations that his parody music cursed the team.
Musician Sent to Taiwan After Fan Backlash
Kyle Ivan, a musician from Ottawa, didn't expect to go viral again after his 2025 parody of Eminem's Without Me for the Senators. But this year, he found himself on a plane to Taiwan after fans claimed his songs hexed the team, leading to two consecutive losses against the Carolina Hurricanes in the 2026 Stanley Cup playoffs.
“The Sens reached out to me, and I think they wanted to play into it a bit. So we brainstormed some kind of idea, some kind of apology statement,” Ivan said. “After all was said and done, we landed on banishing me to Taiwan, as far away from the (Canadian Tire Centre) as possible.”
Viral Apology Video
On Thursday morning, the official Ottawa Senators account posted a video of Ivan delivering an apology from the streets of Taipei, captioned “You’re welcome, Sens fans.” The video quickly racked up over 10,000 likes on X, with one comment about the banishing gaining nearly 30,000 likes.
Ivan has created a parody song for the Sens every time they qualified for the playoffs in the past 12 years: 2015, 2017, 2025, and 2026. “It started off in 2015. They were down three-nothing in their series (against the Montreal Canadiens), and I decided to just grab my guitar and make a little song to inspire them to do the impossible and come back from a three-nothing deficit,” Ivan said. “They won two games after I made the song, but didn’t end up coming out with a win.”
His latest parody, released before the series against the Hurricanes, featured him singing and dancing outside the Canadian Tire Centre in a bright red jersey. The lyrics included, “Guess who’s back, back again. Sens are back, pesky Sens.”
The banishing has been widely praised as one of the funniest moves by a professional sports organization, with fans enjoying the lighthearted approach to superstition during the playoffs.
