Offseason Recap

In: William Eklund, Andre Burakovsky, Samuel Ersson

Out: Brady Tkachuk, Lars Eller, James Reimer 

I won’t relitigate it too much: Brady Tkachuk’s a good player, he’ll do well in Florida. His behavior was at times endearing and at times alienating. It would have cost a lot to keep him, perhaps more than you want to pay for a power-forward who plays on the wing who’s already started missing a lot of games to injury. And he handled his desire to leave about as well as could be expected. As a person who lived through the Dany Heatley trade request, this was a relatively tidy exit, and everyone seems ready to move on. Tkachuk was fun to have on the team, and he’ll be fun to root against. I commend everyone for mostly keeping their heads.

Ottawa General Manager Steve Staios did well to get three first round picks, including the ninth overall, and a second rounder for Tkachuk, given the complete lack of leverage he had, though the relative quality of the return is not equal in value to Tkachuk himself. 

Staios traded the ninth overall to the Sharks for William Eklund, the kind of player a fanbase get obsessive over when their team uses a top ten pick to select him but nobody else knows anything about. Accordingly, Sharks fans seem pretty heartbroken to part with him. Pierre McGuire floated on the Sick Podcast that Ottawa wanted Eklund in that year’s draft, that the Sharks had committed to not taking him and went back on it (whatever that means) and so Ottawa (infamously) took Tyler Boucher 10th overall. So it’s a player the organization has liked for a long time. He’s three years younger than Tkachuk, has draft pedigree (he was rated the top non-North American skater in the draft), and is on an affordable deal. And of course he’s good friends with team mascot Fabian Zetterlund. I’m excited to see what he can do.

I’m reminded that when Ottawa traded away Erik Karlsson, the return was roundly lambasted at the time as a massive loss for the franchise. Well, that return turned into Tim Stützle, and Josh Norris, who begat Dylan Cozens. There’s a line from a Kipling poem: If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster / And treat those two imposters just the same. You can win or lose a trade, but only fleetingly. It’s helpful to maintain perspective. Let’s see where both Tkachuk and Eklund are in five years. Tkachuk could be an aging forward, battling injuries, with an untradable boat anchor of a contract. Or he could win the Conn Smythe. Or both.

Given Florida traded Samoskevich to Seattle to make room for Tkachuk, I’m curious to know if he was ever floated as part of the return to Ottawa. He’s a promising young player with the same kind of grit Tkachuk provided, but it’s not the kind of thing that keeps me up at night. Maybe if Florida includes him, Ottawa doesn’t get the ninth overall, which means they don’t get Eklund, who seems to have a higher ceiling as a point scorer. I would have loved a scenario in which they get Samoskevich in lieu of one of those later first rounders, and still get the ninth/Eklund. Anyway, it will be interesting to compare the two players’ careers over time.

I don’t hate the Burakovsky trade as much as some. The team is looking for cheap scoring, which is a contradiction in terms. You only get it by taking a flyer on reclamation projects. They got a Cup-winning veteran who has shown he can score sometimes, on a relatively cheap deal, for a sixth round pick. He’s horrendous defensively, so you give him favorable zone starts and powerplay time and hope he can convert more than Tkachuk could on Stützle’s wing, or at least get the puck to Cozens, who sometimes seems like the only guy on the team who can score goals. If the goalscoring and playmaking works but his terrible qualities outweigh them, you pad his stats and he’s gone at the deadline for more than a sixth rounder – there’s always a market for a Cup-winning veteran on an expiring deal. Or he’s a disaster and all you’ve wasted is money. We’ll never know what else was on the table and what could have been instead of this deal, but seeing Mason Marchment get almost $7M per year and five years from the Sharks, I understand Staios not wanting to play in that sandbox.

Errson’s stats are terrible, but Staios basically said those stats don’t count because they intend to use him differently than he’s been used in other systems, and he’s deferring to his goaltending coach. I don’t know enough about goaltenders’ styles nor hockey systems to know if that kind of statement is ridiculous or another example of how publicly available statistics fall short. Either way, Ersson and Merilainen will have a chance to battle each other for a chance to provide what has recently been unattainable for Ottawa: league average goaltending.

The Short Term

The 2026-2027 season might be a rough one for the Ottawa Senators. Ottawa squeaked into the playoffs last year, although they were almost a 100 point team, the result of the Atlantic being an absolute bloodbath. Their playoff eligibility that season coincided with down years for Toronto, Florida, and Detroit. 

Well, according to the Athletic, Toronto is the 4th most improved team this offseason, and Florida the 6th most. So the Atlantic was tough, and it got tougher. Buffalo, Tampa, and Boston got worse, according to that Athletic article, and Buffalo is the least improved team in the league with the loss of Tuch and two middle-six defenders. Hapless Detroit somehow also got worse and that’s not even accounting for the potential loss of Dylan Larkin. But Ottawa is the second least improved team in the league. So if you’re looking for three teams in the Atlantic that could find themselves on the outside looking in, Detroit, Buffalo and Ottawa would be reasonable bets.

On the other hand, Linus Ullmark went from one of the worst goaltenders in the league in Goals Saved Above Expected during the regular season to one of the best in the playoffs. So who knows what the Senators produce with solid goaltending? And lest we forget that Tim Stützle is only 24 and Jake Sanderson only 23. The Senators could very well find themselves on the right side of the bubble again.

It’s worth noting that the top 10 of the 2027 draft class is projected to be seven of 10 centers. Top-line centers are so hard to find that Philadelphia just signed Leo Carlsson to an $18M/year offer sheet trying to get one. So, if there’s a year for Ottawa to take a step back and add a blue chip prospect, this might be it. The team could also jettison Amadio, Giroux, Burakovsky, and Foegele at the deadline, add the draft haul to the 2nd rounder they got from Florida in the Tkachuk trade, and restock their prospect pool. There are worse things than missing a year of the playoffs while keeping all of your core players. Ask Toronto, who took a year off and ended up with the first overall pick.

The Long Term

There’s a lot to like about the Ottawa Senators’ long-term position. If they re-sign Batherson at $10M, Kleven at $4M, Zub at $7M (all on the higher end of what they’re estimated to get), and trade or let all other UFAs over 30 walk, they’ll be sitting at ~$92.2M against a 2027-2028 $113.5M cap, or just shy of $21.5M in cap space with all core players locked up and only depth signings to consider. You want to bring Amadio, Foegele, and Giroux back for another lap? They’ll have the room to do it. Or they can be replaced, or they’ll have the space to swing big on a trade.

Every planet in the Ottawa Senators’ solar system revolves around the twin stars of Tim Stützle’s and Jake Sanderson’s contracts. I cannot overstate how big of a deal it is that those two are signed long-term at about $8M per year. In a league where Connor Bedard is already getting $15M and Leo Carlsson is getting $18M, Tim Stützle, who scored 90 points in his third season, and was better than a point-a-game last season and was a plus player, is making a little more than half of Bedard’s AAV. Sanderson is already getting Norris votes (he tied for ninth in voting) and he’s 23.

I was accused online of glazing Dorion’s legacy, but I’ll stick by what I actually said: Dorion signing these guys to these contracts is such a big deal that it almost nullifies the boneheaded stuff, of which there was a lot. If he’d signed them both to $5M X 4 bridge contracts, Senators fandom would be running around with its hair on fire right now about how we don’t have cap space to sign them both and might have to lose one. The Carlsson deal has changed the league; if he’s an $18M player, then what is Stützle, who has better numbers and better underlying stats?

It also means that Tim Stützle and Jake Sanderson are going to make $20M apiece in 2031-2032, right around the time Andlauer is going to be trying to finance a new arena’s construction. The team has to do everything it can to win in the next five years. There’s a lot of potential – the league will have a new television deal, and league expansion will result in more lucrative expansion fees for owners. But that’s probably going to result in an even higher cap and NBA-like contracts for the league’s best players, and Ottawa will be trying to keep two of them.

There’s less to be enthusiastic about when it comes to Ottawa’s prospect pool, which consists of Yakemchuk, a truly unique defensive prospect who electrified at times when he debuted last season but on the whole got caved in, and a collection of toolsy depth who are years away. The farm team could really benefit from another blue-chipper or two. 

The Bottom Line

I’m imploring everyone not to overreact if the Senators take a step back next season. Their core is locked up long-term on team-friendly deals. Boston, Tampa, and Florida are all aging, trying to win one more Cup before entering the waning years of their contending window. Buffalo, Toronto, and Detroit are intriguing mixes of young talent, bloated contracts, and big question marks. Montreal is really the only team in the division that seems to be both just entering its peak years and with an airtight cap sheet.

If the question is, “Who is your pick going into next season?” Ottawa might not be at the top of your list. But if you could only pick one team in the Atlantic to compete with for the next decade, for me it comes down to Ottawa and Montreal. It will be important to keep that in mind when we hit the do-or-die days of March 2027, no matter where Ottawa finds itself in the standings.