Ottawa Built a Defense Around Jake Sanderson. Now He Can't Practice.

The Senators spent the summer constructing a blue line around a single assumption: that Jake Sanderson would be healthy, available, and logging the kind of minutes that make everything else work. That assumption is now in serious doubt, and without it, the entire logic of this offseason starts to wobble.

Sanderson was one of the few things that genuinely worked in 2025-26. He posted 37 points and a +7 rating while averaging 24-and-a-half minutes a night — elite usage for a young defenseman, the kind of workload that signals a coaching staff's trust and a roster's dependence in equal measure. Ottawa finished 44-38 and missed the playoffs, losing close games at a ruinous rate — just 43% of one-goal decisions — but Sanderson wasn't the problem. He was the foundation. The front office acknowledged that plainly when they signed Jordan Spence to a four-year, $20 million deal specifically to play alongside him. Spence-and-Sanderson was the pairing. That was the plan.

Right now, there is no pairing. Sanderson is out, Artem Zub is out, and the blue line Ottawa is fielding in mid-July looks nothing like the one they drew up. This matters more than a typical summer injury because the Senators didn't just add Spence in a vacuum — they traded Brady Tkachuk, their captain, and replaced him with William Eklund, a prospect bet on upside rather than a proven commodity. The margin for error in this rebuild is already thin. A defensive corps without its anchor makes it thinner still.

Here is the narrow path to this working: Sanderson recovers fully, returns before or shortly after opening night, and the Spence pairing functions as designed. In that scenario, Ottawa has a legitimate top pair, Claude Giroux provides veteran steadiness on a one-year deal, and Tim Stutzle — who was a point-per-game player last season — doesn't have to carry the entire team on his back quite so visibly. Eklund develops into a real top-six contributor. The close-game execution that killed them last year improves because the defensive structure is finally stable enough to protect leads. That version of this team is a playoff contender.

What breaks that path is obvious, and it's already happening. If Sanderson misses significant time to start the season, Spence is suddenly asked to anchor a blue line he was signed to complement, not lead. Dylan Cozens was a minus-14 last season; the forward group has real holes. Ridly Greig is suspended. The team is already thin at center and the goaltending questions that shadowed them all year haven't been answered publicly. My read is that this roster, as currently constituted and injured, would struggle to improve on 44 wins — and 44 wins wasn't good enough to make the playoffs last spring. The front office made bold moves. The boldest assumption embedded in all of them was that Sanderson would be fine. He isn't, at least not yet, and the clock is running.