Ottawa Built Its Defense Around Sanderson. Now That Foundation Has a Crack.

Here is what the Ottawa Senators asked Jake Sanderson to be this offseason: the answer. Not part of the answer — the answer. When they traded Brady Tkachuk to Florida and signed Jordan Spence to anchor the blue line's second pairing, the entire defensive architecture of this rebuild was drawn with Sanderson at its center. He logged 24.5 minutes a night last season, finished plus-7 in a year when the roster bled close games, and posted 37 points from the back end. In a season that cost Ottawa approximately 11 points in one-goal losses alone, he was one of the few players who made the team better when he was on the ice. That is not a complementary piece. That is a cornerstone.

Which is why the news that Sanderson is currently out — with his availability for the season opener genuinely in question — does not register as a footnote to this summer's reset. It registers as a threat to the reset's entire premise. The Senators did not rebuild around depth. They rebuilt around a spine: Sanderson anchoring the left side, Spence alongside him on a four-year commitment, Tim Stutzle driving offense at a point-per-game pace. Remove the top vertebra and the whole structure loses its shape.

History is instructive here. Think about what happened to the 2017-18 Vegas Golden Knights when they lost their top defenseman to injury in the early going — except Vegas had extraordinary depth to absorb the blow. Or consider how the 2019-20 Avalanche seasons before Nathan MacKinnon's supporting cast arrived looked: one transcendent player carrying an offense, a blue line that couldn't hold leads, and close games that slipped away. Ottawa is not far from that template. Stutzle is the MacKinnon-level talent they are building around offensively. Sanderson was supposed to be the stabilizing force on the other side of the puck. Without him, this team's close-game problem — the one that cost them a playoff spot last spring — has no structural fix.

The compounding factor is that this is not an isolated absence. Artem Zub is also out. Ridly Greig, who gave the team real secondary center depth at 21 points in 44 games last season, is suspended. The Senators enter training camp not just thin at defense but thin everywhere that thinness hurts most: the blue line, the middle of the ice, and the margins. Dylan Cozens finished the year at minus-14. The team won just 43 percent of one-goal games. Those numbers do not improve when your best defenseman is watching from the press box in October.

My declaration is this: if Sanderson misses significant time to open 2026-27, the Senators will not be a playoff team, regardless of what Eklund develops into or how Spence settles in. This is not pessimism about the rebuild's long-term direction — Spence at four years and Sanderson as the anchor is a reasonable foundation. But reasonable foundations require the foundation to be present. A team this dependent on a single offensive engine in Stutzle, this unresolved in close games, and this freshly stripped of its franchise captain cannot absorb a Sanderson absence and still expect to cross the threshold. The summer was built on a specific bet. Right now, that bet is sitting in a trainer's room, and nobody in Ottawa can tell you when it walks back out.