Ottawa's Offseason Bet Collapses Without Jake Sanderson
The Senators built their entire 2026-27 blueprint around a single defensive cornerstone. Every other move this summer—the Tkachuk trade, the Jordan Spence signing, the William Eklund acquisition—only makes sense if Jake Sanderson is healthy and logging 24-plus minutes a night. He isn't, at least not yet. And Ottawa has no credible answer for what happens if he isn't.
Start with what Sanderson actually meant to this team last season. Among Ottawa's top ten in ice time, he was the only defenseman averaging more than 24 minutes a game, and his +7 rating stood out sharply on a roster where Dylan Cozens finished at -14 and several other regulars were in negative territory. He was the connective tissue of a blue line that was already thin before Artem Zub went down. The Senators signed Jordan Spence to a four-year, $20 million deal this summer specifically to play alongside Sanderson—to form a pairing, not to anchor a defense alone. If Sanderson misses significant time, Spence isn't a solution. He's half of one.
The broader problem is that Ottawa's margin for error was already razor-thin before any of this. They went 16-21 in one-goal games last season—a 43% win rate in close contests when the league baseline sits around 54%. That gap, right there, is why they finished 44-38 and watched the playoffs from home. A team that fragile in tight situations needs its best defensive player available every night. Sanderson's absence doesn't just hurt the power play or the matchup deployment; it removes the one guy who could theoretically help Ottawa stop bleeding in the third period of a one-goal game.
What makes the timing particularly brutal is that the rest of the roster is simultaneously compromised. Ridly Greig, who quietly gave Ottawa useful depth production last season, is suspended. Zub is out. Tim Stutzle posted a point per game but did so over only 50 games, and the team's offensive dependency on a single center was already a structural flaw heading into the offseason—not a problem anyone solved this summer. My read is that Ottawa's front office understood the roster was fragile and moved quickly on Spence and Eklund precisely because they knew they needed to add bodies. But adding bodies and adding depth are different things, and right now the body they need most is the one already in a training room.
The Tkachuk trade will generate debate all season regardless of how things unfold. But the more pressing question isn't whether Ottawa got fair value in that deal—it's whether this team can function without its best defenseman for any meaningful stretch of October and November, when early positioning in the Atlantic can define a season. Last year, Ottawa went 6-6 in October and 6-7 in November before finding their footing. They cannot afford another slow start while also running a patchwork blue line. The offseason reset was supposed to be a new beginning. Right now, it looks like it's already waiting on a medical update.