Ottawa's Rebuild Was Designed Around One Defenseman. Without Him, the Whole Thing Falls Apart.

There is a version of Ottawa's offseason that makes sense. You trade the captain, absorb the short-term pain, bring in a young winger with upside, lock up Jordan Spence on a reasonable deal, and let Jake Sanderson anchor a rebuilt blue line while Tim Stutzle drives the offense. That version of the plan is coherent. It has a logic. The problem, as I wrote at the end of July and again earlier this month, is that every piece of it depends on Sanderson being healthy—and right now, nobody can confirm that he will be.

Sanderson logged 24.5 minutes a night last season. That is not a secondary defenseman's workload; that is a number that tells you he was carrying the blue line on his back while posting 37 points and a +7 rating in a season where most of this roster was bleeding goals against. When a player like that goes down in the offseason, the question is not whether his absence hurts—it obviously does—the question is whether the organization built any redundancy around him. Ottawa did not. Artem Zub is also sidelined. The blue line depth behind Sanderson and the newly signed Spence is, to be charitable, a significant concern.

History is instructive here. Franchise rebuilds that hinge on a single defender's health almost always pay a brutal tax when that defender misses time early. Think of the teams that built around a young, high-minute defenseman and then watched him miss the first month—the recovery time is rarely linear, and the habits a team forms in those early games without its best blue liner tend to calcify. Ottawa already demonstrated last season that it cannot execute in close games, going 16-21 in one-goal decisions, a collapse that cost them roughly 11 points and their playoff spot. That problem does not get easier to solve when your best defensive player is watching from the press box.

The Spence signing was supposed to provide a partner, not a replacement. Four years at $20 million suggests Ottawa believes in what Spence can become alongside Sanderson—not instead of him. Those are very different roles, and asking an unproven defender to carry the load that Sanderson carried last year, in the first months of a franchise reset, is a significant ask. My read is that Spence is a legitimate piece of this rebuild, but he was never meant to be its spine. Sanderson was.

Meanwhile, the forward group is carrying its own fractures. Ridly Greig is suspended. Stutzle, who produced at a point-per-game pace last season, remains the only player on this roster capable of generating offense at an elite rate—and that concentration of offensive responsibility was the exact problem the Eklund acquisition was supposed to begin solving. Eklund is a bet, not a solution. Claude Giroux, back on a one-year deal, provides veteran stability at 32 points and a team-leading +13 last season, but he is a bridge, not a foundation.

Here is my declaration, and I will stand on it: if Jake Sanderson is not ready for the season opener, Ottawa will not solve its one-goal game problem this year. Full stop. The structural weakness that cost them the playoffs last spring was never purely about talent; it was about execution in tight games, and tight games are decided on the blue line as much as anywhere. Without Sanderson eating 24-plus minutes and controlling defensive zone exits, the Senators will be scrambling in exactly the situations where they already proved incapable of winning. Spence and whoever else fills the gap will be learning on the job while the standings move without them.

The timeline is the only hedge I will offer. If Sanderson returns by November, the damage may be containable—this roster has enough pieces to tread water for a few weeks. But every game that passes without him is a game Ottawa plays with a blueprint that was designed for a building that hasn't been constructed yet.