Ottawa Traded a First-Round Pick for a Left Wing. That Left Wing Won't Play a Single Playoff Game.
The depth chart tells the story before any narrative can dress it up. At left wing, Jaxon Cover is Ottawa's listed starter and has produced nothing — zero — against a position where a league-average starter contributes meaningfully every night. William Eklund, acquired from San Jose in June for the ninth overall pick, was supposed to fix that. He was the answer to a structural problem the organization had identified, priced accordingly, and moved aggressively to solve. He is now 10 to 12 weeks from returning after ankle surgery to repair a torn tendon. The Senators are in the playoffs right now. The math is not complicated.
What makes this sting beyond the immediate loss is what Eklund represented in the roster architecture. Ottawa gave up a top-ten pick — the kind of asset that shapes a franchise for years — specifically because left wing was a genuine hole, not a depth concern. When a front office trades that high to address a positional need, the implicit promise is that the acquisition plays. Eklund appeared in the depth chart as the position's second option by playing time, which means whatever he contributed before the ankle gave out was the most production that spot has seen all season. Now Blake Montgomery is also on Injured Reserve. The third option at left wing has produced nothing. Ottawa enters a playoff series with a position that is, functionally, unmanned.
The forward group beyond Stutzle and Batherson was already operating on thin margins. Tim Stutzle's 50 points in 50 games and Drake Batherson's 44 points in 44 games are genuinely elite production rates — matching at 1.00 per game apiece — but that pair was always going to need secondary contributors to survive a playoff series. Claude Giroux, in what is at minimum his twentieth NHL season, has been that third voice at +13 and 32 points in 49 games, and Shane Pinto has given the team consistent secondary center depth. But the left side of the forward group was supposed to be reinforced. It wasn't, and now it can't be.
Ridly Greig, day-to-day with a strain after leaving the St. Louis game early, adds another layer of uncertainty to the same forward corps. The Senators went 7-3 in their last ten games, which is real and not nothing — this team has shown it can execute when bodies are available. But "when bodies are available" is doing enormous work in that sentence. The recent form is encouraging. The roster constructing it is not intact.
My read is that the Eklund injury forces Ottawa into a playoff run that depends almost entirely on Stutzle and Batherson sustaining elite production while the left wing position contributes at a level the roster analysis makes brutally clear it cannot reach. That was always a risk with this team. The front office spent a first-round pick in June specifically to reduce it. The ankle surgery on October 15th undid that investment completely, at the worst possible moment, and left the Senators with the same structural problem they had before the trade — just without the pick.