The Contract Is Signed. Now Ottawa Has to Show Up Healthy Enough to Honor It.

The number that should be keeping Senators management awake right now isn't $86 million. It's 24.5.

That's the average minutes per game Jake Sanderson logged last season — the most of any Ottawa defenseman, the spine of a blue line that was already thin before training camp opened. Sanderson is day-to-day. Artem Zub is out. Warren Foegele joined the injured list on September 16. Ridly Greig remains suspended. The organization's response was to sign Ben Hutton to a professional tryout — a move that tells you everything about how desperate the depth situation has become before a single meaningful game has been played.

Here is the structural problem the Batherson extension doesn't solve: Ottawa missed the playoffs last season not because it lacked a franchise-level commitment at the top of the lineup, but because it couldn't stay whole long enough to execute. The team won just 16 of 37 one-goal games — that's not a talent failure, that's a roster-depth failure, the kind that compounds every time a key player misses three weeks. Sanderson finished last season at plus-7 and nearly 37 points from the back end. Losing him for even a stretch of October games doesn't just hurt the power play; it collapses the entire defensive structure that allows Tim Stutzle and Batherson to operate in favorable situations. Last season, Stutzle carried a point-per-game pace over 50 games while the offense around him struggled to generate secondary production. That burden doesn't ease if the blue line is undermanned and the team is hemorrhaging close games again.

The Batherson extension is the right move in isolation. Forty-four points in 44 games, a commitment through 2034-35 — the organization is declaring that it has its cornerstone alongside Stutzle, and the $86 million signals that owner Michael Andlauer is serious about building something rather than cycling through another half-decade of near-misses. Trading Brady Tkachuk and acquiring William Eklund from San Jose was the harder, more honest admission: the previous identity wasn't working. Claude Giroux re-signing at plus-13 last season gives the new core a veteran anchor. The architecture of the roster, on paper, makes sense.

But architecture only matters if the building stands. My read is that the next ten days of training camp are less about systems installation and more about triage. If Sanderson isn't healthy by late October, the Senators will be asking Dylan Cozens — who was a brutal minus-14 last season despite 36 points — to anchor a forward group that is already missing depth at center, while a patchwork blue line tries to hold together behind him. That is not a recipe for winning close games. It is a recipe for repeating last season's collapse in a slightly different formation.

The Batherson extension buys Ottawa the future. What the organization cannot buy right now is the health of the players who make the present viable. The $86 million answered the long-term question. The next ten days will tell us whether the Senators are actually ready to compete in 2026-27, or whether they've committed franchise money to a team that will spend November learning the same lessons October already tried to teach them.