With his production headed in the wrong direction in Buffalo, last year's trade to Ottawa has proven to be just what the doctor ordered for Dylan Cozens... and the Senators.
When the Senators traded Josh Norris to the Buffalo Sabres at the 2025 trade deadline, plenty of Sens fans were ready for a change.
Norris was a good teammate, a talented player, and a proven goal scorer, but his battle with injuries had become a long-running concern, and the club needed someone it could count on to stay in the lineup.
What Senators fans didn't really know was exactly what they were getting back in Dylan Cozens.
Cozens had once looked like one of the NHL's emerging young centres. In 2022-23, still only 21, he scored 31 goals and 68 points for Buffalo.
But his production dropped considerably over the next two seasons.
Cozens fell to 47 points in 79 games in 2023-24, then he struggled again through the first five months of the following season.
By the time the Sens acquired him in the Norris deal in 2025, Cozens had 11 goals and 31 points in 61 games for Buffalo.
That's a scoring rate of just 0.51 points per game.
Then he came to Ottawa, and almost immediately, he looked like a different player. Cozens produced 16 points over his final 21 regular-season games, good for 0.76 points per game. It was an encouraging start, but 21 games isn't a particularly large sample size.
It could have been the excitement of joining a new team. Maybe he was energized by the first playoff push of his career. Maybe he got hot for a bit, as many players do.
A year later, we can set those theories aside.
Cozens followed up his impressive spring audition with 28 goals and 59 points while playing all 82 games in 2025-26.
That's 0.72 points per game.
In other words, the player the Sens saw immediately after the trade is essentially the same player they got over an entire 82-game season.
During his final 61 games with Buffalo, Cozens was producing at a 42-point pace over 82 games.
Since becoming a Senator, he's almost at a 60-point pace over a full season, a 43 percent increase in his points-per-game production compared to his final season in Buffalo.
After parting ways with Norris, the Sens got a second-line centre who's never missed a game, so it was almost too much to ask that Cozens could produce the way a healthy Norris could.
But for the most part, he has.
Cozens hasn't hit the 68-point level he reached three years ago, but he's a lot closer to that player than the one Ottawa traded for.
And with Norris continuing to pile up games lost to injury, this deal has a chance to be among the Senators' best.
By Steve Warne
The Hockey News
This article was first published in The Hockey News. For more Sens coverage at The Hockey News, click on one of the Sens headlines below:
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