Circumstances with no obvious solutions, not poor play, define a Senators season that is quickly flying off the rails
The first person to huff and say, “I guess we just can’t have nice things,” must have been a Senators fan.
After finally breaking through and making the playoffs in the 2024–25 season, the sky seemed like the limit for this franchise. Here was a team that played the game the right way. They played for each other and the community they represent, with loads of runway for their young stars to reach new heights.
In many ways, this year has picked up right where the team left off. The Senators are analytical darlings, with sparkling defensive numbers, good scoring depth, and a decent amount of cap space to make adjustments if necessary.
Then a funny thing happened on the way to the Canadian Tire Centre.
The team finds itself in second-last place in the Eastern Conference in a season that is rapidly slipping away. Yet most of the team has not shown any signs of regression.
The Senators are third in the NHL in expected goals for at 54.83% at 5-on-5, only three percentage points behind the Colorado Avalanche team, which has lost only three regulation games in half a season. Ottawa is also eighth in the league in goals for above expected at 5-on-5, and currently has the fifth-best power play in the league operating at a 24.6 percent clip, which shows that offense is clearly not the problem.
Their expected goals against at 5-on-5 is the best in the league, and they’re fourth in the league in shots against per game at 25.4. They even have the second-best faceoff winning percentage in the league, so they’re not giving opponents much to work with in their own end either.
So what’s gone wrong?
It’s a bunch of simple, straightforward problems that, unfortunately for Sens fans, have no easy solutions.
The first problem is that this has been a kooky year in terms of the standings, where nothing makes sense and every single team in the conference has a (fake) winning record. Every team the Sens are trying to compete with is putting up points every night. As of this writing, the Sens are 6-3-1 in their last ten games and have still lost ground.
They’re the only team in the conference with a positive goal differential outside a playoff spot and somehow sit nine points behind Detroit despite scoring the same number of goals in fewer games, while the Red Wings carry one of the worst differentials in the East.
They say you can’t worry about what you can’t control, but that borders on the ridiculous.
This team also has a maddening habit of playing down to opponents, suffering humiliating losses to direct competitors and “inferior” competition, usually in regulation; coughing up points with late-game breakdowns or starting games with multiple goals against in fewer than 10 shots.
Ottawa’s mistakes are rarely catastrophic on their own; they’re just timed perfectly to be devastating. GM Steve Staios calling it “pissing away points” was as accurate as it was painful. You can’t even blame the GM or coach because most of the team is actually playing up to their potential. Add in a penalty kill hovering around 70 percent for one of the most penalized teams in the league, and even small cracks quickly become sinkholes.
These simple problems with managing game situations more effectively should be addressed by team leadership and coaching, but how much can they really do about it when the elephant in the room looms so large?
Ottawa fans are familiar with the goalie graveyard, but this season threatens to be its magnum opus. Describing it as “Not good enough” doesn’t cut it; the goaltending has been a full-blown disaster. Given the team’s elite defensive metrics, the blame lands squarely in the crease.
Linus Ullmark was having the worst statistical year of his career by far, to coincide with the first year of his four-year, $8.25 million contract. Before it was defined by his sabbatical from the team for undisclosed personal issues, his season was defined by soft goals, slow reactions to the play in front of him, and an .881 save percentage.
What can you do with this situation other than support the player and hope he comes back with a fresh mindset? You wish the guy well as a human being going through something; but as a hockey team in the business of winning games, an indefinite absence for undisclosed reasons is a real kick in the teeth.
You can’t trade Ullmark, and you can’t acquire another big-ticket goalie. This turn of events has completely handcuffed the team when it should have been a non-concern, if not an outright strength.
In that situation, you’d hope you can rely on your backup to carry the mail. Unfortunately, Leevi Merilainen has been even worse. Last year, Merilainen saved the season with an impeccable run of 8-3-1 with three shutouts.
This year, the sophomore slump has hit the kid like a bowling ball.
Shooters have figured him out, and he’s playing tentative and twitchy in the net. His .869 save percentage is among the league’s worst, and he’s so borderline unplayable right now that the team just called up Mads Sogaard, the oft-injured, stalled prospect with a 2-8-3 record, a .887 save percentage, and a 3.49 GAA in the minors.
Relying on Sogaard to right the ship would be comically desperate. He's back in the minors now, bt Hunter Shepard might actually be the best option right now, in that pie-in-the-sky, Hamburglar kind of way.
Achilles himself would wince at the heel the team’s goaltending situation has become.
What do you even do when your goaltending implodes to this degree? Fire goalie coach Justin Peters? That move is probably overdue but would likely be a band-aid on a gaping wound.
With the aforementioned goofy standings, the trade market is non-existent since every team feels like they’re still in it. Signing an over-the-hill free-agent goalie that the rest of the league passed on, like James Reimer, or coaxing Marc-Andre Fleury out of retirement, likely isn’t the solution either.
The team can’t even wave the white flag and simply tank the season despite all the promise, because, oh yeah, this team doesn’t have their first-round pick because of the Dadonov fiasco with Vegas.
The problems facing this team are so simple and obvious. It's too bad those simple problems have no simple solutions.
Andrew Sztein is a freelance contributor to The Hockey News and a graduate of Carleton University's Journalism program. A proud owner of every Hockey News Yearbook since the 2000-01 season, Andrew can be reached via X/Twitter at SzteinCreative.
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