When the Ottawa Senators acquired goalie Linus Ullmark and signed him to a four-year contract, they had hoped they were getting a Vezina Trophy-calibre goaltender for the foreseeable future. It was, after all, a trophy he had recently won, just a year earlier with the Boston Bruins.
Ullmark certainly had some excellent stretches in his first year as a Senator, but he was also injury-prone, which surely had a hand in some of his runs of inconsistency. Fully healthy for 2025-26 and starting a new contract that pays him over 8 million a year, hope was renewed that he would slay Ottawa's goalie graveyard moniker once and for all.
We're a month into the new season, Sens fans are still waiting, and if social media is any indication, a lot of them aren't happy.
Despite Ullmark's 5-4-2 record, his .861 save percentage and 3.41 goals-against average aren't quite the level fans were counting on. It's still a pretty small sample size, and the numbers could still change dramatically with a couple of big performances.
But in the past couple of weeks, Ullmark has begun to get a little more colourful than usual during his media availabilities, turning into something of a quote machine.
In their recent game in Chicago against the Blackhawks, Ullmark described the team's performance as "immature," which raised an eyebrow or two. The following night in the team's victory over the Calgary Flames, Ullmark walked back the comments a little.
"I came out a little hot last game, and said some things that I might, afterwards, regret," Ullmark told the media. "And I got to eat them up today because I felt that we played a mature game today. Really, that’s what we did. We were down three times in the game, and we came back all three times and grabbed the win in the shootout. That shows some guts and some maturity right there."
On Wednesday, Ullmark expressed some displeasure with some of the dialogue out there in the first month. In Bruce Garrioch's Wednesday article in Postmedia, Ullmark was asked about naysayers and the pressure of expectations.
“I can’t say it here,” Ullmark said. “There are so many things I’d like to say to all the people, all the doubters, all the so-called ‘experts’, that I can’t say to the media.
"It is what it is. Everybody has a right to their own opinion, but the only opinions that matter are the people around me that I do care about and my coaches. What everybody else says, they’re entitled to say whatever they want because I don’t give two sh-s about it.”
Ullmark certainly hasn't been shy to speak up when he sees or hears things he doesn't like. The quirky veteran did volunteer a vague critique of the media during a scrum last season. suggesting some of them weren't being totally truthful with their reporting.
"I think it's just the media overall that's been doing their job and not doing their job when it comes to following this team, writing things and saying things that I feel hasn't been fully the truth..."
He was asked by The Athletic's Julian McKenzie to elaborate on the media remark.
"No. That's for you to think about."
Being a starting goalie in the NHL isn't easy, and it obviously wears on Ullmark on occasion, especially when things aren't rolling his way. Though some of them have grown a little skeptical, Sens fans hope that, whether it's media half-truths or the grumblings of the so-called experts, Linus Ullmark uses it as fuel to rejoin the NHL's elite.