With the Sens at Chicago on Thursday, we look back at the ill-fated Alex DeBrincat deal and how the Sens tried to fix it.
The Ottawa Senators are going for their fourth win in a row on Tuesday night when they face the Blackhawks in Chicago. When these two teams get together, it conjures up memories of one of the bigger trades in Senators history.
In the summer of 2022, the Senators and Blackhawks were in very different stages of their rebuilds — or so we thought at the time. The Sens had been plugging away at theirs for four years, while the Hawks were just getting started on theirs.
Senators GM Pierre Dorion clearly decided his team was close and that the time was right to pull off one of those go-for-it trades.
On July 7th, 2022, the Senators acquired 24-year-old winger Alex DeBrincat for three draft picks – their first- and second-round selections in 2022 and their third-round pick in 2024. There was a catch in this deal: DeBrincat was entering the final year of his contract and would be eligible for unrestricted free agency the following summer. Despite that, the move was praised in Ottawa because everyone assumed the Senators would be able to re-sign him. Surely, they wouldn’t make such a trade otherwise.
After one season in Ottawa, where he posted 27 goals, 66 points, and a minus-31 rating, DeBrincat said all the right things about being open to re-signing with the Senators, but in truth, it was never in the cards. The Senators ended up dealing him after one season to his hometown Detroit Red Wings for winger Dominik Kubalik, defenseman Donovan Sebrango, a first-round pick belonging to Boston, and a 2024 fourth-round pick.
So as the Senators and Blackhawks prepare to play on Thursday — both holding the final wild card spot in their respective conferences, one game over .500 — let’s look back at the various branches of the Alex DeBrincat trade to see how it has played out for Ottawa.
What Ottawa Gave Up
2022 First-Round Pick (7th overall): Chicago used this pick to select Kevin Korchinski, a high-scoring WHL defenseman who’s still working on the defensive part of his game down in the minors. Sounds like a certain Sens prospect. Like Carter Yakemchuk, Korchinski was even a 7th overall selection.
2022 Second-Round Pick (39th overall): Chicago used this pick to select forward Paul Ludwinski, who’s also still in the AHL Rockford and not exactly lighting it up yet (12 points in 65 AHL games last season).
2024 Third-Round Pick: Chicago used this pick to select AJ Spellacy, a modest-scoring forward still with the Windsor Spitfires of the OHL.
What Ottawa Got
One season of DeBrincat: He's now in Detroit.
One season of Kubalik: He was unproductive with 15 points, so the Sens let him walk.
Four career games of Sebrango: He was claimed off waivers this month by the Florida Panthers.
Detroit’s 2024 first-rounder, originally belonging to Boston.
Detroit’s 2024 fourth-rounder.
So in the two deals directly involving DeBrincat, the Sens gave up a first, second, and third-round pick and wound up with a first, a fourth, and one season each of DeBrincat and Kubalik.
Not great, but not the end of the world.
And when you look at what the Hawks did with Ottawa’s picks, they're not tracking too well at the moment. But no two scouting teams are the same, and Ottawa’s group almost certainly would have drafted differently than Chicago’s, for better or worse.
For example, with Dorion's fondness for the US National Team Development Program, it's not hard to imagine him coveting Frank Nazar, who was chosen six picks after Korchinski in 2022. Nazar went 13th overall to Chicago (the Hawks had 3 first-round picks), currently leads the team in scoring, and will be a tricky player for the Sens to reckon with on Tuesday.
But we'll never know what they were thinking or might have happened. Every first-round pick looks pretty damn enticing on draft day.
Finally, a year after DeBrincat was out of their hair, the Sens traded their 2024 first-round pick to the Bruins (Dean Letourneau) as part of a package deal to acquire Linus Ullmark, another player entering the final year of his contract. But unlike DeBrincat and later Jakob Chychrun, Ullmark wasn't one-and-done. He was actually willing to sign an extension with Ottawa.
The Senators used their 2024 fourth-rounder to select winger Javon Moore, who has two points in his first eight games as a freshman at the University of Minnesota.
What do you think about how things played out for the Senators? Let us know in the comments.
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