All eyes on Ottawa’s beleaguered blueline

On Friday, NHL Network asked fans to grade the Ottawa Senators’ off-season. My initial reaction was to heap praise on general manager Pierre Dorion and the rest of the Senators’ front office.

Trading for 40-goal scorer Alex DeBrincat and giving up next to nothing in the process, was sterling. Signing veteran forward Claude Giroux adds quality depth, though expectations for any 34-year-old should be a bit muted. Erasing Matt Murray’s disastrous contract – a contract signed by Dorion, it must be pointed out – from the ledger was of critical importance.

The Senators are unquestionably a better team from this series of moves. And with a young core certainly on the upswing, we can reasonably assume there is improvement coming across the balance of Ottawa’s young talents.

Brady Tkachuk, Josh Norris (freshly signed to a long-term deal), DeBrincat, Drake Batherson, Tim Stutzle, Alex Formenton, Shane Pinto, Jake Sanderson, Erik Brannstrom, Jacob Bernard-Docker, and Lassi Thomson are all 24 or younger. Tkachuk and DeBrincat are already stars. Another handful seem on the cusp. And sure, a few will not pan out. But there is an awful lot of top-end talent across this lineup, a feather-in-the-cap moment for Dorion and his five-year rebuild.

But grading the off-season must be reconciled against expectations. I think the franchise is serious about contending for a playoff spot as soon as this year. And why wouldn’t it be? For as daunting as the top of the Eastern Conference is, there are plenty of bottom-feeders. Points are there for the taking. And with full respect to the likes of the Boston Bruins, Washington Capitals, and Pittsburgh Penguins, there are three perennial playoff teams whose core is old. At some point, gravity will come into play. It always does.

The missing piece in Ottawa’s presumptive rise is the need to bolster the blueline, an obvious position of weakness made even more glaring now relative to what looks like a lethal top-six forward group.

As it stands today, the team has two defenders it can reasonably trust in Thomas Chabot and Artem Zub, the latter of whom is on an expiring contract. After that, it’s a mess of guys you don’t want out there or very young players who could break either way:

It’s one thing to try and plug holes with aging veterans or insulated rookies on a third pair. A second pair plays a lot of minutes against tough competition, and the pickings here are slim. Travis Hamonic, Nikita Zaitsev and Nick Holden are not serious options. Brannstrom is still regarded as a prospect, but he’s fresh off a grim 2021-22 season. Sanderson and Thomson are unproven rookies. Maybe one or both explodes onto the scene, but maybe not.

At any rate, this lack of depth is why we keep hearing Ottawa linked to any rumoured defender out there – two puck-movers in Florida’s MacKenzie Weegar and Arizona’s Jakob Chychrun are frequently discussed as targets.

You never want to be in a position of overpaying for a player to address such an obvious weakness, but this is where I hone back in on playoff expectations and whether this team is serious about making a move into the top eight.

Consider a profile from last season, where the depth parts of the blueline were routinely beaten into the ground. I cannot emphasize one point enough: Ottawa’s core players were fine last year, as shown below. It was the bottom half of the roster that was shelled, culminating in Ottawa finishing 39 goals below break-even and 27 points out of a playoff spot.

Not surprisingly, Chabot and Zub fought to possession break-even and goal differential break-even in tough minutes over the entirety of the season. You want these numbers to gap up a bit more next year, and the hope is that some of that will come with a quality of teammate bump – after all, players like DeBrincat and Giroux, who weren’t in the fold a season ago, will create more opportunities for others and score more in their own right. At any rate, the fact that both players can be relied upon is a good start.

But the rest of the group? I mean, who would you really bet on here? Holden is a decent third-pairing option, perhaps. I’ve seen talk about Hamonic’s miniature renaissance over a 19-game stint with the Senators to end last year; I note this comes on the heels of him getting 93.1 goaltending behind him, a fleeting number that rarely sustains itself long-term. Plus, Ottawa had a 45 per cent expected goal rate with him out there; hardly the number you point to for optimism. It’s not even worth talking about Zaitsev, and the rest you can flip a coin on right now.  

Senators fans understand the issue  well. I think the interesting part of the debate here is just how aggressive Dorion should be in pursuing a defender to address the issue. The risk-averse argument is that you never want to overspend on a player out of desperation, and you certainly don’t want a player blocking valuable ice time from players like Sanderson and Thomson, who figure to factor sometime down the road.

The playoff-or-bust argument, save whatever happens performance-wise across the Anton Forsberg-Cam Talbot tandem in net, rests on this team’s second and third pairings as they exist today. They are the most likely blockers for Ottawa returning to the playoffs.

How do I know that? Because the blueline held Ottawa back last season. We’ll see how the team addresses the hole, but I’m betting we see another move out of the Senators organization before all is said and done.

Data via Natural Stat Trick, Evolving Hockey, NHL.com.