OTTAWA — Travis Green drilled down on systems and fundamentals last season.
The Ottawa Senators head coach was in his first campaign with a club that had failed to make the playoffs seven years running as part of a glacial rebuild in the nation’s capital.
Green would help start the thaw and get his new team back in the post-season before a respectable first-round exit — the end of a campaign viewed on the whole as a solid foundation for a group finally starting to realize its potential.
Training camp opened ahead of the 2025-26 campaign with heightened internal and external expectations. It wasn’t a smooth ride.
“Last year we had to find our game as the year went on,” Green said. “This year was more of a mental grind.”
Ottawa managed to snag the Eastern Conference’s second wild-card spot thanks to a post-Olympic surge after a roller-coaster start on and off the ice. The results weren’t always there, while chatter and innuendo beyond the locker room’s four walls, at least for a time, dominated the outside narrative.
Though not an exact mirror image, the opening stages of the Senators’ current predicament in their first-round playoff series with the Carolina Hurricanes have similarities. The club is largely happy with its process. The scoreboard, however, hasn’t been kind.
Staying strong between the ears will be crucial if there’s any hope of a revival, and it will be up to Green to again steer the ship away from more choppy waters.
Ottawa is down 2-0 in its best-of-seven series with the East’s top seed after a 2-0 loss in the opener was followed by a thrilling, chaotic 3-2 double-overtime decision. Game 3 is set for Thursday at Canadian Tire Centre.
The Senators have responded before. They were more or less a .500 hockey club through the first two months of the schedule. Then came the off-ice distractions.
“There’s always stuff going on,” Ottawa centre Tim Stutzle said. “But it brought us close as a group.”
Senators goaltender Linus Ullmark was in a rough stretch and then took a personal leave at the end of December — later revealed to be related to mental health — before internet rumours regarding some players’ private lives received online traction to a point where the team issued a statement of denial.
“We talked about the noise,” said Green, a former NHL centre. “(Canada’s) the best place to coach or play. There’s obviously a lot of passion for the game; they want their team to win, and that’s a great thing about it. But with that comes pressure, and comes a lot of noise from the outside when things aren’t going well.
“It’s hard to block it out as a player, especially in today’s world.”
The message was always clear and concise from the coach’s office.
“You’re paid to go out there and do your job on the ice,” Senators defenceman Thomas Chabot said. “We dug in, and we stuck together.”
Ottawa went on a 5-1-0- heading into the NHL’s three-week Olympic break in February, but still sat six points below the playoff cutline at 28-22-7.
When the league returned, the club got hot. The Senators went 16-5-4, including a 10-2-2 run from Feb. 26 through March 24, thanks in large part to Ullmark’s return and resurgence, on the way to securing a playoff berth with 99 points.
“We had control over the whole thing,” Senators winger Drake Batherson said of the perceived drama. “We just believed in one another, had each other’s backs through it. No matter what you do, people are always going to say stuff. You’ve got to go out and play.”
Ottawa forward Nick Cousins said Green was there throughout.
“A few distractions this year … handled it well,” he said. “The room has handled it well, as well. We haven’t let any of that outside noise creep in. We’re a tight-knit group in here. We don’t let a lot of stuff like that bother us.
“Travis just keeps us focused on the task at hand, the ‘win-the-day-mentality’ that he always has.”
The Senators will need to win a lot of days over the next stretch to keep their season alive — beginning Thursday in front of their fans.
“We liked our game almost from the start of the year and just weren’t getting results,” Green said. “As a player, that can be very frustrating to hear, ‘Keep doing it again.’ Sometimes you’re looking for answers. As coaches, we did a lot of internal looking at our team and really felt like there wasn’t a lot to change.
“We just needed to keep resetting and playing again and having faith in our team.”
He will soon find out if a repeat is in the cards.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 21, 2026.
Joshua Clipperton, The Canadian Press
