Ottawa Senators Hit a Wall in Drake Batherson Talks While Travis Green Talks Cups

The most important piece of Ottawa Senators news this week didn't involve anyone changing teams — it involved the growing possibility that someone might. On July 29, Postmedia's Bruce Garrioch reported that the Senators and Drake Batherson "aren't close" on a contract extension, and every day that report sat there, it got a little heavier. Batherson is entering the final season of the six-year deal he signed in 2021, carrying a $4.95 million cap hit that has quietly become one of the best bargains in the league. Next July, he can walk. For a franchise that already lost its captain this summer, the idea of its most productive winger playing out a lame-duck year is the kind of thing that keeps a general manager checking his phone in August.

The Batherson math is the problem

Here's the squeeze. Batherson, 28, put up 33 goals and 71 points in 79 games last season, then added three goals in Ottawa's four playoff games. That's four straight seasons of 60-plus points, and league executives cited in Garrioch's reporting believe he could command $10 to $11 million a year if he reaches the open market next summer. Ottawa's internal salary structure tops out around $8 million — Tim Stutzle, Jake Sanderson, Thomas Chabot and Linus Ullmark all live in that neighborhood — so paying market rate for Batherson means making him the team's highest-paid player by a wide margin, or convincing him to take less.

The encouraging part: the player isn't agitating. "I mean, it's a great spot for me... feels like home," Batherson has said, and there's no indication he wants out. But sentiment doesn't sign itself, and the uncomfortable subtext of the week's coverage was already turning to what a trade might look like if the gap doesn't close by the season. With Stutzle and Sanderson locked up for five and six more years respectively, this is the one core contract Steve Staios can't afford to fumble. File it under: not a crisis yet, absolutely a clock.

Green's late-summer case for optimism

While the front office wrestles with the math, the head coach spent the week making the emotional argument. In an August 1 appearance on the 100% Hockey podcast with Millard and Shannon, Travis Green looked back at a season that ended in a first-round sweep and somehow came away sounding like a man who liked what he saw. "It's not very often after you get swept 4-0 that you look at it and you're proud of your group," Green said — before going considerably further: "I also felt like we were closer to winning a Stanley Cup than not."

Bold, given the scoreboard. But there's a case in there. The Senators went 44-27-11 for 99 points, made the playoffs as the East's second wild card, and posted back-to-back postseason appearances for the first time since 2012-13 — all while their blue line got shredded by injuries down the stretch, with Sanderson, Chabot, Nick Jensen and others missing time. Green pointed to late-March wins over the Rangers and Red Wings with essentially four healthy defensemen as proof the group "learned how to believe in themselves." The sweep came against Carolina, which went on to win the Stanley Cup, so the exit at least came at the hands of the best team in hockey. Whether "closer than not" survives contact with an 84-game season is another matter, but Green clearly isn't coaching scared.

The post-Tkachuk reset, two months on

All of this sits in the shadow of June 22, when Brady Tkachuk invoked his no-movement clause to request a trade and was sent to the Florida Panthers — joining brother Matthew — for the No. 9 and No. 25 picks in the 2026 draft, a 2027 second-rounder and a top-10 protected 2029 first. Tkachuk had two years left at an $8.214 million cap hit, and his exit gave the Senators roughly $25 million in cap room and a mandate. Staios was blunt at the time: "I don't intend on taking a step back with this group."

He mostly kept his word. A day later, the No. 9 pick went to San Jose for William Eklund, plus Kasper Halttunen and the rights to Brandon Svoboda. Eklund, 23, is coming off a 53-point season and is entering a three-year deal at a tidy $5.6 million a year — a legitimate top-six forward acquired at the exact age curve a retooling contender wants. The rest of the summer was maintenance: Claude Giroux, 38 and coming off 49 points and a 63.1 percent faceoff rate, re-signed for one year at a $2 million base with bonuses that can push it to $5 million ("I chose to come back because I want to be here," he said, which is about as clean as free-agent quotes get). Nick Cousins took a two-year extension, Leevi Merilainen signed for one year, and Xavier Bourgault — Ottawa's lone arbitration filer — settled on a one-year, two-way deal before a hearing was ever needed.

Prospect corner: a homecoming worth noting

The draft capital left over from the Tkachuk deal turned into actual humans in June: right wing Jonas Lagerberg Hoen of Leksands at No. 25, and London Knights winger Jaxon Cover at No. 32, a pick the Senators recovered through the league's modification of an old trade penalty. Cover carries the better story — he's the first player from the Cayman Islands ever drafted into the NHL, and this week fans greeted him at the airport when he returned home, a genuinely great scene for a franchise that could use a feel-good pipeline tale. Neither player will push for NHL minutes soon, but between Eklund, Halttunen and the incoming draft class, the system is meaningfully deeper than it was in May.

The extension queue and the cap picture

Batherson isn't the only name on Staios's list. Artem Zub's camp said this week that talks on a new deal haven't started but are expected "in the coming weeks or in early fall." The flip side of Ottawa's summer discipline — short deals, two-way contracts, bonus-laden veteran signings — is real cap flexibility heading into 2026-27, which analysts spent the week crediting to the front office's maneuvering. That flexibility is precisely what makes the Batherson standoff so strange from the outside: the space exists. The question is whether Ottawa wants to spend it on a winger who'll be 29 when the next deal starts, or whether that money is being held back for the trade market, where the Senators have been persistently linked to upgrade hunting all month.

What's next: key Ottawa Senators dates

• October 3: Season opener in Toronto, the start of a three-game road trip through Boston and Detroit in the new 84-game schedule.
• October 8: Home opener at Canadian Tire Centre against Philadelphia.
• October 21: Brady Tkachuk returns to Ottawa with the Panthers. Circle it in whatever color you like.
• December 18 and 20: NHL Global Series in Dusseldorf, Germany — two games against Chicago, Ottawa's third overseas trip in nine years.
• January 20 – February 9: Season-long six-game homestand, wrapped around the bye week and All-Star Weekend in New York.

So that's the state of Ottawa Senators hockey in early August: a coach talking about Stanley Cups, a front office sitting on cap space and draft capital, and one very large contract question hanging over both. The roster that ended last season believing in itself is mostly intact, and the Eklund addition makes the top six younger and arguably better balanced. But the next month of Senators news will be measured against a single benchmark — whether Batherson's name shows up under "extensions" or keeps drifting toward the rumor columns. Ottawa has until the season starts in Toronto to make the boring, correct kind of headline.