Ottawa’s goaltending nightmare has returned. And a promising, talented lineup under head coach Travis Green is at risk of missing the postseason because the team can’t buy a save.

The Senators officially ended a lengthy rebuild last season, returning to the playoffs with a 97-point campaign in 2024-25. Ottawa was eliminated by the provincial rival Toronto Maple Leafs in six games in the opening round, but the organization had every reason to be excited about the future.

Many of their homegrown prospects had shown they were NHL-ready, and, just as promisingly, the Senators appeared to have found their long-term solution in net. The recently acquired Linus Ullmark (backed up by Anton Forsberg) offered real stability. So much so, the Senators finished eighth in the NHL in team save percentage, stopping 90.1 per cent of shots faced.

But that stability has broken down in stunning fashion this season. A very similar Senators lineup is struggling mightily to stay afloat in an otherwise weak Atlantic Division, and it’s almost entirely because they cannot keep pucks out of their own net.

Ullmark has struggled and is now away from the team while dealing with a personal matter. Backup Leevi Merilainen has struggled just as much in relief. Their save percentage as a team has fallen to dead last in the NHL, with Senators goalies barely stopping 87 per cent of shots faced.

Using goals saved versus expected (which adjusts for shot quality faced), the 2025-26 Ullmark and Merilainen tandem looks identical to the tail end of the Craig Anderson years or the Matt Murray era. And if Ullmark is gone for an extended period of time, Ottawa will have to look even further down the depth chart to dig out of this performance hole:

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Simply put: every 60 minutes of hockey played, Ottawa’s goaltenders are giving up half a goal more than you would expect from replacement-level goaltending.

One important qualifier here on why it appears to be such an outsized goaltending issue underway in Ottawa right now – shot rates faced and expected goals (shots adjusted for quality, based on shooting locations, shot types, etc.) look very similar to last season.

Sometimes when you see goaltending suddenly capitulate like this, it’s a function or byproduct of suddenly shoddy defensive play. Ottawa is not the most robust defensive team in the league, but the Ullmark/Merilainen tandem is facing less defensive pressure than ever, and notably at even-strength. Shots faced and expected goals (shots adjusted for quality) are at multi-year lows, and in considerable fashion:

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Merilainen has only played in 13 games and has all of 27 games of NHL experience at this point in his career. I think it’s fair to say the 23-year-old may need some time to get comfortable at this level, though he’s clearly underwhelming compared to where Forsberg was a season ago. The much bigger concern here is Ullmark, who signed a four-year, $33 million-dollar extension (coupled with a full no-movement clause) in October 2024.

Goaltending slumps happen everywhere and it’s more than reasonable to hope that a veteran like Ullmark can pull himself out of this stretch; if nothing else, the Senators are desperately counting on it. But the career trend is not good – he doesn’t look anything like the goalie we saw the past few years in Boston and Ottawa. Instead, he’s more in line with the early edition version the Buffalo Sabres had back in 2018 and 2019:

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The season is not lost for Ottawa, certainly not in such a middling division. And there are still core pieces of this team to like – the Senators have a top 10 offence at both even strength (2.7 goals per 60 minutes) and on the power play (8.6 goals per 60 minutes), which can offset some of the defensive pain they are feeling right now. It’s one reason why this team is 6-3-1 in their past 10 games. But goaltending this shambolic is usually difficult to overcome long term.

If Ullmark and Merilainen can crawl back just to league average, Ottawa will appear to be the playoff-calibre team they were a season ago, especially with the offence scoring the way it is. If not, this team is shockingly going to be back in draft lottery discussions, with sudden questions about the health of their goaltending position.

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

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