The Ottawa Senators gathered on the second floor of their hotel, hoping to celebrate.
Hours earlier, on Saturday afternoon, Ottawa defeated the New York Islanders in Elmont, N.Y., moving one step closer toward clinching a playoff berth for the second straight year. Back at the Westin Jersey City Newport, many members of the team’s traveling party were glued to screens showing the Detroit Red Wings-New Jersey Devils game. The stakes were simple: A New Jersey victory would punch the Senators’ ticket.
Several players watched on a television in a conference room, cheering at every Devils goal. Coach Travis Green and his staff tuned in from another meeting room next door, with Green later admitting to unleashing a few swear words throughout the viewing experience. Others received audible updates, via these live reactions, from a third space doubling as a makeshift athletic training room.
After falling behind through two periods, New Jersey mounted a late charge to beat Detroit, 5-3. Senators players and coaches celebrated together, at once basking in their latest success and breathing a sigh of relief. Their roller coaster ride of a 2025-26 season was guaranteed to continue.
“We’ve been through a lot this year,” Senators forward Claude Giroux said Sunday. “We dug ourselves into a pretty big hole, and then we were able to get out of it and find a way to make the playoffs.”
The Senators’ chances of making the playoffs once looked bleak, dipping below 20 percent as they dropped into a tie for last in the Eastern Conference in late January. At the time, their penalty kill was languishing among the NHL’s worst. Their team save percentage would’ve ranked among the lowest league-wide in the last 35 years. Starting goaltender Linus Ullmark was away on undisclosed personal leave, leading the organization to release a statement denouncing online speculation about the nature of his then-indefinite absence. And captain Brady Tkachuk hardly looked himself after a right thumb injury ahead of his first Olympic appearance.
Under the hood, though, Ottawa was consistently brushing shoulders with Stanley Cup contenders on expected goals and shot suppression, suggesting that a turnaround was possible. Now the team is improbably playoff-bound in consecutive seasons for the first time since 2011-12 and 2012-13, capturing the East’s second wild card spot to set up a first-round date with the conference-leading Carolina Hurricanes.
And while many once doubted their odds, the Senators insist they never lost faith. Not even post-Olympic injuries to defencemen Jake Sanderson and Thomas Chabot led to Ottawa using 13 different blueliners by season’s end — or Ullmark’s struggles, or Tkachuk’s fatigue — could derail their final on-ice push.
“Inside our room,” assistant coach Nolan Baumgartner said, “there was no panic.”
Looking back on their regular-season resurgence, players and coaches struggle to identify a single turning point. But the Senators experienced a significant amount of turbulence that necessitated course corrections.
In net, with Ullmark still away on leave and the Senators down to Leevi Meriläinen, Mads Sogaard and journeyman minor-league Hunter Shepard, the Senators found themselves in troublesome goaltending waters to start 2026. This prompted general manager Steve Staios to sign veteran James Reimer, who had just represented Canada at the Spengler Cup in Switzerland.
It wasn’t the first time that the team had pursued Reimer, checking in with him last summer before Reimer chose to remain unsigned and spend more time with his family. And once Reimer’s time at the Spengler Cup ended, Staios pounced, signing him to a professional tryout agreement with the Senators’ minor-league affiliate on Jan. 9. Fittingly enough, the news broke during the second intermission of the season’s most lopsided loss, an 8-2 blowout at home against the Colorado Avalanche.
On Jan. 17, the day before Reimer’s debut with the Senators, Meriläinen allowed six goals on 19 shots in a 6-5 overtime loss to the Montreal Canadiens, after which Sanderson declared that his team’s goalie needed to “make more than 10 saves to win a game.” Sanderson later apologized to Meriläinen, but the netminder was soon sent to the minors. Since joining Ottawa, his replacement has fared much better: In 14 regular-season appearances with the Senators, Reimer went 7-4-2 with a 2.42 goals-against average and an .886 save percentage, ending with 19 saves in a 3-1 win over the Maple Leafs in Wednesday’s finale.
“Very thankful that we could get a good pro like James Reimer here,” Staios told The Athletic. “I think his impact not only increased for us on the ice, in practice. But, off the ice, he has been really, really valuable to the group.”
Even with Reimer arriving to address their Achilles’ heel, the Senators still had other issues to sort through — namely, their penalty kill. Deploying a hybrid box structure that morphed in shape depending on the opposing power play, Ottawa proved too easy to pierce, especially with sub-standard goaltending. In Reimer’s third game, on Jan. 22, the team blew a 3-0 lead by allowing five unanswered goals in a 5-3 loss to the Nashville Predators, including two against Nashville’s power play.
“We were trying, and it just wasn’t working out at the time,” Baumgartner said.
Two days later, on the morning of a game against the Hurricanes, a change was announced: Baumgartner, a longtime assistant of Green’s dating back to their days in Vancouver, would make way for Mike Yeo in overseeing the penalty kill. No structural changes were made, but the improvement was drastic. When Yeo took over on Jan. 24, the Senators had the NHL’s second-worst penalty kill unit at around 72 percent. Under Yeo, entering Wednesday, the Senators were operating at nearly 83 percent — the sixth-best rate in the league in that span.
“We’ve tried to put an emphasis on going out sort of with a mindset of not reacting to what they do, and be a little bit more assertive and dictate things,” Yeo said in March. “I think that’s what we’ve seen from our group. We’re trying to develop a bit of an attitude where, you know, and a bit of a swagger.”
While dark clouds followed the Senators, they managed to enjoy lighter moments. Ullmark travelled with the group during the team’s three-game road trip through Detroit, Columbus and Nashville, cheering up teammates who were just happy to have him around even if he wasn’t playing.
Around that time, the Senators’ coaching staff emphasized playing with desperation during a video meeting — using forward Claude Giroux as an example in a clip. In response, Giroux reiterated the need to play desperately to his teammates.
“We started making fun of him for saying that,” forward Shane Pinto said, wearing a shirt featuring Giroux’s face with the nickname “Mr. Desperate” below. The shirts were made upon their return from that road trip.
“That’s just them messing around with me,” Giroux said.
But the message was serious: If the Senators were to fix their season, they had to want it more than their opponent every night.
If any single turning point does exist, it is probably a speech that Green made on Jan. 25, following a resounding 7-1 victory over the Vegas Golden Knights. In the Senators’ dressing room, the coach told his team to block out the “white noise” surrounding the group.
“He kind of nipped it in the bud right away,” Sanderson said. “Let the white noise be out there. Don’t let it affect this locker room.”
The Golden Knights’ victory was among five wins in their final six games before the Olympic break. Ottawa’s momentum continued upon its return with four wins in its first six games back. Tkachuk even removed the tape from his right thumb once he returned to the Senators and collected points in his first seven games. And on March 19, he fought Anders Lee to start a game against the Islanders. Tkachuk ended this season with 22 points in 23 games.
“He manages the game the right way, manages his emotions,” Staios said. “I think it’s growth.”
Tkachuk wasn’t alone in producing at the top of the lineup. Tim Stützle amassed separate points streaks of 13 and 14 games, continuing the latter through the Olympic break after representing Germany in Milan. Drake Batherson worked toward, and eventually achieved, his first 30-goal season. Dylan Cozens, acquired at the trade deadline from Buffalo last year, reached 20 goals for the first time since the 2022-23 season.
The Senators were even rewarded off the ice, receiving their 2026 first-round pick back after lobbying the NHL to amend their punishment for the Evgenii Dadonov trade gone wrong.
Despite injuries sidelining Chabot, Sanderson, Nick Jensen and other members of their back end, the Senators continued to surge. On March 23, they beat the New York Rangers on the road with only four defenders. The next night, in Detroit, they called up rookies Carter Yakemchuk and Jorian Donovan and won again.
“I think we’re a little bit cursed right now on the back end,” Sanderson said earlier this month. “But guys have been playing awesome.”
The Senators dealt with more “white noise” when Ullmark was unavailable against the Tampa Bay Lightning due to mental health reasons. His first game back, on March 31 against the Florida Panthers, saw him allow five goals on 16 shots before being pulled. Ensuing podcast comments from Tkachuk’s father, Keith, went viral after fans and pundits interpreted them as critical of the Swedish netminder, which Brady strongly refuted. In Ullmark’s six games after that Panthers loss, he went 5-1-0 with a .926 save percentage and a 1.83 goals-against average.
Entering Wednesday, according to Natural Stat Trick, the Sens ranked in the NHL’s top five in expected goals percentage, high-danger chance percentage and shot attempt rate. And others around the league have taken notice of their success.
“That’s a team that plays playoff hockey,” Hurricanes forward Taylor Hall said after the Canes lost to Ottawa earlier this month. “It’s a good test for what we’re going to see. They have that desperation, and we’re gonna have to match that in a couple of weeks.”
An exhaustive list of ups and downs has followed the Senators all season. There will likely be more adventures when the Senators begin their playoff quest in North Carolina this weekend. But they can’t say they haven’t been battle-tested with all the drama, injuries and other forms of adversity that have come their way this season.
As Ullmark said, “We’re used to it.”