The Ottawa Senators celebrated their Saturday win over the New York Islanders, which helped punch their playoff ticket.Rich Graessle/Getty Images
It was a winter in which the Ottawa Senators had more floor crossers than the Liberals.
Finnicky fans roiled weekly through the wild emotions. The team sucks, the team triumphs; the American-born captain wants to play down south, the Canadian-dwelling captain is the heart and soul of the team; the goaltending is dreadful, the goalie is on leave, the goalie is back and on a streak – and, almost magically, the Ottawa Senators are back in the Stanley Cup playoffs, thanks to a captain and a goaltender who both rose to the occasion as spring arrived in the national capital.
There is in the Senators’ fan base what a team executive once called “paranoia” – a fear that something is about to go wrong … again. And again.
But not this spring. With captain Brady Tkachuk leading the attack and goaltender Linus Ullmark playing brilliantly since the Olympic break, the Senators claimed a wild-card position in the postseason on Saturday, thanks to an impressive 3-0 victory over the New York Islanders coupled with a Detroit Red Wings 5-3 loss to the New Jersey Devils.
The once-powerful Red Wings are now in a decade-long playoff drought. The Senators are into the postseason for the second straight year under the relatively new ownership of a group led by Toronto-area businessman Michael Andlauer, who made his fortune in health care supplies.
Senators beat Islanders 3-0, clinch playoff spot after Devils beat Red Wings
The Senators were widely considered to be on their deathbed over the first half of the 2025-2026 season but then lost only a half dozen games since Jan. 27. They have been, as the saying goes, on fire.
That same January week saw Detroit with the most points in the NHL’s Eastern Conference. The Wings were given an 89.5 per cent probability to reach the playoffs, only to enter a swoon that is now seen as a total collapse.
Ottawa, on the other hand, has been a startling contrast. Injuries once had their top defence corps on the sidelines. Ullmark, the goaltender, had been so inconsistent that he took leave from the team early in the New Year, leading to a social-media frenzy so filled with wild accusation that team general manager Steve Staois released a formal statement that the rumours and false stories were “completely fabricated.”
Staois’s statement said the organization was “disgusted that outside forces are attempting to disrupt our hockey club.”
Ottawa Senators goaltender Linus Ullmark has been excellent in net since the Olympic break. Ullmark took a leave from the team earlier in the season.Frank Franklin II/The Associated Press
Ullmark was surprisingly candid about his brief absence, telling reporters, “I am broken, and I’m still not fully, completely healed.” Yet he was well enough to play spectacularly when it mattered most.
Ullmark’s propitious return was not alone. The forwards began scoring, the penalty kill blossomed, key defencemen Thomas Chabot and Jake Sanderson recovered from injury – Chabot returning to action less than a month after surgery to repair a broken right arm.
Looked upon with panic by their fans over the fall, and with some disdain by the hockey world beyond, the Senators late-winter-early-spring revival has been a welcome respite in a news world filled with gloom and doom and Donald J. Trump.
So impressive has the team’s rebound been that NHL insider Pierre Lebrun posted this week that “Ottawa has that look of giant slayer entering the Stanley Cup playoffs.
“I think the Senators can beat anyone.”
If this were somehow to become true, it would have to mean the Stanley Cup would be returning to Canada for the first time in 33 years, the last maple syrup victors being the 1993 Montreal Canadiens.
For Senators fans with memories stretching back approximately to the Middle Ages, however, it would mean the Stanley Cup would be returning to its actual birthplace for the first time in 99 years – the last Ottawa team to claim the championship being the 1927 original Senators.
There is, surely, no one alive who can claim to have been at that final victorious match.
The original Ottawa team – known as the Silver Seven and then the Senators – won 11 Stanley Cups between 1903 and 1927. They were the talk of the town, and often the country, during The Roaring Twenties thanks to such stars as (One-Eyed) Frank McGee, Cy Denneny, Punch Broadbent, (Fearless) Frank Finnigan, Francis (King) Clancy and others.
Post 1927, however, the team ran into money problems. When selling off players didn’t work – Clancy went to the Toronto Maple Leafs for $35,000 and two players – the team decided to depart Ottawa for St. Louis, where they became the Eagles and eventually foundered again and vanished.
On April 7, 1934, the Evening Citizen editorialized that the franchise “cannot go on losing money, and so, local fans must accept the situation as gracefully as they can.”
Grace, however, has only so much staying power. The modern Senators are into their fourth ownership since the Sens returned to the league in 1992-93 after a 58-year hiatus. The closest the modern version of the team came to the Cup was 2007, during the Daniel Alfredsson years, when they came up short against the Anaheim Ducks. It was, despite the loss, a glorious time to be a hockey fan in Ottawa.
The Roaring Twenties are never to return, yet the roar that went up in Ottawa this weekend was something to behold.
How long the roar lasts is unknown.
But it sure beats the groans of short months past.