Headlines

Go To MLB Trade Rumors
Go To Hoops Rumors

Senators Rumors

Morning Notes: Pysyk, Clifton, Zub

at CDT | by Leave a Comment

The Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins of the AHL have signed defenseman Mark Pysyk to a professional try-out. Pysyk is a 521-game veteran of the NHL, most recently playing for the Buffalo Sabres in the 2021-22 season.

Pysyk scored 12 points in the 68 games he was awarded in 2021-22, six points shy of his career-high in scoring. He set that career-high with the 2019-20 Florida Panthers, reaching 18 points in 58 games. It speaks to the modest career that Pysyk had, with much of his value being provided on the defensive side of the puck. How Pysyk will be utilized on his newly-signed PTO is up in the air but if he plays AHL games, it will be his first experience in the league since 2015-16. It will also be his first time playing with a minor league club other than the Rochester Americans, whom Pysyk totaled 145 games with throughout the early stages of his career.

Other notes from around the league:

Ottawa Senators Fire General Manager Pierre Dorion

at CDT | by 27 Comments

The Ottawa Senators have relieved general manager Pierre Dorion of his duties. The announcement was made on Wednesday afternoon, just hours after it was announced that the team would lose a First Round pick for their mishandling of Evegnii Dadonov’s trade away from the club.

This was the last straw for Ottawa, says Bruce Garrioch of the Ottawa Sun, as the club has faced a string of bad news and scandals to start the season. Only last week it was announced that Shane Pinto would face a 41-game suspension for going against the NHL’s betting policy. This comes after a laborious contract negotiation with the restricted free agent that carried into the regular season.

Ottawa is off to a fine enough start to the season, despite the off-ice theatrics, with a 4-4-0 record through their first eight games and the seventh-most goals in the NHL. They’re being championed, once again, by the powerful duo of Tim Stutzle and Brady Tkachuk – the former leading the team in assists (8) and the latter leading them in goals (6).  The two have spent 123 minutes of ice time together and have been on the ice for 12 of Ottawa’s 32 goals so far this season. Their even-strength line is rounded out by Claude Giroux, who has nine points of his own through the team’s eight games.

Dorion was also the man to bring in free agent Vladimir Tarasenko, whose brought a defiant punch to the team’s second line, with three goals and nine points. With Dorion now out of the picture, all attention turns towards who the Senators may entertain as his replacement. New team owner Michael Andlauer announced that Dorion has stepped down and Steve Staios will take over general managing duties in the interim at a press conference on Wednesday.

Ottawa Senators To Forfeit First-Round Pick

at CDT | by 30 Comments

The NHL has announced that the Ottawa Senators will forfeit a first-round draft pick for their role in the July 2021 trade of Evgenii Dadonov from the Senators to the Vegas Golden Knights and the subsequent, invalidated March 2022 Dadonov trade between the Golden Knights and the Anaheim Ducks.

According to the league’s announcement, the Senators will have 24 hours after the conclusion of the NHL Draft lottery to determine if they will surrender their first-round pick in that given year, and they will be able to choose between giving up a pick in either the 2024, 2025, or 2026 drafts.

The Vegas Golden Knights issued a statement regarding the Senators’ punishment, stating:

We appreciate the league’s diligence on this matter and respect the decision. The club will have no further comment.

This issue originates from 2021, when the Golden Knights acquired Dadonov from Ottawa. No official statement regarding how exactly the Senators mishandled that trade has been released, but The Athletic’s Jesse Granger writes on X that the issue relates to the Senators’ handling of the no-trade list in Dadonov’s contract.

While the league did not elaborate on any specifics as to what the Senators did that merited such a punishment, the fact that a first-round pick has been docked sends a signal that the league deemed serious punishment in order for the Senators.

Per the league’s statement, the NHL nor any of the involved clubs will comment further on this matter, meaning no official explanation of the reasons for this punishment will come.

Thankfully, reporting from Postmedia’s Bruce Garrioch sheds some light on the situation. Garrioch reported that today’s punishment has come “as a result of general manager Pierre Dorion giving the Knights the wrong information about the existence of Dadonov’s 10-team ‘no move’ clause.”

The Golden Knights, seemingly believing that Dadonov did not possess no-trade protection, attempted to trade the player to the Anaheim Ducks in a move that was eventually vetoed by the league.

Garrioch added: “The Knights were under the impression that Dadonov hadn’t entered a 10-team no-trade list before the 2021-22 campaign so he no longer had one.”

This appears to have been an issue for Golden Knights management, as Garrioch cites a source who said: “Vegas president of hockey operations George McPhee and GM Kelly McCrimmon refused to let this matter go and appealed to the NHL’s head office to look into it,” a move that resulted in today’s punishment.

Garrioch also laid out the Senators’ argument in defense of their actions, stating that at the time of the trade, the Senators “argued that Vegas had the contract on its books for eight months” and had not looked “at the details” of the contract. While it’s true that the Golden Knights had employed Dadonov for quite a bit of time before the trade, it seems this argument was not sufficient to stave off punishment from the league.

This reported chain of events has not been officially confirmed, and the league’s statement today makes clear that no official confirmation is set to come. But regardless of what exactly happened in Ottawa to merit this kind of punishment, the reality the Senators now face is that they have lost a key asset for their future.

Their right to choose which draft pick they surrender does offer them some crucial flexibility in the matter, especially if the team misses the playoffs this season and ends up in the draft lottery. Just a few years after the Senators had to watch the Colorado Avalanche draft Bowen Byram fourth-overall with a draft pick that once belonged to them, the Senators will not want a repeat of that situation.

Photos courtesy of USA Today Sports Images

Senators’ Artem Zub Expected To Return This Week

at CDT | by 2 Comments

The Senators hope defenseman Artem Zub will be ready to return to the lineup for Thursday’s game against the Kings, Bruce Garrioch of Postmedia reports. Zub was on the ice for practice Monday after not playing since taking a puck to the jaw in an October 18 contest against the Capitals.

Zub is widely regarded as Ottawa’s best shutdown defenseman, and the numbers back that up ever since he signed with the team as a free agent out of Russia in 2020. The incident against the Capitals was Zub’s second jaw injury in as many seasons, and it’s caused him to miss the team’s last four games. They’ve gone 1-3-0 in his absence and now sit seventh in the Atlantic Division with a .500 record, another slow start for a team consistently plagued by early-season ineffectiveness.

Through four games this season, Zub had a goal and two assists in 17:57 of average ice time. His +3 rating still ranks first among Ottawa’s defenders thus far.

Head coach D.J. Smith did not initially expect Zub’s absence to be “long-term,” and while he was right, almost half a month is certainly longer than Ottawa would like to be without his services, especially given the circumstances. Later injuries have sidelined both Erik Brännström and number-one defenseman Thomas Chabot, decimating the team’s defensive depth and forcing veterans like Travis Hamonic into top-pairing minutes, albeit temporarily. Those injuries have necessitated recalls from AHL Belleville like Tyler Kleven and Nikolas Matinpalo, who both played under ten minutes and took less than 15 shifts in Ottawa’s 5-2 win over the Penguins last Saturday.

Zub, 28, is in the first season of a four-year, $4.6MM AAV extension signed last December.

Ottawa Senators Recall Tyler Kleven, Nikolas Matinpalo

at CDT | by Leave a Comment

The Ottawa Senators have announced that defensemen Tyler Kleven and Nikolas Matinpalo have been recalled from the club’s AHL affiliate, the Belleville Senators.

These moves have been made in the aftermath of two significant injuries that have hit the Senators’ blueline. Yesterday, it was announced that Thomas Chabot would miss significant time with a fractured hand, while defenseman Erik Brännström also suffered an injury as well.

In a corresponding move to create the necessary cap space for these recalls, CapFriendly reports that Chabot has been placed on long-term injured reserve, creating $8MM in LTIR relief for Ottawa.

The result of this absence: the Senators have a massive number of minutes that need to be filled on their blueline.

Chabot is the club’s most highly-utilized defenseman, soaking up time at both even strength and on the power play. There’s no way what he offers the Senators can be truly replaced by any call-ups, although that’s not to say the Senators’ call-up options aren’t quality players in their own right.

Kleven, 21, is an expected call-up as he’s widely viewed as the top Senators defenseman in Belleville. The 21-year-old 2020 second-round pick got a small taste of life in the NHL at the end of last season, skating in eight games for the Senators after the conclusion of his three-year NCAA career at the University of North Dakota.

The six-foot-four, 200-pound stay-at-home blueliner excels in his own end and will be able to offer size, physicality, and shutdown ability to head coach D.J. Smith.

As for Matinpalo, he’s a player with a very different background and someone who has taken a very different path to receiving this call-up. Like Kleven, Matinpalo also offers above-average size (he’s six-foot-three, 207 pounds) as well as defensive responsibility.

But unlike Kleven, Matinpalo’s standing in the Senators organization isn’t backed by a valuable draft pick they invested in him.

The 25-year-old wasn’t a high draft pick like Kleven, instead he’s an undrafted player who only joined the organization this past summer, signing his one-year entry-level deal after establishing himself in his home country’s Finnish Liiga for three seasons with Ässät Pori.

As a result, this recall represents a massive opportunity for Matinpalo. With Chabot injured, the right side of the Senators’ defense is relatively wide open. Artem Zub is still dealing with an upper-body injury and did not travel with the Senators for their two-game road trip.

As a result, Matinpalo is positioned to make his NHL debut against the Pittsburgh Penguins tonight, and he has just two healthy players ahead of him on the team’s right-shot depth chart: Travis Hamonic and Jacob Bernard-Docker.

With some strong play as well as some luck, Matinpalo stands a chance of playing a bigger role in the NHL than anyone could have anticipated, at least for one game, which would be a major opportunity for him to showcase his skills.

While these Senators’ injuries are hardly ideal, they do offer opportunities for two less-experienced Senators defensemen to get into NHL contests.

Ottawa’s competitive chances have undoubtedly been reduced by these injuries, but the silver lining of this situation is that the Senators now has the chance to evaluate the progress of two younger blueliners at the NHL level.

Photos courtesy of USA Today Sports Images

Thomas Chabot Out Four To Six Weeks With Fractured Hand

at CDT | by 4 Comments

Ottawa Senators head coach D.J. Smith has announced to the media, including Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman, that defenseman Thomas Chabot will be out for four to six weeks with a fractured hand.

This loss is a massive one for the Senators and another instance of bad news in what has been a brutal week for the franchise. It began when one of the team’s top young centers, Shane Pinto, was suspended for 41 games. Then last night Erik Brännström left the game on a stretcher due to injury, and now today it’s announced that Chabot is facing an extended absence after fracturing his hand on a shot block.

The Senators have looked at this year as a crucial one, one where they should step out of their rebuild and finally return to the playoffs.

A solid start was seen as essential to the team’s chances of competing in what will be a cutthroat Atlantic Division playoff picture, but as of right now the Senators sit tied for last place with a 3-4-0 record.

Without Chabot, the Senators will need to replace some very important minutes on their back end.

Partnered with Jake Sanderson on the team’s top pairing, the 26-year-old $8MM defenseman hasn’t had the strongest start to the season, though he has weathered major minutes for Smith’s club.

Chabot currently plays the most minutes on the Senators, averaging 24:19 per night. That figure includes over three minutes per night on the club’s power play. He’s proven to be capable of scoring at a 50-plus point pace, and even with some defensive struggles he’s inarguably one of the team’s most important players.

The loss of Chabot means that instead of having a star blueliner on his pairing, Sanderson will likely have to be paired with a less-accomplished blueliner. The ongoing injury to Artem Zub doesn’t help matters either, as Travis Hamonic is playing top-four minutes as a result.

With Zub out as well, it’s likely that the Senators will have to dip into the defensive depth they’ve stashed in the AHL in order to make ends meet at the NHL level. That likely means that a player such as Tyler Kleven or Lassi Thomson will land on the NHL roster.

While the Senators still have quite a a bit of talent on defense even without Chabot (Chychrun and Sanderson are both excellent, for example) this is a major loss for the Senators, a major loss at a crucially important juncture in their season.

Photos courtesy of USA Today Sports Images

Senators Erik Brännström Leaves Game With Injury

at CDT | by 1 Comment

Ottawa Senators defenseman Erik Brännström had to be stretchered off the ice tonight in a scary scene at UBS Arena. The Senators were on the road to take on the New York Islanders when Brännström was checked into the boards by Cal Clutterbuck after a dump-in. The hit spun Brännström around and his head appeared to hit the ice very hard after the initial contact.

The players and officials on the ice signalled right away to the bench for assistance and the medical staff were quick to respond before Brännström was stretched off the ice. The incident quieted the crowd and was very concerning as Brännström didn’t move for some time after the hit.

Little is known at this time about Brännström’s condition although he did appear responsive a few moments after the hit. The Senators Communications team has tweeted that Brännström is alert, can move his extremities and will be transported to hospital to be evaluated further.

The incident comes one night after a very similar incident in the AHL in which Vasily Podkolzin of the Abbotsford Canucks suffered a terrible head injury after being hit into the boards and falling awkwardly to the ice. Much like Brännström, Podkolzin’s head hit the ice hard and a stretcher was needed to assist him.

PHR would like to wish both Brännström and Podkolzin a speedy recovery.

Shane Pinto Suspended 41 Games For Violating NHL’s Sports Wagering Rules

at CDT | by 21 Comments

11:35 a.m.: The NHL has officially announced Pinto’s suspension. The Senators issued a statement on the matter, including in it a statement from Pinto himself which reads:

I want to apologize to the National Hockey League, the Ottawa Senators, my teammates, the fans and city of Ottawa and most importantly my family. I take full responsibility for my actions and look forward to getting back on the ice with my team.

10:43 a.m.: Contrary to expectation, Pinto’s 41-game suspension has been applied retroactively to the Senators’ first game of the season, Friedman reports. That means the clock has already begun on his 41-game absence, and he does not need to sign a contract with Ottawa to begin serving the suspension. That means he will be eligible to return for Ottawa’s 42nd game of the season, a January 21 contest against the Flyers – assuming he’s signed to a contract by then. Coincidentally, Pinto will be eligible to play this season even if he does not sign a contract before the normal December 1 signing deadline for RFAs, says Friedman.

10:12 a.m.: According to reports from TSN’s Darren Dreger and Pierre LeBrun, Ottawa Senators restricted free agent center Shane Pinto is set to be suspended by the NHL “for activities related to sports wagering.” The suspension could be up to 41 games in length, reports Postmedia’s Bruce Garrioch. Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman later confirmed the 41-game penalty.

The clock on a suspension cannot start until Pinto is under contract and on the active roster. Garrioch adds that because of the looming suspension, the Senators have ended contract negotiations and “rescinded all previous offers.” That means Pinto will have to sign his qualifying offer – a one-year, $874,125 deal – to begin serving the suspension.

Friedman reports the league has not accused Pinto of wagering on NHL games but that a March 2022 memo from the league states that NHL commissioner Gary Bettman is authorized to:

Discipline individuals determined to have engaged in improper gambling activities in any or all of the following respects: expulsion or suspension [for] a definite or indefinite period; cancelling any contract that such individual may have; and/or by imposing a fine. The League will act swiftly and aggressively in penalizing any League or Club personnel determined to have engaged in acts in violation of the NHL Gambling Policy.

An investigation into Pinto’s behavior began over the summer but did not intensify until the past few weeks when a hearing was held with the league, Friedman says. He also believes that Pinto has not asked for a trade despite the ongoing contract negotiations because “he appreciates the organization’s secrecy about the investigation.”

This is the first online sports gambling-related suspension in NHL history. Typically, players suspended without pay for off-ice conduct are not counted against the salary cap – meaning Pinto’s likely prorated $874,125 cap hit for this season won’t factor in until after the suspension has been served.

Ottawa selected Pinto, 22, with the 32nd overall pick in the 2019 NHL Draft. He’s coming off a 2022-23 campaign in which he played in all 82 games, far eclipsing his previous career-high of 12, and notched 20 goals and 15 assists for 35 points. Those totals came in some heavy minutes – averaging nearly 16 minutes per game with normal second-line center Joshua Norris missing nearly all of 2022-23 with a shoulder injury. Pinto has also dealt with a significant shoulder injury during his development, which sidelined him for nearly all of 2021-22.

Pinto was expected to play a major depth scoring role on the team this season, anchoring their third line with the help of offseason additions Dominik Kubalík or Vladimir Tarasenko. Yet again, however, the Senators have deviated from expectations early on in the season, failing to get an agreement with Pinto due to cap constraints and now involuntarily being without his services. After losing 6-4 to the division-rival Sabres on Tuesday, the Senators are 3-3-0 through six games and sit sixth in the Atlantic Division.

If Pinto signs his qualifying offer later today before the Senators’ game against the Islanders, the earliest he would be eligible to make his season debut is February 10, 2024, against Toronto. If a qualifying offer signing comes tomorrow, Pinto would need to wait until February 13 against Columbus.

Photo courtesy of USA Today Sports.

NHL Rescinds Automatic Instigator Suspension For Brady Tkachuk

at CDT | by 5 Comments

The Ottawa Senators have avoided punishment for a late-game instigator penalty assessed to forward Brady Tkachuk, as the league has announced that Tkachuk won’t face a suspension for a late-game fight with Buffalo’s Alex Tuch. Head coach D.J. Smith also won’t be fined. Bruce Garrioch of Postmedia shared that suspensions are automatically applied to instigator penalties in an effort to curb late-game brawls, which the Senators avoided despite Tkachuk’s penalty. Tkachuk appealed the suspension, which was lifted.

This is refreshing news for Senators fans worried that their top forward may have gotten himself into disciplinary trouble. Tkachuk currently leads the Senators in goal scoring, with four through his first six games of the season. He’s added two assists to this total, getting him up to a point-per-game scoring pace. This keeps him up with the pace he established last season, netting 35 goals and 83 points while appearing in all 82 games of the season. Tkachuk also totaled 126 penalty minutes last year, a tally that ranked third in the entire league – three minutes ahead of his brother Matthew, who ranked fourth.

Ottawa is staggering a bit after a hot start to the year, losing each of their last two games. This brings them to an even 3-3-0 record, with a +4 advantage in goal differential. It’s a fine enough start for a team that faced a lot of questions entering the year. Newcomer Vladimir Tarasenko has been the team’s biggest surprise through the early going, currently leading the team in scoring with three goals and eight points, through six games. Recent lineup addition Joshua Norris is quickly catching up to Tarasenko’s scoring title, though, with three goals and four points through the four games he’s appeared in since returning from shoulder injury. It’s been a strong offensive start for Ottawa, who will look to maintain that now that Tkachuk has avoided a suspension.

Artem Zub Expected Out, Jacob Bernard-Docker Recalled

at CDT | by Leave a Comment

Pro Hockey Rumors is not affiliated with National Hockey League, NHL or NHL.com

Do not Sell or Share My Personal Information

scroll to top