Part 2 is here! For those who aren’t aware, this series takes an analytical player-focused approach to preview the Ottawa Senators’s 2024-25 season. I cycle through all of Ottawa’s big pieces and highlight a key aspect of their game that has the potential to play a major part in both the player’s and team’s success towards making the playoffs.
In this edition, I focus on the team’s defensemen and goalies, whereas part 1, which you can find here, covered the forwards. With that preamble out of the way, let’s get right back on track in the same way as last: through another injury bounce-back candidate.
Thomas Chabot
Earlier this fall, Thomas Chabot divulged that he had been dealing with a wrist issue the last couple years, and finally felt back to 100%. Turning back the clock prior to his injury in 2021-22, Chabot was arguably at his peak.
Even though his production was not significantly higher back then (52-point pace vs 51, 49, 48 in the other seasons from the past four), his on-ice play most definitely was. Chabot was one of only 10 defensemen from the 2021-22 season to contribute 6 or more standings points above replacement in our model, ranking 9th overall. That performance was on the back of some truly top-end work in transition, playmaking prowess, and ability to shoulder to shoulder through contact.
And while these remain strong parts of Thomas’s toolkit, they have somewhat regressed recently. Looking at the timeline of his passing, transition attack, and exit skills over the last four years in his progression dashboard, the injury’s effect is made apparent. All of these rely on good puck feel through carrying or moving it which would evidently be hampered by an injured wrist, and thus we can observe a significant decrease moving forward from 2021-22.
Something did make good progress during that time however and those are his suppression numbers. Chabot’s impact on the other side of the puck has risen steadily since 2022, going from near replacement level to just above the league median last season. Whether he was forced to focus on the defensive end due to the limited offense his wrist’s health imposed is up for speculation. But what matters is that this development persists into the future, and hopefully even continues to mature.
With the injury fully healed as he mentioned, we could be in line for a jump back up in breakout efficiency, passing frequency, and general dynamic play. If this gets combined with the defensive improvements from the last couple of years, we could very well witness Chabot’s best season yet.
Jake Sanderson
The speed at which Jake Sanderson has established himself as Ottawa’s top player is outstanding. He has only spent two years in the city and already embodies the definition of an elite modern-day two-way defenseman.
It usually takes a few years for rookies to acclimate themselves on the defensive side of things. The jump from other leagues to the NHL is so massive in terms of top-end skill and pace of play that it can so easily overwhelm defenders when it comes to making reads or just physically trying to keep up with shadowing their opposition. In his sophomore season, Sanderson already began thriving in that area.
Looking at his zone defence and transition percentiles amongst 2023-24 defensemen, the consistency across the board is outstanding. Seven of the ten skills figure at or above 90, with the other three still ranking very high as two are in the 80s and the other in the 70s. This culminates in him being the only player to reach the 100 mark for both the zone defence and transition categories last season. Miro Heiskanen and Quinn Hughes are the only other guys who even come close in that aspect (98-98 & 96-97 scores respectively).
So with all those skills having already developed at such a high level, what’s next for Sanderson? The one thing seemingly holding him back from being considered that top echelon of the league’s best defensemen is point production. And signs point to a potential breakout soon.
Going back to Miro Heiskanen, the similarities don’t just end on the defensive and transition aspects. Jake has actually followed Miro’s production path fairly closely since his draft. Using Dobber’s NHLe calculator, we can see they both progressed from the equivalent of a mid-20s points pace over a full 82-game NHL season, to around 40 at the 4th year post-draft mark.
Heiskanen then saw a huge jump in his D+6. The same goes for an even more offensive-leaning dman in Evan Bouchard. Sanderson looks to be on the same track, with a potentially earlier but less extreme jump as he’s on a 66-point pace through 10 games this season. Sure it’s a small sample, but he holds the highest “breakout candidate” badge score in our model as he’s poised to exceed his previous production peak.
Artem Zub
Artem Zub was seemingly engineered in a lab to perfectly fit on the right side of Ottawa’s current defensive group. With the dynamic talents of Sanderson and Chabot as centrepieces on the left, a stay-at-home dman with true shutdown ability is the perfect complement to support the high-flying offensive talent. Even though that responsibility started by flanking Chabot, it has turned into top pair duties with Sanderson in the last year as he grabbed the #1 D spot on the team.
Zub has sneakily turned into one of the toughest defensemen to play against across the league. His suppression ability, rush defence, and physicality all rank as strengths. Even with the puck in the defensive zone, he’s hard to pressure into poor puck management, as he consistently turns a high percentage of his touches into clean breakouts.
But the most impressive quality has been his play in front of his own net. He has been an imposing presence there, outplaying forwards and preventing them from getting chances in tight. Radio Gudas, K’Andre Miller, Mattias Samuelson, & Jamie Oleksiak have been the only NHL regulars to rank higher on that front in our multi-year cards.
This stylistic profile just sounds like a general pain for forwards to have on the other side.
Looking at actually quantifying this “difficulty to play against”, we can take the change in xGF% of a player’s opposition when on the ice against them, relative to without. Weighting this by time spent with each skater, we can obtain a player’s estimated impact on their opposition’s performance.
On average Artem Zub, reduced the opposing skaters’ expected goal share by 4.7%. This places him 12th since 2021-22, as he is flanked by a grouping of highly-esteemed defensemen throughout the top 15.
With Sanderson establishing himself as one of the league’s elite and Zub being a lock on his side, the Russian RD will likely be focused by tough matchups even more moving forward. Will he be able to sustain his impact dominance despite this? The fact he has been facing quality of competition more difficult than all but 9 defensemen over the last three years is an encouraging sign that he will continue to do so.
Nick Jensen
Despite making the playoffs, it was a disappointing 2023-24 campaign for Nick Jensen. It was easily his lowest individual production post-COVID as he dropped from a 25.5-point pace over the previous three years down to 14.7 last season. But the more noticeable drop came from his shutdown abilities.
Since 2020, Jensen had consistently placed as one of the most underrated defensive defensemen in the league. Year after year, he drove excellent suppression numbers and ranked toward the top in our model for both the Zone Defence & Checking categories.
Conversely, the latter of these two is what saw the biggest drop in score last season. This is most noticeable in his hitting rate which has been continuously decreasing since 2021 (5.51 -> 4.04 -> 2.43 hits/60). This could be a strategic move on Jensen’s end as he looks to increase his career’s longevity by pivoting to a less physically intensive defensive style in his early thirties.
In his first few games for Ottawa, he has certainly shown that he possesses the skating prowess and stick-checking to follow a more modern defending profile. Early returns on this skillset have been very encouraging, as he’s been able to quickly turn targets against the opposing rush into transition chances of his own. On normal cycle plays too he has often walked from the blue line to the half boards in order to pull opposing defenders out of position before making a sharp turn and pass to generate advantages.
This was made especially apparent against Utah as Jensen sliced through the offensive zone, interrupted two rush chances, and sprung up the ice upon intercepting the second, creating a 2-on-1 where he hit Giroux with a pass to give the Sens a two-goal lead.
Nonetheless if that aforementioned physical shutdown presence is not as prominent in his game moving forward, Nick Jensen still brings tons of necessary characteristics to the Sens such as underrated contributions to offensive sequences thanks to his mobility, and most importantly of all, a stable partner for Thomas Chabot at long last.
Linus Ullmark
After an outstanding season debut, Linus Ullmark has not really wowed the Sens fanbase. But when diving deeper into his game, that’s not too alarming. Due to the wave of new personnel and rust at the start of every season, there is a period of adaptation as line chemistry requires building or systems are not fully learned & implemented. The hockey thus tends to be generally sloppier, with a more run-and-gun feel than usual.
This loose and open style of play more closely favours volatile but athletically-inclined goalies as they thrive on chaotic play. Turning to the other extreme, less explosive but technically sound goalies need to be more in tune with the systems they are standing behind (and against, to a lesser extent). With Ullmark falling into the latter category, it’s no surprise seeing him take time to get up to speed, especially having missed multiple series of games due to injury.
Linus didn’t begin as the steady goaltender that he is today. Even looking at just the last four years, his play-reading ability and resiliency grew from being below average to near the top of the league. Now he sees the ice like few other goalies: tracking pucks with ease, anticipating likely offensive plays, and consistently bringing a strong level of play day in and day out. It’s that last point which should really bring much-needed change to the Senators’ roster.
Between Joonas Korpisalo and Anton Forsberg (& Mads Søgaard), Ottawa was just completely incapable of stringing together consistent goaltending performances. They were constantly undone by poor goals against early on, crashing the team morale right off the bat.
Ullmark is the polar opposite of that archetype. In my dataset, no other goalie completes a higher percentage of his games nor performs so strongly as often as he does. He’s also exceptionally solid at the start of games and periods.
Top-to-Bottom: Ullmark, Forsberg, Korpisalo
In 2023-24, the Sens’ goaltending formula would often consist of bouncing between subpar games until one of their netminders had a good showing or two, before being run into the ground due to the lack of other options, and forcing a replacement to come in cold which rarely worked (as expected). With Linus Ullmark now in the picture, we should expect him to receive a consistent slate of games, allowing him to set a routine not only for himself but for his backup as well. Speaking of…
Anton Forsberg
For the first time as a Senator, Anton Forsberg is slated to hold a true backup role for the upcoming season. No more 1A-1B tandem with a historically inconsistent partner, no more covering for a perennially injury-prone goalie, Forsy’s workload for 2024-25 is expected to come back down after years of personnel change in Ottawa’s crease.
Over the last three years, Forsberg has had some pretty incredible performance-sequencing. In other words, the timing of his play has brought better results than were likely expected. The pinnacle of this comes from his record despite team quality as throughout all of his full seasons as a Senator, he has yet to have a year below a .500 points percentage. Since 2021-22, the Swedish netminder has posted records of 22-17-4, 11-11-2, & 15-12-0 for a combined 48-40-6. Over that stretch the team has gone 109-118-19, meaning that Ottawa has improved from a .482 PTS% to a .543 under Forsberg.
So what is driving this success and can the Sens bank on it continuing into this season?
Looking at the situations in which Forsberg thrives, the sequencing is starting to make sense. First, his timing is especially solid, ranking in the 82nd percentile for play in “Clutch Time” (measured by games within 1 past the 10-minute mark of the 3rd period).
But what most helps drive his winning record, are his results peaking when his team is ahead. Anton places in the top 5 of all goalies over the last three years in terms of performance while winning, and this is the area that points to potential sustainability throughout 2024-25.
So far this season, the Sens have been playing far better in the first period. Their average score difference in the 1st is at a strong 0.73 (and 0 for the later two). If this trend is upheld as the year gets older, Forsberg gets time to establish himself in his net early on, and can get rolling with a lead more often than not for the rest of the game.
Senators 2024-25 Average Score Difference (per HockeyViz.com)
That’s quite the contrast when compared to last season with all the early goals against and quick deficits the team found themselves in.
Bonus Round: Carter Yakemchuk
We’re a good bit removed from Carter Yakemchuk’s outstanding pre-season that almost forced Ottawa’s hand into giving him a spot on the opening night lineup. Despite being aware of his dynamic offensive potential, he wowed fans nonetheless with high-end puck handling and better-than-expected defensive play. Through this pre-season, Yak showed that his overall performance level is likely quite close to professional level already, but I think his specific playing style is what most warrants time in the NHL soon.
As established, Yakemchuk is an incredibly talented offensive defenseman. He slices through opposing players with a blend of finesse & power, effectively uses give-and-gos to stretch defensive pressure, and blasts pucks through lanes on a more consistent basis than almost any draft-eligible WHL dman in the last 30 years. On the playmaking side specifically, he has really developed since the start of 2023-24, making his offense more diverse and projectable moving forward. This allows him to use the threat of a high-danger pass to generate a chance for himself and vice-versa.
Simply put, what he does best is usually the reason you send a player back to junior; with the hopes that an increased volume of puck touches and opportunities unavailable elsewhere would develop their offensive acumen. Yakemchuk has that in spades, whereas his biggest weaknesses are things that would certainly benefit from time with an NHL-caliber training staff and experience in a professional system.
His need for the former stems from necessary skating improvements. As of now, Yakemchuk’s stride is pretty inefficient: he lacks ankle flexion, his posture is too upright, and he tends to flail his legs far too much deeper into shifts. This leads to sub-optimal pivoting ability and separation speed which would help him tremendously both with and against the puck.
The tools are there however to have this fixed, especially by a pro-level fitness/conditioning team. They could get Yak to better use his long powerful legs and tendency to adapt a wider stance as quickly as possible, which would have ramifications throughout his entire game. Not only would addressing this immediately allow him to adapt to such a big change early on, but it would also fast-track his development of other aspects, namely his rush defense.
On the other side of the puck, Carter might have the size & reach to defend, but his approach is still rather lacking. When targeted on the rush, he tends to keep too loose of a gap but maintains his aggressive mindset which allows the opposition to exploit his check/denial attempts, especially given the skating & pivoting issues we’ve outlined. This is made evident in Mitch Brown’s tracking data where Yak’s ability to shut down entries stands out as his lowest score.
The skating issues also pop up in the d-zone during retrievals, as his stance does not give him the best leverage to win possession in those puck battles. His aggressiveness & physicality do help him on 1v1s throughout the game, but it still needs to be properly calibrated for optimal results.
Yakemchuk’s 2023-24 data from EP Rinkside
Overall, Carter Yakemchuk is a rare defenseman with triple-threat offensive prowess on top of the size & physical willingness to grow into an imposing defensive presence. He will absolutely need a forgiving coaching staff guiding him; one that will not overly punish him as he’s trying to find the right balance in his game of extremes. Fans hope that the Hitmen staff can do so, especially as he has the potential to join Ottawa after his WHL season, and help them take another step on the Senators’ path to the playoffs.