Ottawa's price reset the moment Tkachuk left, and the return complicates it
Senators win total odds for 2026 are impacted by the Tkachuk trade and the addition of William Eklund. The math isn't straightforward.
Ottawa traded Brady Tkachuk to Florida for four draft picks, and any win total on the Senators has to start with the obvious fact that their best player is gone. It should not stop there.
Subtracting a star is the easy part of the math
Tkachuk was the identity of that roster, on the scoresheet and physically. A win total that simply lowers Ottawa’s number to account for his production leaving is doing the minimum work a repricing requires, and it is the calculation every book will make first.
The harder part is what came back immediately
Ottawa didn’t sit on the four picks. It flipped one straight to San Jose for William Eklund, adding an NHL-ready forward the same summer it lost its captain. That is not a pure rebuild reset, where the roster gets worse now in exchange for future assets. It is closer to a partial retool, replacing veteran production with a younger player already capable of producing at the NHL level.
What that means for the number
A market that treats this as a straightforward subtraction is missing half the transaction. Ottawa’s realistic win total sits somewhere between the team that just lost its captain and the team that used the return to immediately add talent back, and the honest range on that number is wider than a book’s first-draft price is likely to reflect this early in the offseason.
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