Ottawa Has Four Weeks to Decide What Drake Batherson Is Worth
The Hockey News asked whether the Senators should hand Batherson an eight-year extension. After Sept. 15 that question stops being available to answer.
The Hockey News’s Wraparound podcast ran a question this week that has a deadline attached to it, whether or not the panel framed it that way. Emma Lingan, Michael Augello and Frank Zawrazky asked what Drake Batherson’s value is to the Ottawa Senators, and whether they should sign him to an eight-year extension.
The eight-year part is the piece with a clock on it.
The term disappears on Sept. 15
The collective bargaining agreement that takes effect Sept. 16 and runs through Sept. 15, 2030 cuts maximum contract length. A player re-signing with his own club drops from eight years to seven. A player signing with a new team drops from seven to six. Sept. 15 is the last day the current limits apply.
Only seven players league-wide signed eight-year deals this summer: Ivan Demidov in Montreal, Ville Koivunen in Pittsburgh at a $4 million cap hit, John Marino, Tyson Foerster, Eetu Luostarinen, Alex Tuch and Darren Raddysh, whose sign-and-trade took him to Toronto. That is a short list for what should have been a rush to the exit.
The reason it is short is that the stars mostly declined. Macklin Celebrini, Connor Bedard and Pavel Mintyukov were all restricted free agents in position to take maximum term and all signed five-year extensions instead, a bet on reaching unrestricted free agency in their mid-twenties inside a rising cap, in a market that will have almost no long-term deals left to compare against.
Ottawa’s summer was about replacing a captain
The Senators traded Brady Tkachuk to Florida on June 21 for the No. 9 and No. 25 picks in the 2026 draft, a conditional 2029 first-rounder and a 2027 second. Tkachuk was the captain and the franchise’s fifth-leading scorer with 463 points in 572 games. General manager Steve Staios said afterwards that he did not intend on taking a step back.
What followed backs that up. The No. 9 pick was flipped to San Jose on June 23 for William Eklund, Kasper Halttunen and Brandon Svoboda. Eklund is 23 and put up 53 points in 78 games. Andre Burakovsky came from Chicago on June 26 for a 2027 sixth. Samuel Ersson arrived from Toronto the same day to back up Linus Ullmark. Sammy Blais signed on July 1.
Ottawa finished 44-27-11 last season, fifth in the Atlantic, and lost in the first round.
Why the term question is genuinely hard
An eight-year deal signed this month runs to 2034-35. Every seven-year deal signed after Sept. 16 runs one season shorter, which means the eight-year contracts that exist now will spend the back half of the decade sitting on cap sheets as the longest commitments in the league, with no comparable deals being written alongside them.
That cuts both ways. Maximum term locks in a price against a cap that has just risen $8.5 million to $104 million and is expected to keep rising, which favours the club. It also carries the player into his mid-thirties, which does not.
Ottawa has had two months to work through that on a roster it has just substantially rebuilt. It has four weeks left to decide whether the extra year is worth having.
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