On Jan. 9, Ottawa Senators’ president of hockey operations and general manager (GM) Steve Staios issued a statement condemning lurid speculation about the reasons behind starting goalie Linus Ullmark’s leave of absence. Commenting on Staios’ statement and the resulting controversy the next day on The Hockey Writers’ Senators News and Rumours Podcast, my colleague Jacob Billington lamented, “I really thought we were past this phase of Senators hockey. But I guess not. It doesn’t have to do with just ownership, apparently. Ottawa is just a cursed city. A cursed franchise.”
Listening to my forlorn fellow scribe, it struck me that Ottawa fans seem to remember pain more clearly than joy. Psychologists explain this as a survival mechanism in which humans are hardwired to retain vivid, long-lasting memories of threats to their survival and happiness. It’s how we avoid such trauma in the future.
Over the 34 years since the modern version of the Senators took to the ice in 1992, their fans have endured a constant series of threats to their happiness and emotional equilibrium. From the legendary Hamburglar run of 2015 to Erik Karlsson’s Achilles, Ottawa’s collective memory is a protective scar tissue shaped by seemingly endless disappointment, occasionally sprinkled with brief but fragile moments of joy.
Dashed Hopes for the Senators’ 2025-26 Season
Billington could be forgiven for believing the Senators are a cursed franchise. Take this season, for instance. As training camp opened, the Ottawa faithful believed their team was sure to build on last season’s successful drive for a playoff berth (the first in seven seasons) and their respectable first-round showing against the Toronto Maple Leafs.
Those hopes were stoked by the team itself with head coach Travis Green assuring the city that, “We’re here not just to make the playoffs. We’re here to do a lot more than that.” That heady boast is a far cry from the way Staios is talking now about his club’s chances of contending for Lord Stanley’s silverware this spring, explaining at a Jan. 2 press conference, “We’ll contend when we’re ready to contend. I think we’re continuing to build towards that … I think we have a good young team that continues to develop.”
That’s not the language of a confident GM – and for good reason. The Senators will probably need 95 points just to squeak into a wild card playoff spot. The team has just 53 points and 33 games remaining. To notch 95 points, they’ll need to take 42 of the 66 points available to them. That translates to a points percentage of .636, and to date, only four teams in the league have bettered that.
Once again, the odds say the Senators will miss the playoffs this season – the eighth time in nine seasons – leading many fans to ask whether the rebuild stretching back to 2017 ever really ended.
Pain At the Hands of the Toronto Maple Leafs
A heavy cross carried by generations of Senators fans is that their team has never beaten the Leafs in a playoff series. Each loss reminds them that maybe Toronto fans are right – the Senators really aren’t worthy of being considered a rival to the Leafs, or the likes of the Montreal Canadiens and the Boston Bruins.Â
What is galling for Senators fans is the way in which their team has lost to the Buds. In three consecutive playoff series beginning in 1999-00, the Senators went down to defeat and in two, they lost in shameful fashion.Â
Who could forget the 2001 series in which the Senators lost their quarterfinal series against the Maple Leafs in a 4-0 sweep? That was after the Senators came in sitting atop the old Northeast Division, well ahead of the Maple Leafs.
The following season they lost the conference semifinal to the Maple Leafs 4-3 after taking a 3-2 series lead after Game 5. They dropped the next two games and were held scoreless in the seventh and deciding game. Coincidentally, Green played for the Maple Leafs in that series.
New Jersey Devils Heartbreak
In the opinion of many, 2003 was when the Senators came closest to winning the Stanley Cup. That spring they won the Presidents’ Trophy – awarded to the team with the best record in the regular season.Â
They roared through to the Eastern Conference Final that spring to take on the New Jersey Devils. After going down in the series 3-1, they stormed back to even the series and push it to Game 7 in Ottawa. They lost that game 3-2 on a defensive breakdown by Wade Redden, allowing Jeff Friesen to score with just two minutes remaining on the clock to kill Ottawa’s hope of a Stanley Cup that year. Had they gotten past the Devils they would have gone on to face the Anaheim Ducks – a team that at the time wasn’t considered the equal of the Senators.
What made losing to the Devils more painful than going down against the Ducks four years later in the Stanley Cup Final was that 2003 was widely regarded by pundits as “the Senators year”. In 2007, the Senators really had no chance of defeating the Ducks, and the proof of that was the team being defeated in just five games.
Tragedy in Pittsburgh
Perhaps ranking among the worst heartbreaks in history for fans of the Senators was the Game 7 loss in the 2017 Eastern Conference Final against the Pittsburgh Penguins.
In that dramatic double-overtime thriller, the Penguins prevailed over the Senators 3-2, with Chris Kunitz scoring the winning goal at 5:09 into the second overtime period. That victory sent the Penguins to the Stanley Cup Final for the second straight year.Â
For Senators fans, the loss marked the beginning of a seven-year-long rebuild that many will say was a failure if the team fails to make the playoffs this season.
All the Great Players That Got Away From the Senators
To be a fan of the Senators you need to be able to endure the pain of wondering what might have been if only the team had managed to hang on to its top talent. The list of good players who the team let slip from their grasp through free agency and questionable trades is a long one.
Take, for example, Boston Bruins great and former Senator Zdeno Chara. The Senators lost him in free agency to the Bruins in 2006. Management decided to prioritize signing Redden, who lasted just two more seasons in Ottawa.
Then there was the decision to send Marian Hossa to the Atlanta Thrashers in 2005 in exchange for Dany Heatley. Just into a new six-year contract he signed in 2007, he requested a trade in June 2009, unhappy with then-coach Cory Clouston with his point production at career record lows. The request was regarded as a betrayal in Bytown. In a trade for him with the San Jose Sharks the Senators acquired a few draft picks along with Milan Michalek and an aging Jonathan Cheechoo.
Related: The Marian Hossa for Dany Heatley Trade Revisited
Sending Mika Zibanejad to the New York Rangers in return for Derek Brassard is widely regarded as one of the worst trades in the annals of Senators history. Brassard never really made an impact in Ottawa while Zibanejad flourished in the Big Apple.
The list of players that got away from the Senators includes Erik Karlsson, Jason Spezza and Mark Stone. Their departure was met with some sorrow in Bytown, leaving many Senators fans asking what might have been had they stayed.Â
Now, with the Senators’ goaltending a blazing dumpster fire, fans are wistfully remembering some of the great goaltenders Senators management let slip through their fingers. Chief among them is Filip Gustavsson who the Senators traded to the Minnesota Wild in the summer of 2022 in return for Cam Talbot. Gustavsson was a recent Vezina Trophy contender while Talbot lasted just one season in Ottawa. If that weren’t bad enough, Senators fans are left to wonder how their team might have fared had Robin Lehner, Ben Bishop and Joey Daccord stayed in Ottawa. All three went on to thrive elsewhere once they left the Senators.
Yet what’s more troublesome for Senators fans is why top players just don’t seem to want to stay in the nation’s capital. Fans held out high hopes that players like Matt Duchene, Jakob Chychrun, Vladimir Tarasenko and Alex DeBrincat would become franchise fixtures. None did and all seemed to want nothing more than to get out of Bytown as quickly as possible. All of this perhaps explains why the franchise most frequently listed in no-trade agreements is Ottawa.
The Price of Being a Fan of the Senators
Senators fans desperately want their team to be considered one of Canada’s premier franchises taken as seriously as the Maple Leafs, Canadiens and Edmonton Oilers. Yet they know that Ottawa is always considered a hockey backwater living in the shadow of Toronto and Montreal, never quite worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as either. Even after three decades, the Senators lack the deep-rooted ethos of older clubs with their rich history and glorious past.
Collective memory shapes a team’s fans and in Ottawa it seems that the Senators faithful never expect much, believing deep down that somehow, in the end, it will all go wrong. They live in the future believing that next year their team will redeem itself.
Yet the emotional cost of perpetually believing that next year things will be different weighs heavily on the psyche of Senators fans. It seems that heartache relieved by occasional glimmers of hope is the lot of a Senators fan.
