The Sens are panicking. Again.
It’s a familiar rhythm in Ottawa, a city where the hockey team operates like a tech startup that’s been in "early access" for seven years without ever actually shipping a stable build. They’ve spent a decade trying to find a goalie who doesn't treat a puck like a hot potato, and now, after finally landing Linus Ullmark, they’re already looking for a backup plan. They call it insurance. Most people call it a lack of faith in their own hardware.
The rumor mill says the Senators are ready to swing big for a high-end redundancy. A "1B" to sit behind the $33 million man. It’s the hockey equivalent of buying a top-of-the-line MacBook Pro and then immediately spending another grand on a backup iPad Pro just in case the laptop decides to stop recognizing the "E" key. It’s expensive. It’s redundant. And it screams of a front office that has been burned so many times they’ve forgotten what it’s like to feel warm.
Let’s look at the math, because the math is where the grease hits the gears. Ullmark is 31. He just signed a four-year extension with an $8.25 million average annual value. That’s elite money. That’s "solve my problems so I can go play golf" money. In a rational world, when you pay a guy that much, you trust him to handle the load. You pair him with a league-minimum veteran or a hungry AHL kid who’s happy to see the sun once a week.
But Ottawa isn’t rational. They’re haunted.
They’re looking at the ghost of Joonas Korpisalo, a $20 million mistake they had to pay to go away. They’re looking at a defensive core that, while talented, occasionally plays like they’re navigating a map with a five-second lag. If the Sens actually go out and drop another $3 or $4 million on a high-end "insurance" goalie, they’re essentially admitting their $66 million investment in Ullmark is fragile. They’re over-provisioning their servers because they know the codebase is a mess.
The friction here isn’t just about the salary cap, though that’s the obvious bottleneck. The real cost is the opportunity. Every dollar spent on a backup goalie who might play 25 games is a dollar not spent fixing the bottom-six forwards who currently couldn't score on an empty net with a soccer ball. It’s a classic misallocation of resources. You don’t buy a second fire extinguisher when your house is missing a roof. You buy some shingles.
Owner Michael Andlauer and GM Steve Staios are trying to buy stability. They want to eliminate the "Ottawa variable"—that specific brand of chaos where a single injury or a bad week in November spirals into a lost season. I get it. I really do. It sucks to be the team that’s always one groin pull away from the lottery draft. But this league doesn’t reward cowardice, and the salary cap is a cruel auditor. If you spend $12 million on goaltending in a $88 million cap environment, you’re basically trying to run Cyberpunk 2077 on a laptop from 2014. Something is going to smoke.
There’s also the human element. Goaltending is 90% vibes and 10% knowing how to fall down correctly. Bringing in a "big swing" backup isn't just a safety net; it’s a shadow. It tells Ullmark, "We think you’re great, but we also think you might break, so here’s the guy we hired to replace you the second your save percentage dips below .905." That’s not a partnership. It’s a staged coup waiting for a catalyst.
The Senators are currently acting like a guy who’s been cheated on so many times he’s installed five different tracking apps on his new girlfriend’s phone. It’s not about her performance; it’s about his trauma. Ullmark was the Vezina-caliber solution. He was the patch that was supposed to fix the bug.
If they still feel the need to buy insurance against the guy they just mortgaged the future for, you have to wonder if they even like the product they’re selling. Does a team with a real plan actually need this much redundancy? Or are they just terrified that, beneath the shiny new $33 million exterior, the same old Ottawa glitches are just waiting to crash the system?