The Senators are staring at a captaincy decision that feels bigger than a simple roster note. With Brady Tkachuk gone, Ottawa has a leadership gap, and the smart play might be to resist the urge to rush into a replacement.
That’s not because there aren’t candidates. Thomas Chabot, Claude Giroux, Jake Sanderson and Tim Stutzle have all been mentioned as possible successors.
Drake Batherson has even entered the conversation, with his camp deep in negotiations and the September 15 deadline for an eight-year extension approaching. In that scenario, the captaincy could be part of the offer.
Still, one possibility has barely been part of the discussion: starting the 2026-27 season without a captain at all.
It’s rare, but not unheard of. In NHL history, only two teams have won the Stanley Cup with no captain - the Boston Bruins in 1970 and again in 1972.
Those Bruins used a captain-by-committee setup and still had Johnny Bucyk and Phil Esposito, both Hall of Famers. They also had Bobby Orr.
A committee approach has shown up elsewhere in league history too, including teams that made the playoffs, but it remains the exception rather than the rule.
Ottawa has done it before. After Erik Karlsson left, the Senators went three straight seasons - 2018-19, 2019-20 and 2020-21 - without a captain before Tkachuk signed his extension and took the job.
That was a very different situation, though. The Senators were rebuilding, expectations were low, and their 77-109-23 record across that stretch reflected it.
Tkachuk, for his part, was always the obvious guy once the time came. Nobody was surprised when he got the C.
That’s why this one matters. Going into a season without a captain wouldn’t automatically sink the Senators, but it also wouldn’t exactly send a reassuring message if the organization has had all summer to solve the issue and still can’t decide who fits.
And right now, from the outside, there’s no obvious answer.
The fact that five names have been floated all summer says plenty. Maybe there’s a clear choice inside the room.
Maybe Steve Staios and Travis Green already know exactly what they want to do. They’ve stayed quiet, though, and that silence leaves room for speculation.
Maybe they’re simply dragging things out for effect - the “American Idol Ryan Seacrest dramatic pause” treatment. Or maybe they’re considering the possibility that there won’t be a captain at all.
Either way, the club better know what it’s doing. If the organization can’t identify the character of its own people by now, that’s a problem.
There is a case for patience here. Ottawa’s last captaincy transition showed that waiting can make sense when the right player isn’t ready yet. Tkachuk was the presumptive captain from the moment he arrived, but the delay spared him years of the kind of media pressure that comes with wearing the C on a team that keeps losing.
The danger, of course, is picking the wrong person just because a decision has to be made.
There’s no statistic for how many teams have survived with the wrong captain, but the answer is probably none. A committee might be awkward.
It might even be the better path. What would be worse is naming someone because the team feels obligated to put a C on the sweater.
Once that choice is made, it has to be right. If it isn’t, the fallout can be ugly. Trading a captain or stripping the letter from a player still on the roster is about as bad as it gets.
Ottawa has lived through that kind of uncertainty before. Jason Spezza wore the C for one season, then missed the playoffs and asked to be traded.
He was stepping into massive shoes after Daniel Alfredsson. Was he the right choice, or just the choice made to avoid leaving the team without a captain?
Then came Erik Karlsson, who looked like the natural successor after leading the team in scoring and carrying a Norris Trophy on his résumé. He delivered a memorable role in the 2017 run to the conference final, but his captaincy also became tied to the controversy that eventually led Pierre Dorion to say the dressing room was “broken”.
Mark Stone was part of that same era from 2014 to 2019, and now he wears the C for the Vegas Golden Knights and has his name on the Stanley Cup. It’s fair to wonder whether Ottawa moved too quickly with Karlsson instead of letting the situation unfold on its own.
That question matters again now, especially with the 2026-27 outlook still taking shape.
Since Tkachuk’s Father’s Day trade announcement, Ottawa’s roster has changed, but one thing has not: the Senators still don’t have another player who fills the power-forward role he left behind. At a season-ticket holders event earlier this month, Staios said the Senators may not have many players who fight, but they are not easy to play against.
That may be true. It still doesn’t erase the hole Tkachuk leaves behind.
The Senators are not being talked about as Cup contenders entering the season. Playoff contenders, maybe.
Cup contenders, no. Of course, they can always go prove people wrong.
But if this roster were supposed to be a true contender, the captaincy would have been sorted out already. Teams with murky leadership structures usually don’t end up lifting the Cup.
So maybe the answer is patience. Maybe the right voice emerges during the season. Teams are allowed to name captains midseason, and players like Alexander Ovechkin and Eric Staal have done it.
For now, the only thing that’s obvious is that Ottawa doesn’t have a clear-cut successor yet. There are plenty of appealing options. None has seized the job.
And that leaves the Senators with a simple but serious rule: if they aren’t 100% sure who should get the next captaincy, then no one should.
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