The Ottawa Senators’ decision to move Filip Gustavsson in the summer of 2022 still hangs over the franchise as one of those moves that looked defensible at the time and brutal in hindsight.
Ottawa sent Gustavsson to the Minnesota Wild for Cam Talbot after a season in which the Senators finished seventh in the Atlantic at 33-42-7 and cycled through four goalies: Anton Forsberg, Matt Murray, Mads Søgaard, and Gustavsson. The young netminder had a rough year, going 5-12-1 with a .892 save percentage, even though the organization had already treated him like the goalie of the future by protecting him over Joey Daccord in the previous season’s expansion draft for the Seattle Kraken.
Talbot arrived with real credibility. He had just gone 32-12-4 with a .911 save percentage in 2021-22, so the logic was clear: Ottawa wanted stability and believed it had found it.
It didn’t work out that way.
The Senators also moved on from Murray that same offseason, dealing the starter they had previously traded for and signed to the Toronto Maple Leafs. Ottawa then rolled into 2022-23 with Forsberg and Talbot in tandem, but Talbot’s season went sideways fast.
He finished with a .898 save percentage and was clearly outplayed by Forsberg. Gustavsson, meanwhile, took off in Minnesota and posted a .931 save percentage.
That’s the part that makes the what-if sting. Ottawa’s 2022-23 team had real offensive growth, with career years from Tim Stützle, Brady Tkachuk and Drake Batherson.
Claude Giroux and Alex DeBrincat came in and made major contributions, and rookie Jake Sanderson stepped in as an immediate defensive presence. The Senators ended up six points shy of a playoff berth, and the goaltending never gave them much room to breathe.
One game in particular showed how shaky things could get. Against the Philadelphia Flyers in March 2023, Ottawa led 4-1 in the third period but still went to overtime after allowing four goals on just 11 shots.
The idea here isn’t that Gustavsson would have turned into the exact same goalie he became in Minnesota. But even a modest step forward - something in the .905-.910 range over 30 games - could have changed the math. Three to five extra wins would have put the Senators in a very different position, with a legitimate playoff path.
And it might have saved them from chasing answers in net afterward.
Instead, Ottawa signed Jonas Korpisalo to a four-year deal, only to get even worse results. Korpisalo finished with an .890 save percentage in 55 games, and his tendency to give up early goals made him a target for frustration, earning him the nickname "Four-pisalo." He was later traded to the Boston Bruins for Linus Ullmark, a move that worked out nicely for new general manager Steve Staios.
In this alternate version of events, that whole chain never happens. Korpisalo never arrives, Ullmark never becomes a Senator, and Ottawa gets more quality starts from a goalie it had already developed. The article’s premise is simple enough: if the Senators had kept Gustavsson, they might have avoided a lot of pain - and maybe even made the playoffs in four straight seasons.
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