Ottawa Is About to Name a Captain and Its Post-Tkachuk Fantasy Board Is Open

Ottawa is close to naming its next captain, with reports identifying Thomas Chabot as the frontrunner ahead of Tim Stutzle and Jake Sanderson, and the club wanting the announcement made before training camp opens on September 16. The vacancy exists because the Senators traded Brady Tkachuk to Florida on June 21, a move that returned a substantial package of draft capital and left Ottawa without the player who had defined the franchise's identity for years.

For fantasy hockey drafters, the captaincy question is the least important part of this. What matters is where Tkachuk's shots, power-play time and net-front usage go, and Ottawa's answer to that has been to redistribute rather than replace.

What Ottawa did after the trade

The Senators used the summer to reshape the supporting cast rather than to find a like-for-like replacement. They acquired forward William Eklund from San Jose, forward Andre Burakovsky from Chicago, and backup goaltender Samuel Ersson from Toronto. None of those players is Brady Tkachuk. Collectively they represent a deeper, more balanced forward group with less concentrated top-end usage.

That is the strategic decision, and it has a direct fantasy consequence. Ottawa's power play, which ran through Tkachuk at the net front, now has to be redesigned around Stutzle's playmaking and Sanderson's distribution from the blue line, with Drake Batherson, Eklund and Dylan Cozens filling the remaining spots.

Tim Stutzle is the obvious beneficiary

Stutzle posted 83 points, with 34 goals and 49 assists, in 80 games last season, the second time in six NHL seasons he has reached at least 30 goals and 80 points. He now becomes the unambiguous first option on a team without a competing focal point.

He sits around the edge of the top 50 in NHL.com's published fantasy rankings, which our model reads as low. Stutzle covers multiple categories, plays first-unit power play, and is about to absorb a meaningful share of the usage that went to a player who took a large volume of shots. That combination is how players jump a tier.

The counterargument is that Ottawa's overall offensive output likely falls without Tkachuk, and a larger share of a smaller pie is not automatically a gain. That is a fair concern and it is the reason we would not draft Stutzle in the first two rounds. It is not a reason to leave him on the board in the fourth.

Jake Sanderson is the better value

Sanderson is the more interesting name for category-league managers. He scored a career-high 14 goals last season and has reached double-digit goals in three straight years, which is unusual for a defenseman still early in his prime. He projects around 67 points for 2026-27 in published projections and sits in the mid-60s in overall fantasy rankings.

The case for him outperforming that is straightforward. With Tkachuk gone, Ottawa's power play needs a quarterback more than ever, and Sanderson is the player running it. Power-play points are the single largest driver of fantasy value for defensemen, and a defenseman running a first unit that includes Stutzle, Batherson, Eklund and Cozens has a clear path to a career high.

Defensemen who combine power-play quarterback duties with heavy even-strength minutes and shot volume are the scarcest asset in fantasy hockey outside of elite goaltending. Sanderson is available at a price that does not reflect that.

The Verdexed model take

Our projections have Stutzle finishing inside the top 35 in standard-scoring fantasy leagues, which is roughly 15 spots ahead of consensus, and Sanderson as a top-eight fantasy defenseman, which is also ahead of most published boards.

The model's reasoning is a usage-redistribution calculation rather than a talent judgment. When a team loses a player who accounted for a large share of shots and power-play net-front time, that usage does not evaporate. It flows to the remaining players on the top unit, and the historical base rate for that redistribution is high and predictable.

Where the model is more cautious is on Ottawa's team results. Our projected point total for the Senators sits below the market's, and the win-total and playoff-odds markets are not places we see value on the Ottawa side. This is a case where individual fantasy value and team betting value point in opposite directions, which happens more often than most people expect.

What's next

The captaincy announcement should come before camp opens on September 16. Chabot being named would be the conventional choice and would say nothing about ice time. Stutzle or Sanderson being named would be a signal about how the organization sees the next decade, and in Sanderson's case it would reinforce the case for the power-play role our model is projecting.

Fantasy drafters should not wait for the announcement. Both Stutzle and Sanderson are values at their current prices, and the news that would move them is the line-combination and power-play information that comes out of the first week of camp, not the letter on the jersey.

What to do in your draft

Take Stutzle in the fourth round of a 12-team league and do not let the team-quality argument talk you out of it. First-line centers with power-play usage and multi-category coverage are drafted on role, and his role just expanded.

Draft Sanderson as your first defenseman if the elite tier is gone. The gap between the fourth-best fantasy defenseman and the tenth is small, and Sanderson's power-play quarterback role gives him more upside than the names typically drafted around him.

Leave Ottawa's goaltending alone in standard leagues. Ersson arrives as the backup, which means the crease is a timeshare until proven otherwise, and timeshare goalies lose fantasy leagues.

Monitor the first line rushes of camp. Where Eklund and Burakovsky slot, and whether Cozens holds a top-six role, determines the third and fourth most valuable Ottawa forwards, and that information will be public within days of September 16.