Captain Chabot Is Out, Sanderson Is Back, and Tkachuk Returns to Ottawa on Wednesday

Ottawa’s blue line traded one problem for another on Monday, and the swap lands on the most loaded night of the Senators’ young season. Thomas Chabot, the captain, will probably miss one to two weeks with an upper-body injury, head coach Travis Green told reporters. Jake Sanderson, the defenceman Ottawa has missed since the first night of the season, practiced and said he will be back on Wednesday against Florida. Wednesday is also the night Brady Tkachuk, the captain Chabot replaced, plays in Ottawa again, this time as a Panther.

What did Green say about Chabot?

That the timeline is a range, not a date, and that the injury is not new. “Going to be out, probably, a week to two weeks,” Green said, per Sportsnet, with the upper-body injury still not precisely defined. Chabot left Saturday’s 3-1 loss in Philadelphia after 12:03, having been seen shaking his hand in the penalty box in the first period. Green added the detail that changes the reading of the last week: Chabot had already played a full game with the injury, finished it, thought he would be fine, and then could not go in Philadelphia. He had one goal, three assists and a plus-5 rating through nine games, on a blue line that has already had Nikolas Matinpalo knocked head-first into the boards on a boarding major this month.

Why is Sanderson’s return not the simple good news it looks like?

Because Sanderson has already tried this once. He left the season opener against Toronto after 4:29 with a lower-body injury and has missed eight games, and on Monday he put part of that on himself. “I might have come back a little too early the first time, and that’s on me,” he told reporters, per Sportsnet. “You live and you learn from your mistakes.” Ottawa’s need is real enough to tempt anyone: the club has used 10 defencemen in 10 games, and its season has already produced a night where two Senators goals were wiped out in a single period before a shootout win. A defenceman returning on a self-imposed lesson about patience, into the loudest home game of the autumn, is a story about minutes management as much as fitness.

What makes Wednesday’s game different from a normal return?

The man in the other jersey. Chabot was named the 11th captain in Senators history before this season and the first francophone captain the club has had, replacing Tkachuk after the trade that sent him to Florida. So the first Ottawa game Tkachuk plays as a visitor was set up as a passing-of-the-letter night: the new captain hosting the old one. Instead the new captain will watch it, the returning defenceman will carry extra minutes in it, and the crowd will spend the evening comparing two eras of the same team. Around the league this week runs on similar personal edges, from Gavin McKenna’s first meeting with Ivar Stenberg to Cole Knuble’s debut for the Flyers, but none of them asks a team to mark its own changing of the guard without the guard.

How deep does Ottawa’s defensive shuffle already run?

Deep enough that Monday’s news is the third layer of it, not the first. Matinpalo, hurt on the Mantha boarding major on October 12, returned on Saturday against Philadelphia after missing two games, NHL.com’s Senators coverage notes, which closed the league’s Player Safety watch on that hit with no hearing announced. Sanderson’s eight games out overlapped all of it. Now Chabot’s week or two begins as Sanderson’s ends, and the pair have still not played a full game together this season. The one piece of Monday that points the other way is the man delivering the news: the Senators announced Green’s own multi-year extension through 2030-31 the same day, a front office betting that this roster, shuffled as it is, is being built rather than patched.

What happens next for Ottawa?

Wednesday answers the first questions: Sanderson’s minutes, the interim captaincy arrangement Green did not name on Monday, and the reception for Tkachuk. Chabot’s re-evaluation sits a week or two out, on a timeline Green left deliberately soft. Ottawa’s wider week sits in a league where the biggest crease story is still Connor Hellebuyck’s suspension ending on Friday with three teams in trade talks, and where a blue line losing its captain in October is a problem half the conference would trade for. The Senators’ version is specific, though. They finally get their best young defenceman back on the night they lose their captain and host their last one.