Senators Recall Xavier Bourgault; Reassign Mads Sogaard
According to a team announcement, the Ottawa Senators have recalled forward Xavier Bourgault from the AHL’s Belleville Senators. Additionally, the team has reassigned netminder Mads Søgaard in a corresponding roster move.
Toward the end of Ottawa’s game against the Vegas Golden Knights on Sunday, depth forward Stephen Halliday left with an undisclosed injury. The Senators haven’t elaborated on Halliday’s injury, but the belief is that it isn’t too severe.
Furthermore, since the team activated Linus Ullmark from the non-roster list on the same day, there was little need for three netminders on the roster. For the Senators’ sake, they’ll hope to get better results from the tandem of Ullmark and veteran James Reimer.
Bourgault, 23, has spent much of the season with AHL Belleville. He’s had an inspired season, placing second on the team in scoring with 14 goals and 37 points in 43 games. He made his NHL debut this past December, going scoreless in 6:43 of action against the Toronto Maple Leafs.
Meanwhile, Søgaard will look to get his performance back on track in the AHL. He’s only two years removed from providing a .916 SV% in 32 games with AHL Belleville, but has been wholly disappointing since. He’s managed a 4-8-4 record in 18 games this season with a .889 SV%. If he wants a realistic chance to make Ottawa’s opening night roster next season, he must rediscover his game by the end of the 2025-26 campaign.
Senators Activate Linus Ullmark From Non-Roster List
The Senators have reinstated Linus Ullmark to the active roster for today’s game against the Golden Knights, per Bruce Garrioch of Postmedia. He won’t be getting the start but will serve as the backup to Mads Søgaard.
Tonight will be Ullmark’s first time dressing for a game in nearly a month. After conceding four goals on 14 shots against the Maple Leafs on Dec. 27 and being pulled from the game, he took a personal leave of absence from the team the following day.
He’s been practicing with Ottawa for more than a week to get back into game conditioning, though. He first returned to team skates on Jan. 16 and will likely be ticketed for his first start next Wednesday against the Avalanche without a conditioning stint with AHL Belleville.
Ottawa hasn’t gotten good goaltending out of any personnel they’ve tried this season. It’s toughest to swallow, though, when those numbers are coming from a goalie with the fifth-highest cap hit among active netminders. Even still, Ullmark’s .881 SV% and 2.95 GAA are the best among the five goalies to suit up for the Sens this year, and he’s the only one with a winning record at 14-8-5. Regardless of his struggles, he’s been the Sens’ clear-cut best option this season and will be their best chance to win down the stretch.
While this season looks more and more like a lost one, Ullmark getting his numbers back to last season’s form and retaining his confidence after his reset would bode well for the Sens’ chances of getting back to the playoffs next year. With a .909 SV% and 13.8 goals saved above expected, he was one of the biggest reasons Ottawa ended its eight-year playoff drought in 2024-25.
Image courtesy of John E. Sokolowski-Imagn Images.
Senators Recall Mads Sogaard, Reassign Hunter Shepard
Jan. 25: After making it through last night’s game without a goalie injury, the Senators reassigned Shepard to Belleville today, Postmedia’s Bruce Garrioch reports. After Reimer allowed four goals on 19 shots for a .789 save percentage in last night’s loss to the Hurricanes, that means Søgaard is the likely starter this evening against the Golden Knights. They’re now back to having an open spot on the active roster.
Jan. 24: The Senators have recalled goaltender Mads Søgaard from AHL Belleville, per a team announcement. To open a roster spot, they placed winger David Perron on injured reserve, per PuckPedia. They announced on Thursday that Perron will miss five to seven weeks after undergoing surgery to repair a sports hernia.
Ottawa has spent much of the season swapping depth goaltending options to serve as backups to Linus Ullmark or, now, to recent free-agent signing James Reimer while Ullmark remains on leave. This isn’t that. The Senators have had Hunter Shepard backing up Reimer for the last two games, and he’s sticking around. Instead, Ottawa plans to carry three goalies amid the winter storm slated to hit the Eastern seaboard during their back-to-back home games tonight and tomorrow, to avoid a situation where weather prevents them from adding a Belleville netminder in case of injury.
It is the 25-year-old Dane’s third recall of the season. He backed up Ullmark in an overtime loss to the Oilers on Oct. 21 and also dressed for a pair of games earlier this month. He entered an 8-2 loss to the Avalanche on Jan. 8 in relief of Leevi Merilainen and allowed five goals on 16 shots for a harsh .688 SV% and 17.22 GAA.
Small sample size aside, it hasn’t been a kind season for Søgaard, nor has it been one for virtually any Sens netminder in the NHL or AHL. In 18 games with Belleville, he’s posted a .889 SV% and 4-8-4 record with a 3.30 GAA and one shutout.
While Søgaard was the third goalie taken in the 2019 draft behind Spencer Knight and Pyotr Kochetkov, it’s becoming abundantly clear that a stable NHL future isn’t in the cards for the 6’7″, 231-lb giant. In 30 appearances for the Sens since debuting five years ago, he’s logged an 11-11-3 record with a .875 SV% and 3.70 GAA.
Nonetheless, he will be heading to Italy next month to serve with teammate Lars Eller on Denmark’s Olympic team. It’s his second time on the men’s national team roster for a non-qualifying tournament, last suiting up as the backup at the 2021 World Championship.
Ullmark Could Return Sunday, Yeo Takes Over Running Ottawa's Penalty Kill
- Senators goaltender Linus Ullmark will return to the lineup soon, possibly as early as Sunday, relays Postmedia’s Bruce Garrioch (Twitter link). He stepped away for a leave of absence for mental health reasons just after the holiday break and Ottawa’s goaltending has struggled mightily since then, with backup Leevi Merilainen recently being sent back to the minors for a reset. Meanwhile, Garrioch also notes that assistant coach Mike Yeo has taken over the penalty kill from Nolan Baumgartner. Ottawa’s shorthanded play this season has been an issue as the Sens rank 31st in the league with a success rate of just 71.7%.
Senators’ David Perron Out Five To Seven Weeks
The Ottawa Senators have lost one of their veteran forwards until the end of February at the very least. Relayed from TSN’s Bruce Garrioch, head coach Travis Green told reporters today that winger David Perron would miss the next five to seven weeks after undergoing surgery to repair a sports hernia.
Perron’s recovery timeline indicates that he will return well after the upcoming Olympic break. On the earlier side, he could return as soon as Ottawa’s February 26th matchup against the Detroit Red Wings. If it takes closer to seven weeks for him to return, his absence could extend until the middle of March.
Regardless, it’s the second consecutive year that Perron has dealt with a significant injury. During his first season with the Senators, Perron missed two months due to a back injury shortly after he returned from a family medical emergency. He finished the campaign with nine goals and 16 points in 43 games.
Healthy to start the 2025-26 campaign, Perron has been a solid tertiary contributor to the Senators. Largely in a middle-six role, the 37-year-old winger has scored 10 goals and 25 points in 49 games, averaging 13:26 of ice time per game. Additionally, he’s been productive on the defensive side of the puck, managing a 53.5% CorsiFor% and 90.6% on-ice SV% at even strength.
Fortunately, because of the Winter Olympics, Perron doesn’t stand to lose as much time as he otherwise could have. Despite being out for over a month, the expected recovery timeline projects him to miss anywhere from eight to 15 games.
The injury will certainly have implications regarding Perron’s future in Ottawa or elsewhere. At his age, suffering major injuries in back-to-back years can invoke career-ending ramifications. Being a pending unrestricted free agent, Perron will have some work to do upon his return to ensure that there’s interest in him next summer.
Ottawa Senators Recall Stephen Halliday
The Ottawa Senators announced today that forward Stephen Halliday has been recalled from the team’s AHL affiliate, the Belleville Senators. Ottawa had an open spot on their 23-man active roster, meaning Halliday was able to be recalled without a corresponding move.
Today’s transaction returns Halliday to the Senators’ NHL roster under two weeks removed from his original reassignment. Halliday spent most of late November through early January skating in the Senators’ lineup. The 23-year-old scored six points in 18 games, averaging 8:12 time on ice per game, including 2:04 per game on the power play.
A 2022 second-round pick out of the USHL’s Dubuque Fighting Saints, Halliday had a strong NCAA career with Ohio State before turning pro in the spring of 2024. He has been thoroughly impressive in the pro ranks, scoring 51 points in 71 games as an AHL rookie last year, and 26 points in 22 AHL games this year.
The 6-foot-4 center entered the season seen as one of Ottawa’s more promising prospects. He was ranked the club’s No. 4 prospect by Daily Faceoff, and No. 7 in their system by Elite Prospects, with both outlets projecting middle-six potential for Halliday.
Now back in the NHL, the goal for Halliday will be to earn a more substantial role than the one he received during his last stint in Ottawa. While he got a solid amount of power play time, he barely played at even strength. Halliday has every physical tool necessary to be able to make a shift-by-shift impact on the ice, and this transaction today will give him the opportunity to prove that.
As a pending RFA whose entry-level contract is set to expire at the end of the year, Halliday has every incentive to string together quality NHL performances and secure his place in Ottawa’s future plans.
Senators Recall Hunter Shepard, Reassign Leevi Merilainen
There are more moving parts between the pipes for the Ottawa Senators. The Senators announced that they’ve recalled netminder Hunter Shepard from the AHL’s Belleville Senators and reassigned Leevi Merilainen in a corresponding roster move.
A year ago, few would have predicted the downfall of Merilainen this season. The 23-year-old finished the 2024-25 campaign with an 8-3-1 record in 12 games with a .925 SV% and 1.99 GAA, showing promise as a future backup behind Linus Ullmark. Unfortunately, Merilainen hasn’t gotten close to replicating that performance this year.
Through 20 games, Merilainen owns an 8-10-1 record with a .860 SV% and 3.51 GAA, including a -16.8 Goals Saved Above Average (GSAA). Additionally, according to MoneyPuck, among netminders that have played in 20 or more games this season, Merilainen is the worst in terms of Goals Saved Above Expected (GSAx) per 60 with a -0.948 mark. St. Louis Blues’ goalie Jordan Binnington is the next closest with a -0.777.
Simply put, that’s unsustainable for the Senators. Ottawa has already brought in James Reimer to shore up their play in the crease. The veteran stopped 30 out of 34 shots in the Senators’ recent overtime loss to the Detroit Red Wings.
Ottawa hopes that Merilainen can regain some of his confidence in the AHL. He has historically been solid with AHL Belleville, owning a career 33-22-8 record across six seasons with a .911 SV% and 2.59 GAA.
Meanwhile, Shepard returns to the Senators for the sixth time this season. The two-time Calder Cup champion has already appeared in one game with Ottawa this season, stopping 10 out of 12 shots against the Red Wings on January 5th. Throughout the duration of his first stint with AHL Belleville, Shepard owns a 6-6-1 record with a .895 SV% and 3.45 GAA.
Ullmark Returns To Practice, No Timeline For Return
- Senators goaltender Linus Ullmark skated with the team on Friday for the first time since stepping away on a leave of absence last month, relays Postmedia’s Bruce Garrioch. However, there remains no timetable for him to return to Ottawa’s lineup. The 32-year-old struggled through the first two and a half months of the season, posting a save percentage of just .881, a career low by a considerable margin. For now, Leevi Merilainen and recent signee James Reimer will continue as their goaltending tandem.
The Senators Have Some Tough Decisions To Make
The Senators are facing a midseason crossroads. The season has not gone as planned, and they are well out of a playoff spot.
They could stand pat and hope James Reimer provides steady goaltending, push for short-term moves to improve the team, or pivot to a sell-off for this season and hope to reload in the summer. It’s a real dilemma in Ottawa, as the Senators are too flawed to contend but too good to tank.
Even if they wanted to aim for an impact prospect in the 2026 draft, they don’t have their first-round pick this year thanks to the Evgenii Dadonov debacle. The Senators are effectively in the worst possible situation this year, and the next few weeks will be crucial in determining where they go from here.
There will be no easy answers for a club that has dramatically underperformed. Rebuilding is absolutely out of the question, given how much long-term money Ottawa has spent on extensions over the last few years.
However, a quick retool could inject much-needed draft capital or prospects into the Senators’ pipeline and net them a fair amount of assets, given how tight the standings are and how few teams appear set to become sellers before the trade deadline. If Ottawa wanted to dump some of its pending UFAs, it could effectively set the trade market on its own terms rather than responding to what other clubs do.
If the Sens start shipping out veteran talent, they have a decent stockpile of players on expiring deals that could be made available, including several former Stanley Cup champions among the forwards: Lars Eller, David Perron, and Nick Cousins. On top of the trio of former winners, forward Claude Giroux and defenseman Nick Jensen are also pending UFAs, giving Ottawa a healthy list of potential players to move should they slide completely out of playoff contention.
But can the Senators move all of those veterans this year?
Giroux is having another solid season, with 32 points in 46 games. However, at 38 years old and playing close to home, does he really want to serve as a deadline rental?
It’s hard to say. On the surface, it seems unlikely, but Giroux is nearing the end of his career and is missing the one thing every NHL player covets: a Stanley Cup ring.
If Giroux agreed to a trade, he could theoretically make the move for a few months and then return next summer to Canada’s capital, or somewhere else close to home. That has happened in the past, albeit not for a long time.
Mark Recchi did it back in 2006 when he accepted a trade from the Penguins to the Hurricanes, only to return to Pittsburgh the following summer. Keith Tkachuk had a similar sequence when he was traded by the Blues in February 2007 to the Thrashers, only to be returned in a separate trade in June.
Jensen is another interesting case and would have been a highly sought-after trade piece before this year, given that right-shot defensemen are always in demand. But this season has been one to forget for Jensen, who was a healthy scratch just a couple of weeks ago and has been trying to find his game for much of the season.
Ottawa has attempted to manage the 35-year-old’s workload, dropping his playing time from over 20 minutes a night to just north of 16 minutes per game in an effort to keep him fresh, but it hasn’t done much to improve Jensen’s play. The biggest knock on Jensen at the moment is that his once-fluid skating now looks disjointed and robotic, which isn’t surprising given his injury history and the fact that he had offseason hip surgery and missed Ottawa’s training camp in September.
Jensen hasn’t looked like himself this year, and the Senators’ goaltending has been terrible, which has only magnified his struggles and dropped his trade stock and, ultimately, his future contract prospects significantly.
Returning to Eller, he is a low-maintenance, plug-and-play fourth-line center who doesn’t contribute much offensively anymore but can still skate and has reasonable puck-handling ability. The 36-year-old has just two goals and four assists in 32 games this year, but has buried himself in a defensive role, which suits his skill set at this late stage of his career.
Eller is the perfect low-cost veteran for contending teams looking to add depth. He is making just $1.25MM on a one-year deal, and with such a low cost, if the Senators move him before the deadline, they should be able to grab a mid-round draft pick.
As for Cousins, no one should want to acquire him, given that he was voted by the players as the NHL’s most punchable player. That said, he is likely only disliked until he plays on someone’s team.
Cousins is the kind of player that teammates love, and opposing players despise. He has a unique skill set that is often overlooked, but he adds physicality, plays a pest-like game, and brings energy that can spark a team, particularly in the playoffs.
The Belleville, Ontario native has historically drawn a lot of penalties and can chip in with offense (six goals and six assists in 45 games this year), although his defensive work leaves a lot to be desired. Cousins is on a one-year deal, making just $825K this season, so, like Eller, there should be demand given that he can fit into almost any team’s salary-cap structure.
Finally, there is Perron, who has been much better this season after posting just 16 points in 43 games last year. The 37-year-old already has nine goals and 14 assists in 46 games this year, and his underlying numbers are much better than they were a year ago.
Perron is no longer a perennial 20-goal, 50-point scorer, but he remains a useful depth scorer and should be in demand if Ottawa makes him available. He’s one of, if not the, slowest players in the NHL, but he hits and is reasonably productive offensively at this late stage of his career.
Perron isn’t going to net Ottawa a first-round pick, but it’s entirely possible they could get a second-rounder should they opt to trade him. He will likely want to stay close to home, but his 15-team no-trade list covers less than half the league and would leave the Senators with plenty of potential suitors for Perron. It’s also possible that he would embrace the move to a team on his no-trade list if Ottawa is out of the playoff picture and a team is appealing enough to him.
Ottawa has rattled off a couple of wins in the last few days, which could be the start of a turnaround. Ironically, the Senators have been deploying Cousins, Eller and Perron as their de facto fourth line in those two games, and they’ve been terrific as a unit.
But even with four points in their pocket, the Senators sit five points back of a playoff spot, with six teams to leapfrog for the final playoff spot. There is also the consideration that those two wins came against the teams sitting at the bottom of both conferences, the Canucks and Rangers.
If Ottawa is going to go on a run, it will need to beat some outstanding teams in the coming weeks. The next two to three weeks will be crucial for the Senators and could ultimately dictate their short-term intentions.
Ottawa Senators Reassign Hunter Shepard
The Ottawa Senators announced today that netminder Hunter Shepard has been reassigned to the club’s AHL affiliate, the Belleville Senators.
The move places veteran goalie James Reimer in a position to be the Senators’ No. 2 goalie behind Leevi Merilainen until Linus Ullmark is ready to return to the active roster. Ullmark skated with the Senators yesterday, and head coach Travis Green expressed optimism that Ullmark would be “hopefully approaching getting back with the team.” Ullmark has been on personal leave since late December.
Reimer is a veteran of 525 NHL games, and although he had a tough debut game for the Senators’ AHL affiliate, the Belleville Senators, his quality 2024-25 performances suggest he’ll be able to hold his own as a stopgap NHL netminder. Reimer posted a .901 save percentage across 22 games last season with the Buffalo Sabres.
As for Shepard, this reassignment returns him to Belleville, where he’s split time with two other netminders. Shepard won back-to-back Calder Cup championships as a member of the Hershey Bears in 2023 and 2024, backstopping the Bears to the title as their No. 1 goalie each time. He hasn’t been able to translate that success to Belleville thus far, posting an .897 save percentage in 12 games.
Shepard was mostly a backup netminder during his stay on the Senators’ NHL roster, appearing in just one game. Although he didn’t play very much, Shepard did earn a real financial benefit from his recall. His one-year, two-way deal carries a $775K NHL salary and a $400K AHL salary, so he saw a notable pay raise during his time spent in Ottawa.
Now back in Belleville, he’ll hope to string together some quality performances in order to potentially earn another NHL recall, or at least position himself most favorably for his upcoming unrestricted free agency.