This is becoming annoying. I don’t mean the Ottawa Senators — I mean the way they get talked about, especially on national hockey panels where the default setting seems to be a shrug. Let me start with why this stings. The most recent Senators game I attended was on April 5, 2026, a 6-3 win over the Carolina Hurricanes. It wasn’t a playoff game, but it had that feeling, because the team was clawing for a playoff spot and the building was alive. Brady Tkachuk — then the captain — scored twice, and after the game he was named first star. During his postgame interview, the crowd chanted his name. I was part of that crowd. There is a video on social media from that night with a caption that says: “Drama, controversy… whatever. This dude is the heartbeat of our team.” That was exactly right. For as long as he was here, Brady was the reason to watch the Sens. He wasn’t perfect, but he was present. He played with his emotions on his sleeve, celebrated like a fan, fought like a teammate, and made you believe that the team could get there. So when it came out that he had asked for a trade to Florida, I felt the sting. But I didn’t feel betrayed. I wrote the day after the trade that there were no hard feelings, because it’s strictly business. Players have short careers and limited windows. If he thought Florida gave him a better chance to chase a Cup, that’s his call. The problem is that the media has decided to retrofit a story onto his departure that doesn’t match what fans actually lived through. There is a growing narrative that he was leaving some kind of miserable situation in Ottawa, or that he was too big for the market, or that the fanbase didn’t appreciate him. None of that lines up with the night I was in the building. So when I see a segment that compares his situation to Connor Hellebuyck’s, I have to wonder if anyone involved actually watched this team before pressing record.
Let’s take some time to unpack that segment. Emily Kaplan is a respected reporter and a thoughtful ESPN insider. She does her homework. One small detail I like about her is that she thanks players in their native language, which says a lot about how she treats people. The clip on TSN’s OverDrive was about how hard it was for Brady Tkachuk and Connor Hellebuyck to return to their Canadian teams after winning gold with Team USA at the Olympics. Tkachuk had been traded to Florida, and Hellebuyck had been traded from Winnipeg to New Jersey. On the surface, there are parallels: both are American, both played in Canadian markets, both requested moves. But once you get past the obvious, the comparison breaks down. Hellebuyck’s case involved something genuinely frightening. The Jets’ general manager acknowledged that Hellebuyck and his family had received threats and online messages serious enough to bring team security and local police into the situation. That changes everything. If a player’s family doesn’t feel safe, you cannot expect him to stay. It doesn’t matter how good the fans are, or how loud the building gets, or how many warm memories he has. That’s not a hockey decision; that’s a life decision. We don’t know exactly how much that played into his request, and we don’t need to. Brady’s reasons, as reported, were much more vague. People used words like “face of the franchise,” “uncomfortable,” and “enemy territory.” No specifics. No threats. No safety issues. Maybe there are details that haven’t been made public, and I’m not saying Brady owed us anything more. But to place his vague discomfort next to Hellebuyck’s family security scare is sloppy journalism. It borrows the gravity of one situation and applies it to another that doesn’t have the same weight. The clip above doesn’t do Emily Kaplan justice, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the Senators are the team in focus here. It does a disservice to both players. Hellebuyck deserves empathy, not a hot take. Brady deserves to be remembered honestly, not as part of some misleading pattern. The media can do better, and it’s frustrating that they don’t even seem to realize how lazy this comparison is.
Then there’s the on-ice part of the argument, which might be the strangest of all. The implication seems to be that Brady left a doomed franchise for a successful one. Fine — the Panthers have clearly been a better organization than the Senators for most of his career. But if we look at last season specifically, the Senators were not just better than the Jets; they were better than the Panthers. I know people will say: “Yeah, but Barkov was hurt.” Fair enough. Injuries matter. But even if you adjust for that, the Senators finished ninth in the league in points, tied for fifth in regulation wins, and seventh in goal differential. Those are not the numbers of a franchise that’s dead in the water. Those are the numbers of a team that was legitimately competitive and might have been even better with a couple of breaks. Yet the national narrative all season was that the Sens were a one-man operation, and that without Brady they’d be lost. What’s with the narrative that the Senators are dead in the water without a 59-point player? That narrative was wrong, and it was also reductive. Yes, Brady was their best player and the emotional engine. But the team around him was not a bunch of passengers. There were other players producing, a coaching staff with a system, and a front office that had been building toward something. The same media that ignored all of that suddenly wanted to act like Brady’s departure was the final nail in the coffin. Why? Because it’s easier to tell a dramatic story about a star escaping a bad situation than it is to do the work of understanding why the team was quietly improving. The Senators didn’t need a savior; they needed a little respect. They were already getting closer. But respect doesn’t generate as many clicks as panic. So the coverage became a feedback loop: the team gets dismissed, the player gets praised for leaving, and the fans are left to wonder if anyone actually watched the games. The numbers say the Sens were moving in the right direction. The coverage says they never had a chance. Those two things can’t both be true, and I know which one I believe.
This pattern isn’t just about Emily Kaplan or one segment on TSN. It’s everywhere. I remember a Sportsnet panel talking about Tim Stützle missing a game in the 2021-22 season after a knee-on-knee collision with Montreal’s Nick Suzuki. Jennifer Botterill is usually the voice of reason on that panel, but you wouldn’t have known it from that clip. The tone implied that Stützle was being soft or that something was off, when anyone who actually saw the play knew it was a scary collision and a legitimate injury. This screams out to me as a network issue, not just an individual mistake. That’s what happens when a network doesn’t do basic research. They don’t know the player’s history, they don’t watch the play from different angles, they don’t check the injury report. They just turn it into a storyline. And this has been going on for years. From Garry Galley to Kevin Bieksa, the message to Sens fans has been consistent: your team is a sideshow, not a story. The dysfunction gets highlighted; the success gets ignored. I’ve become a TSN guy because TSN at least has people like Cheryl Pounder, who clearly does her homework and talks about Ottawa with the same seriousness she would give any team. But even TSN isn’t perfect. The fact that I’m grateful for someone simply meeting the low bar of basic research tells you how far the coverage has fallen. It shouldn’t be a luxury to hear a broadcaster who knows the players’ names, roles, and histories. It should be standard. But for Senators fans, it’s become rare. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Ottawa is the team in focus in these moments. There’s a hierarchy in hockey media, and the Senators are near the bottom. They’re a small market, they’re in Canada but not Toronto or Montreal, and they don’t have a built-in national audience. So the national networks don’t invest in them. They send whatever the bare minimum is, and it shows. Watching that Stützle clip, I didn’t just get angry about that one take. I got angry about all the years of half-hearted, dismissive coverage that led to it.
But it’s not just Sportsnet. It’s the whole system. Rogers has been building a broadcasting monopoly, and instead of using that power to make local coverage better, they’ve been cutting it. That’s backwards. A monopoly should mean more games, more features, more reporters with real access, more stories from the local market. Instead, it means fewer people in the building, less particularity, more generic national commentary from people who don’t know the team. The Senators are the perfect example. Why was Brady Tkachuk the team’s lone All-Star representative every single year? Do you think he was the only Senator with All-Star-level talent? No. But the organization didn’t have the same media push, the same constant highlights, the same social media machine that other markets have. The players don’t get the same recognition, so the fans are asked to believe the team is less talented than it is. That’s a media construction, not a hockey reality. And there are other examples. When Erik Karlsson was traded away from Ottawa, so many media outlets acted like they were seeing him for the first time in that first game. It was as if his years in Ottawa hadn’t happened, or as if they didn’t count. He was the same player, doing the same things, but because he was suddenly in a bigger media market, it was treated like a revelation. Mark Stone was left off NHL.com’s Top 50 wingers in 2018, despite being one of the best two-way wingers in the league. Why? Because he was wearing an Ottawa jersey, and the people making those lists didn’t bother to watch him. These aren’t coincidences. They’re patterns. When a market is undervalued, everything that happens there is undervalued: the players, the games, the stories, the successes. That matters. It affects how players are viewed around the league, how trade values are set, how free agents think about the team, and how the fanbase feels. It makes it harder for the Senators to compete off the ice even as they compete on it. And nobody in a position of power seems to care enough to fix it, because the people controlling the coverage don’t have to deal with the consequences. They don’t have to feel the quiet humiliation of watching your team be treated like a punchline. We do. And so we call it out.
At the end of the day, I want to be clear about what I’m not saying. I’m not saying Brady was wrong to leave. I’m not saying the Senators are perfect. I’m not saying every media member is terrible. And I’m not saying the league owes Ottawa anything. What I’m saying is simpler: fans deserve better. We’re not unreasonable. We understand trades. We understand markets. We understand that hockey is a business and that players have every right to make decisions for their careers and their families. But when we turn on the TV and see a segment comparing a player who dealt with threats against his family to one who just wanted a fresh start, we don’t have to pretend it’s a fair comparison. When we see a team that just finished ninth in the league in points being written off as hopeless, we don’t have to accept it. When we see an injury mocked by analysts who didn’t watch the play, we’re allowed to be angry. None of this is a grand injustice in the grand scheme of things. Sports are supposed to be fun. But part of loving a team is wanting the people who cover it to respect it. I’ll love the Senators long after these hot takes have faded. I was in that building in April, chanting Brady’s name with thousands of other fans. I remember what it felt like to believe. And I know the difference between a team that was failing and a team that was building. The Senators were building. Some of the media just couldn’t be bothered to notice. So, to the networks: do better. Do the basic research. Treat Ottawa like a real market. And to the fans: don’t let a lazy narrative rewrite what you know. You were there. You saw the team. You know the truth. Keep paying attention, keep pushing back, and keep loving this team — not because the media tells you to, but because it’s yours. And maybe one day, the coverage will finally catch up to what we’ve known all along.