Ottawa Senators Trade Tiers

Setting the Senators players into tiers dependant on their trade value

With the Stanley Cup playoffs entering the home stretch with only four teams remaining, the NHL’s off-season is nearly in full swing. For the Senators, that means more and more teams are joining them on the sidelines, where the team has been idling since March. Every team that gets eliminated also creates a new potential trade partner for the team, meaning the likelihood that we’ll see some off-ice action soon keeps increasing.

Earlier in the off-season, I wrote about potential targets the team could pursue in the trade market, and many others have done the same. But as we all know, you have to give something to get something, which means that if the Sens want to acquire talent, they’ll likely have to send some players the other way. It’s next to impossible to know specifics about which players other teams would want in trades, but we can make educated guesses on the likelihood of players being sent packing in trades.

To do this, we’ll look at a series of tiers ranging from players who are nearly untouchable to those who may as well pack their bags already. Given that the Sens are still rebuilding, they likely won’t have much of an interest in moving prospects, so while that possibility can’t be completely ignored, we’ll limit this piece to players who played at least 10 games for Ottawa in 2019-20. We’ll also exclude pending UFAs from the equation, meaning Ron Hainsey, Craig Anderson, Mark Borowiecki, Matthew Peca, and Scott Sabourin will all be omitted.

I’ve created eight tiers based on the scientific method of Whatever I Feel Like, so let’s start with the players least likely to be moved this off-season.