Just ten games into the season, the Ottawa Senators are shaking things up to try to break out of a funk. The biggest news from yesterday was, of course, the team naming Brady Tkachuk the franchise’s 10th captain — and the first since Erik Karlsson in 2018. By the time they got around to doing it, the move felt like it had a certain inevitability to it but it was still good to formalize. Tkachuk even had some nice things to say about the community in his comments to the media.
The other big change is that, after much debate, DJ Smith has elected to break up his top pairing of Thomas Chabot and Artem Zub.