Many armchair general managers in Bytown think the Ottawa Senators need to get rid of their twine minding duo of Joonas Korpisalo and Anton Forsberg this summer and get better goalies. But the Senators won’t, because they can’t. They’re stuck with what they have between the pipes. That means next season the team stands a good chance of another early start to their golf season rather than punching a ticket to the playoffs.
Related: Senators’ Latest Front Office Moves Hint at What’s to Come
But look at it this way – recently, the Senators’ division rival in Buffalo was mathematically eliminated from playoff contention. That makes it 13 straight campaigns in which they haven’t seen postseason action. As bad as things may be in Ottawa, at least they’re not as hopeless as they are in the Queen City.
Senators’ Goaltending an Embarrassment
Okay, just for those diehard fans who think Ottawa’s goaltending isn’t all that bad, you don’t have to take my word for it. Even Korpisalo thinks the team’s goaltending is lacking, saying back in late February that, “I need to be better. It’s nothing crazier than that. I need more wins. It’s as simple as that” (from “SNAPSHOTS: Joonas Korpisalo knows he has to be better for the Senators”, Ottawa Sun, 2/29/24).
Yet just for fun and to show that Korpisalo knows of what he speaks, let’s look at what the statistics say about Ottawa’s goaltending this season. Perhaps the most telling stat is the number of games in which the team’s goalies gave up four or more goals this season. You just won’t win in this league if you do that too often – and it’s something the Senators did in 35 of the 78 games they’ve played at time of writing. Put another way, almost half the time opposing teams lace up against the Senators they know they’ll face the proverbial sieve between the pipes.
Korpisalo and Forsberg rank 57th and 55th in the league respectively according to Moneypuck. Ranked as a duo, the two are 31st in the league according to the venerable publication for which I write – The Hockey Writers.
Korpisalo’s save percentage (SV%) at time of writing was just .891 and his average goals-against per game (GAA) was 3.25. The corresponding numbers for Forsberg are .885 and 3.36. To put that into perspective, a run-of-the-mill NHL netminder puts up a SV% of .904 and a GAA of 2.91. And in case you think Mads Sogaard in Belleville could improve the situation, his SV% is .859 and GAA is 4.05, albeit over just six games he played in Ottawa this season.
I could go on, but I hear you begging me to stop beating the dead horse that is the Senators’ goaltending this season.
What Can Staios Do to Improve Senators’ Goaltending?
Now that we’ve agreed Ottawa’s goalies are sub-par, what could Senators general manager (GM) Steve Staios do about it? Here are his options.
(1) Trade Korpisalo and/or Forsberg
I hear cries of trade for better goalies, but that’s unlikely to happen. Pigs would fly before Staios works a deal to trade Korpisalo in a one-for-one trade given his performance, his reputation for inconsistency and the excruciatingly long four years left on his contract with its average annual value (AAV) of $4 million. Added to that, his contract has a modified no-trade clause that allows him to name 10 teams for which he won’t play.
No NHL GM worth his salt would be willing to take on that boat anchor. Not unless Ottawa retained a large portion of his salary and that’s all but impossible given that the team is up tight against the salary cap.
Even as part of a trade package, Korpisalo would be tough to move. God only knows what the Senators would have to include in a package to move him.
Forsberg would be easier to dump since he becomes an unrestricted free agent (UFA) at the end of the 2024-25 season and has a contract featuring a more digestible $2.75 million AAV. Even so, Staios would need to find a buyer in desperate straits in goal if he is to move the big Swede.
If he could, some salary cap wriggle room opens for him. That could leave the Senators to contemplate the likes of Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen of the Buffalo Sabres or Vitek Vanecek of the San Jose Sharks. Yet would these trade targets be a marked improvement over what the Senators already have? As discussed in a recent episode of The Hockey Writers’ Senators Roundtable, (see goaltending discussion at 41:29), the answer is probably not.
(2) Acquire Linus Ullmark
There has been speculation that the Senators could be talking to the Boston Bruins about Ullmark. You have to wonder whether Ottawa could snag him in exchange for Jakob Chychrun. This deal could be a straightforward player-for-player hockey exchange. Chychrun is under contract for another full season and comes with a cap hit of $4.6 million, while Ullmark also becomes a UFA at the end of next season and has a contract with an AAV of $5 million.
There’s no question that the Bruins need to bolster their backend. Injuries and expiring contracts have taken their toll. Everyone in Boston knows that the 30-year-old Ullmark is probably surplus to the team’s needs and could fetch them much-needed help for their D-corps. Apparently, it wasn’t for lack of trying that the Bruins failed to move him at the trade deadline. If Bruins management is confident that 25-year-old Jeremy Swayman is truly a starting goaltender, you can bet they’ll be aggressive in peddling him on the free agency market this summer.
Still, Ullmark is rumoured to have a 16-team no-trade list in his contract. Many believe that is why he is still in Boston. There is a very high likelihood that Ottawa is on his list, and he’d nix a Beantown to Bytown move.
(3) Buy Out Korpisalo
Some argue that Staios needs to buy out the remaining $16 million on Korpisalo’s contract and then shop for a new goalie on the free agency market. Forget it. Ottawa simply doesn’t have the cap space to do that. Not that the Senators would need to pay that in a lump sum. According to CapFriendly, they could bring the effective cost of a buyout down to $10 million and change, but that would mean they’d need to carry $1.3 million in dead cap space for the next eight seasons.
Limited Number of Good Goalies in 2024 NHL Free Agency
Even if Staios could find a taker for Korpisalo or buy him out, the free agency market this summer for a replacement goalie will be very thin. Those twine minders available are either too old (see the Los Angeles Kings’ Cam Talbot and the Minnesota Wild’s Marc-Andre Fleury), regarded as being untouchable by their current teams and likely re-signed (see Swayman and Dustin Wolf of the Calgary Flames) or not much better than Korpisalo and Forsberg.
Senators Must Salvage Korpisalo
By any measure, it looks like the Senators are stuck with Korpisalo. There’s no option but to try to salvage him. He could very well rebound and do well next season as a starting netminder under the team’s new coaching.
At times Korpisalo has shown flashes of brilliance. Over the course of his career, he has demonstrated an ability to play at a level that makes him respectable anywhere in the league. As he recently said about his game, “The basic building blocks are there.”
It’s also important to keep in mind that he’s playing in front of a weak lineup prone to making all kinds of defensive zone blunders that lead to goals. Had it been better this season, goaltending in the nation’s capital may not have been a topic I’d be writing about.
No Easy Fix for Senators’ Goaltending Problems
Goaltenders are the foundation of any good NHL team. If a GM has one, his team can go a long way with mediocre talent as the Montreal Canadiens did in 2021 when Carey Price took them to the Stanley Cup Final. Without it, even the most talented teams can flounder. Just ask the Edmonton Oilers before they got rid of Jack Campbell earlier this season.
That good goalies are so scarce in the NHL is why teams are loathe to give them up. That’s why most of them are drafted and developed rather than picked up in trades or free agency. Not only that, but seemingly mediocre goalies can flourish with the right team in front of them.
All of this is to say Staios needs to be careful in deciding when and even if, at least for now, he needs to make dramatic changes in his net.
