On Aug. 1, Hockey Canada unveiled the 42 NHL players invited to participate in the Olympic orientation in Calgary later this month. The initial six were announced back in June, and now Connor McDavid, Cale Makar, and Sidney Crosby will potentially be joined by Jordan Binnington, Mitch Marner, Mark Scheifele, and John Tavares, among others. Even though the official team roster won’t be announced for some time, Canada still looks to enter the tournament as a gold medal favourite.
However, one name was suspiciously absent from the list – Ottawa Senators defenceman Thomas Chabot. Hockey Canada can’t include everyone, and some players just won’t make the cut, but not inviting Chabot raises some significant questions. He has been one of the most productive defenders in the NHL since 2018-19 and proven he can be an excellent international competitor, so why wasn’t he even offered the chance to try out?
It’s impossible to know the process Hockey Canada underwent to select their initial list of 42 players, but Chabot’s exclusion points to one thing – Hockey Canada is trying to build a team of role players, just like they did at the 2025 World Juniors, and, as we saw at that tournament, that strategy doesn’t work.
Chabot’s Career Deserves an Invite
While Chabot has never been one of the NHL’s top defencemen, he’s been a reliable offensive threat on Ottawa’s blue line. Since his debut in 2016-17, he’s averaged over 11 goals and 30 points a season, which has put him in some distinguished company. Since 2018-19, only eight Canadian defencemen have put up more points than him, and of those, three have already been named to Canada’s preliminary roster.
The 2018-19 season was a pivotal moment in Chabot’s career, as he recorded a career-high 14 goals and 55 points. That’s the 15th-highest total a Canadian defender has recorded since that season. But that season also saw him capture his first World Championship medal. Playing on the second pair alongside Troy Stecher, his seven points tied for the third-highest total among defencemen at the tournament, but the Canadians fell just short to Finland in the final. It wasn’t his first World Championship—he first competed for Canada in 2018 as a 21-year-old—nor would it be his last, as he returned as team captain in 2022, but it was his best as a professional.
Chabot has also gained a reputation as a big-minute defenceman. There was a stretch from 2019-2022 where he led the NHL with an average of 26:09 a night and played in nearly every situation for the Senators. Unfortunately, playing that much led to several injuries, keeping him off the ice for 65 games over the next two seasons, but he still kept up his scoring pace. Despite the injuries, he scored 20 goals and 71 points over that span. Had he played every game, he would have had nearly as many points as Charlie McAvoy, Morgan Rielly, or Devon Toews.
If we include stats up to last season, Chabot still sits among the top ice time averages in the NHL with 24:46. Of the eight players who scored more points than him since 2018-19, only two—Makar and Kris Letang—averaged more time on ice, with Makar averaging just a second more. Chabot hasn’t taken on as heavy a workload in recent seasons, but that’s allowed him to focus on what he does best: move the puck. In 80 games, he put up nine goals and 45 points, his best total since 2018-19. But it was also the 18th highest total among defenders last season and the eighth-highest among Canadians. Of those who put up more points than him, only Jakob Chychrun wasn’t invited to Canada’s Olympic camp.
Canada’s Questionable Decisions of Defence
Granted, points aren’t everything when it comes to assembling a national team, but it’s tough to argue that Chabot shouldn’t have at least received an invite over some of the others included.
Two defencemen received invites likely due to big offensive seasons in the past and the hope that they can recapture that magic at the Olympics. Brandon Montour is a solid offensive defenceman, but he’s only put up more than 40 points twice in his 10-year career. Last season, he scored 41 points with the Seattle Kraken while recording a team-worst minus-22, and in 2022-23, he recorded 73 points with the Florida Panthers. The same goes for Noah Dobson, who broke out in 2023-24 with a 70-point season with the New York Islanders, but came nowhere close to that lofty total last season with 39 points before being moved to the Montreal Canadiens at the 2025 Draft.
Aaron Ekblad is an interesting inclusion, as he was suspended for 20 games back in March for violating the terms of the NHLPA’s performance-enhancing substance program. He was eligible to return to the Florida Panthers for the playoffs, though, where he put up 13 points in 19 games and helped his team claim its second Stanley Cup in franchise history. At one time, he was one of the NHL’s top two-way defencemen, but he’s taken a step back in recent seasons.
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However, most of Canada’s defence is just the same group from the 4 Nations Face-Off in February. Only five of the 13 defencemen invited were not on that team, which includes Montour, Dobson, and Ekblad. MacKenzie Weegar and Evan Bouchard were the other two newcomers, both of whom unquestionably earned an invite to the Olympic team, but may be on the bubble because of the team’s previous experience together.
There’s the issue of handedness. Of the 13 defencemen invited, eight were right-shot defencemen, while the five left-handed shots were all on the 4 Nations Face-Off team. Right-shooting defencemen are highly sought-after in the NHL today, but are they so valuable that a team can ignore their left side? Canada could have easily invited one more left-shot defenceman to give them an even 14 to work with at training camp, yet their arbitrary number may have cut out some players more deserving of a spot.
The 2025 World Juniors Problem
Canadian fans would prefer to completely forget the 2025 World Juniors, but there are a lot of lessons that can be learned from the team’s fifth-place finish and collapse against Latvia in the round robin, the biggest of which is making sure to bring as much talent as possible. Sam Dickinson was forced to do a lot of heavy lifting after Canada left both Zayne Parekh and Carter Yakemchuk at home, and the latter didn’t even get an invite to their development camp. “We understand these are difficult decisions to make and worthy players often don’t make the cut,” Senators general manager Steve Staios said after Canada’s roster was announced. “However, it was peculiar that four players selected inside the top nine of this year’s NHL draft were omitted from the camp roster.”
Also left off the Canadian World Junior squad were Michael Misa, Tij Iginla, Beckett Sennecke, and Andrew Cristall, all of whom were having incredible seasons with their junior teams. However, Canada instead chose to bring players more suited to playing grinding roles, such as Tanner Howe, Ethan Gauthier, and Mathieu Cataford. Those players weren’t undeserving of a place on the national team, but after Canada struggled to score throughout the tournament, it raised the question of whether management made the right choices.
Canada’s Olympic team is starting to shape up similarly. Instead of bringing in players like Chabot, Dougie Hamilton, Kent Johnson, Dylan Guenther, or Pierre-Luc Dubois, Canada has invited Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, Anthony Cirelli, Travis Sanheim, and Carter Verhaeghe. All those players have done plenty to earn an invite to a national team tryout, but to only have the latter group implies that Canada is trying to find the right fits for bottom-six roles. Doing so will leave talent at home, which will almost certainly bite them when they need it most. It also ignores valuable veterans like Claude Giroux, who also should have received an invite, but at 35 years old, it makes sense that Canada is looking to get younger.
The Senators will still have representatives at the Olympics; Brady Tkachuk and Tim Stutzle were already named as one of the first six for their respective countries. It’s also almost guaranteed that Jake Sanderson will join Tkachuk on Team USA, and Leevi Merilainen and Nikolas Matinpalo have a decent shot at making Team Finland. But most Senators fans will still be cheering on the Canadians, and Team Canada is doing the same thing they’ve done for the past several tournaments. Chabot’s exclusion reveals a glaring issue that Hockey Canada refuses to address, and that might mean their gold medal drought at both the World Juniors and Olympics will stretch on for another year.
