It’s been a tough season for the Ottawa Senators, but March 12 brought some very welcome good news. Nearly two and a half years after the NHL stripped the Senators of one of their upcoming first-round picks, the league announced that the team would be reinstated in the first round of the 2026 Draft with the 32nd selection, which cannot be traded or moved. The $1 million fine was trivial; Ottawa had its pick back.
“We are grateful for the League and Commissioner (Gary Bettman) keeping an open mind on this issue and modifying the penalty,” said owner Michael Andlaur in a team statement. “The Senators organization is appreciative the fine money will be directed to the NHL Foundation Canada, to help grow the sport in our country. We consider this matter closed and will have no further comments on the situation.”
Andlauer is saying all the right things, but there’s a very good chance he’s still not happy with the result, nor should he be. The NHL has been incredibly unfair in its treatment of the Senators since Andlauer took control of the team in 2023 for seemingly no reason other than it can. With so much bad blood, the return of Ottawa’s draft pick won’t erase the damage done to this team.
Andlauer Didn’t Deserve Punishment
There is no debate that the Senators made a huge error in not disclosing a part of Evgeny Dadonov’s contract when they traded him to the Vegas Golden Knights during the 2021 offseason. While it may have been a simple oversight, it prevented the Golden Knights from moving Dadonov to the Anaheim Ducks at the 2022 Trade Deadline. The Senators didn’t disclose Dadonov’s 10-team no-trade clause, which included the Ducks, and the NHL blocked the trade because he had not agreed to waive it.
However, it was over a full year after the trade before the NHL stripped the Senators of their first-round pick in 2024, 2025, or 2026 due to their negligence in the trade. In the meantime, Ottawa had a new owner in Andlauer, who was not fully informed of the NHL’s ongoing investigation into the matter. When the punishment was dropped, Andlauer was beside himself. “Why I inherited this is beyond me,” he said when the NHL announced its sanctions.
Andlauer acted quickly, firing the offending general manager, Pierre Dorion, and giving his new GM, Steve Staios, plenty of tools to prevent him from having to do the job on his own. He was also very clear that the offence occurred before he joined the team and had not been adequately informed of the issue. Yet nothing swayed Bettman to reduce the steep punishment, forcing Ottawa’s new owner to take his new lot and like it. Andlauer was not happy, but his hands were tied, so he tried to make the best of it.
“The consensus seems that it’s a harsher penalty than it deserved,” he said later, “but at the end of the day, you’ve got to respect the decision. That’s the way I look at it. It would be a great message for our city to show that we’re doing the right thing. We would have to earn that right.”
The NHL Was Overly Harsh with Ottawa
The Dadonov trade was not the only issue plaguing the Senators in 2023. A week before the NHL’s punishment against Ottawa, forward Shane Pinto was handed one of the longest suspensions in modern history for gambling on sports. “Our players get regular briefings and education in terms of what you can and can’t do,” Bettman said in October 2023. “The good news is there’s no evidence that he bet on NHL hockey games, and so that’s why the penalty wasn’t even more severe. It’s one player out of 800, and the fact that there are protocols and procedures we have in place, that’s how we found out about this.”
There’s no question that Pinto broke the rules by allowing friends south of the border to place bets for him. Proxy betting is a prohibited practice in regulated markets, and the NHL needed to make it clear that its actions were not tolerated. However, over the past 70 years, only Slava Voynov was given a longer suspension than Pinto’s 41 games, retroactively given a one-year ban for domestic assault. Not even Todd Bertuzzi, who was charged with assault in 2004 for an on-ice incident, was given such a suspension. By comparison, Pinto’s penalty was incredibly harsh.
Related: Senators’ 2026 1st-Round Pick Returned by NHL With Modifications
The same goes for Dorion. His failure to disclose Dadonov’s full contract deservedly cost him his job as an NHL GM, and the team had to pay a penalty for their error. But neither case felt like the punishment fit the crime. The New Jersey Devils were also stripped of one of their next four first-round picks after circumventing the salary cap with Ilya Kovalchuk’s 17-year, $102 million deal in 2010. Additionally, the team was also fined $3 million and forced to forfeit a third-round pick in the 2011 Draft. Three years later, the NHL amended the sanctions, giving the Devils the 30th overall selection in the 2014 Draft and refunding them $1.5 million of the original fine. The NHL’s statement read:
“The Devils recently applied to the League for reconsideration and relief from a portion of the original penalty, citing primarily changes in circumstances which, in the Club’s view, changed the appropriateness of the sanctions initially imposed. After due and thorough consideration, the League has decided that a modification of the original circumvention penalty associated with the Kovalchuk contract is warranted and, accordingly, has amended the sanctions…”
The NHL’s statement following the Senators’ amended punishment read almost the same: “The Senators subsequently applied to the league for reconsideration and relief from the original penalty, citing primarily the change in club ownership and oversight, which, in the club’s view, changed the appropriateness of the penalty initially imposed. After due and thorough consideration, the league has decided that a modification of the original penalty is warranted and, accordingly, has amended the sanction.”
These two situations are very similar, at least in their punishments. Therefore, why did the NHL wait until now to make the change, instead of handing out the appropriate punishment back in 2023?
The timing is also worth noting. New Jersey was given their pick back the day after the 2014 Trade Deadline, while Ottawa had to wait a full week before the NHL made their announcement. The Senators may have known sooner, influencing their quiet deadline, but nothing was made official until Mar. 12, a full week after the deadline closed. It’s as though the NHL just wanted to watch the Senators squirm just a bit longer.
There may be something to Vegas’s connection to the original infraction. The NHL’s first expansion team since 2000, and the Golden Knights’ immediate success made the NHL seem like geniuses. So, when they came crying to Bettman asking for their “pound of flesh,” as Andlauer put it, the NHL jumped into action, although it still dragged out for far too long for Andlauer’s liking.
This time, Andlauer kept his cards closer to his chest, but reading between the lines shows he’s still not happy with his treatment at the hands of Bettman and the league. “There might be some precedent set, but it may not be the same thing exactly at the end of the day,” he said after the amendment. “It was in the due diligence material (when buying the Senators), and I would suggest that I was guided in the wrong way. But I rather not talk about it, because I think all it does is upset the NHL.”
The NHL Needs to Do Better
The NHL’s handling of the Senators’ punishment will be a black mark on Bettman’s career when he retires in “a couple years,” but it’s far from the only one. Bettman’s regime has routinely given precedence to the rich and powerful while pushing the little guy down, while refusing to back down on any issue, big or small. It’s why there have been three lockouts during his 30-plus-year tenure and why the NHL still sits fourth among the big four sports. The league is more stable and profitable than ever, but every fun decision that could have connected fans with the game was left on the table.
Yes, the NHL made the right call in returning the Senators’ first-round pick. But don’t let that distract you from their initial mistake. This isn’t an apology or an admission of wrongdoing. It’s just another table scrap from a league that has proven time and time again that they don’t care about the fans.
Hopefully, whoever takes over will do better than their predecessor. Because the Senators don’t need to be the
