The NHL’s Panthers, winners of the 2024 and 2025 Stanley Cups, are eagerly reloading after an unexpected retreat this past season, while the Senators are showing the heightened difficulty many of the league’s seven Canadian teams are having trying to compete.
Ottawa and Florida have completed a massive trade in which the Senators have dealt team captain Brady Tkachuk to the Panthers for a package of four draft picks. Two of those selections will be first-rounders in this weekend’s NHL draft in Buffalo, including the Nos. 9 and 25 picks. Ottawa will also receive a 2029 first-round pick that is top-10 protected, as well as a second-rounder next year.
Far from a standard offseason NHL trade, this particular deal is rife with far-reaching subplots. The Panthers are bringing together Tkachuk with his older brother, Matthew, who is already on the Florida roster. The franchise is also looking to get back to its winning ways after a budding NHL dynasty saw a series of injuries this past season result in Florida’s first non-playoff year since 2019.
“Brady is a dynamic competitor and one of the most physical and relentless forwards in the league,” said Panthers GM and hockey operations president Bill Zito. “A proven leader and exactly the type of player we want in our locker room, he strives to make everyone around him better.”
The two Tkachuk brothers also played together on the U.S. men’s national team that won gold at the Milan-Cortina Olympics earlier this year, as well as on the American team in 2025’s 4 Nations Face-Off.
Reboot in Ottawa
The Senators, meanwhile, are retooling, at least to some degree, after posting the franchise’s first back-to-back playoff campaigns since 2012–13. Brady Tkachuk had been the face of the franchise, but he is yet another player from a Canadian-based franchise that shifted to a contending one in the U.S. operating in a state with either a relatively low personal income tax or none at all. In this case, Tkachuk will be working in a state with no such tax.
Similar moves have been made in recent years by stars such as the Golden Knights’ Mitch Marner, Hurricanes’ Nikolaj Ehlers, and Wild’s Quinn Hughes. Jets goalie Connor Hellebuyck, a three-time Vezina Trophy winner, former league MVP, and a leader of that gold medal U.S. team in Italy, is similarly now the subject of trade rumors.
Brady Tkachuk had signaled he was not inclined to sign an extension with the Senators when his seven-year, $57.6 million deal made in 2021 expires in two years. That helped prompt Ottawa to pull the trigger now on a trade.
“This was not a decision we took lightly, but ultimately, we did what we felt was best for the long-term future of our hockey club,” said Senators GM Steve Staios. “We now possess cap space and draft capital and will be actively working to improve our roster.”
To that end, Staios said the Senators will be “active in the market” and that he has “no intention of taking a step back.”
The Senators, meanwhile, have been in the midst of a long-running effort to develop a new arena in downtown Ottawa, and will now do so without their biggest star.
Although the Panthers have much of their championship core locked up for multiple years, the team was able to absorb the financial implications of the Tkachuk trade thanks to a sharply rising NHL salary cap that will reach a record $104 million in the 2026–27 season.
