Senators avoid paying the price of previous regime’s failures with adjusted draft-pick punishment

Welcome back to the first round of the 2026 NHL Entry Draft, Ottawa Senators! After the Senators’ 2026 first-round pick had been forfeited as punishment for Ottawa not disclosing the teams on Evgenii Dadonov’s no-trade list upon sending him to the Vegas Golden Knights, thereby spoiling a potential deal between Vegas and the Anaheim Ducks, the NHL has decided to give Ottawa the last pick in the first round at 32nd overall.

While the Senators’ natural first-round pick would almost certainly be higher than 32nd overall, Ottawa has to be thrilled to just be allowed back in the party after having been kicked out, even if they still have to pay a $1 million CAD fine. It seems the NHL decided to lessen its penalty on the Senators as the Dadonov incident occurred prior to the commencement of Ottawa’s current ownership group led by Michael Andlauer.

On Thursday’s episode of Daily Faceoff LIVE, hosts Tyler Yaremchuk and Matt Larkin were joined by The Fourth Period‘s David Pagnotta to discuss the NHL’s rationale for modifying the Senators’ punishment.

Tyler Yaremchuk: What do you make of the NHL reversing this decision? The punishment felt stiff at the time, but are other teams raising an eyebrow at this? What’s the feeling around the league?

David Pagnotta: I haven’t gotten that sense yet, that anybody’s up in arms over this. The Sens did a really good job in arguing that it was a past regime’s problem. It was the previous ownership group, the previous GM that screwed it up, and it’s their fault, not our fault.

Now, you still have to pay the price for what’s happened in the organization. You don’t just come into a new environment and everything is clean and you forget about your past. You still have to pay the price, and for them, it’s instead of drafting potentially 13th, 14th, 15th overall, they will draft 32nd overall, and they have to pay the $1 million fine, which by the way is in Canadian dollars, not U.S. dollars. It’s still a punishment, you still fall at the end of the draft. The way that they’re structuring this is they’re still going to part of the draft lottery. If they happen to win the lottery, then there’s a redraw, because they’re excempt. They can’t win it because they have the 32nd overall pick.

You can catch the full discussion and the rest of Thursday’s episode here…