The midnight deadline is not a press-conference talking point. It is the actual lever in Drake Batherson’s extension talks with Ottawa, and as of Monday morning the sides were still far enough apart that Pierre LeBrun’s league sources could describe the gap without hedging.
Batherson is entering the last year of a six-year deal that carries a $4.975 million cap hit. He put up 33 goals and 71 points in 79 games last season, career highs, and he led the Senators in scoring. League executives have already priced the open market at $10 million to $11 million per year. That is the real number sitting between the player and the club. Everything else is structure.
Steve Staios has been clear in public. “There’s no secret that we want to get Drake,” the GM said earlier this summer, and at the Senators Foundation golf event he added the only honest line left in these negotiations: “until we get there, we’re not there yet.” Batherson has said the same thing from his side. He wants to stay and finish his career in Ottawa. Mutual interest is not the problem. AAV and term are the problem, and the new CBA turns the term question into a hard stop.
The Eight-Year Window Is the Whole Fight
Under the old rules, a club can still lock a player for eight years. Once the new CBA flips, re-signings drop to a seven-year maximum. Batherson’s camp is interested in eight years and will take six or seven only if the average annual value moves. That is not posturing. It is leverage with a timestamp. He also does not want to negotiate once the season starts, a stance pending UFAs take every year and one Igor Shesterkin famously held before eventually signing in December. One phone call can change that. The calendar cannot.
The comps are already on the table. Alex Tuch got eight years at roughly $10.5 million AAV. Adrian Kempe signed eight years at $10.625 million. Batherson’s production last season sits right next to those deals. Ottawa’s current top salaries are Tim Stützle at $8.35 million, Linus Ullmark at $8.25 million, and Jake Sanderson at $8.05 million. An extension in the $10.5–$11 million range makes Batherson the highest-paid player in franchise history. That is the sticker price of keeping a 28-year-old who just delivered his first 30-goal season and still has another year of club control before unrestricted free agency on July 1, 2027.
Post-Tkachuk, This Is the Retention Test
The Senators traded Brady Tkachuk to Florida earlier in the offseason after honoring a trade request. That move raised the cost of every remaining core piece. Batherson is no longer a secondary scoring winger on a nice deal. He is the forward you either lock in now or risk watching walk into a market that already has him between $10 million and $11 million. Bruce Garrioch’s sources put it cleanly back in July: the sides “aren’t close,” and “getting this new contract to a place where both sides are satisfied is viewed as difficult.” That assessment held through mid-September even as both sides kept talking.
The rising cap helps. It climbs to $104 million next season and is projected near $113.5 million the year after. Ottawa can absorb a top-of-roster AAV without breaking the structure around Stützle and Sanderson. What they cannot absorb is losing the eight-year hammer and then trying to renegotiate under a shorter max term while Batherson’s camp sits on a full year of UFA runway. The new CBA also tightens how front-loaded money and signing bonuses can be shaped. That is the same pressure creating movement in other RFA files around the league. Ottawa is simply later to the table with a player who already owns the leverage of pending unrestricted free agency.
I keep coming back to the production curve. In the last four seasons Batherson has scored 109 of his 149 career goals. He is not a one-year spike. He is a mid-prime scorer who just set career marks on a team that needs secondary offense after the captain left. The market already wrote the number. The only question left is whether Ottawa pays it before the rulebook changes the length of the check.
If this drags past the deadline, the Senators will still have Batherson for one more season at $4.975 million. That is the short-term comfort. The long-term risk is a seven-year max and a player who has already said he prefers the deal done before camp. Mutual desire does not close a $5 million-plus annual gap. The clock does. Ottawa either bridges it now or spends the year explaining why the highest-paid forward in franchise history never happened.
