OTTAWA — Drake Batherson wants to stay in Ottawa. The Senators want him to stay. The problem is that the clock is about to remove one of the most valuable bargaining chips from the table.
At the Senators’ annual charity golf event Tuesday, Batherson made his position clear: he wants to sign an extension before training camp, and keeping the negotiations moving is a priority. General manager Steve Staios offered the corresponding message from the organization, calling Batherson an important player and making clear that Ottawa wants him to remain a Senator for the long term.
Both sides agree on the destination. They have not yet agreed on the price of getting there.
Batherson, 27, is entering the final season of the six-year contract he signed in 2021, which carries an average annual value of $4.95 million. He will become an unrestricted free agent next July. But the immediate deadline comes sooner.
Six days after Tuesday, on September 15, the eight-year extension window under the existing collective bargaining agreement closes. Any extension agreed upon after that date can run for no more than seven years.
For Batherson and Ottawa, that makes the timing more than a procedural detail. One additional season of contract term — along with the salary structure attached to it — will no longer be available once the deadline passes.
Batherson’s bargaining position is also being shaped by the strongest offensive season of his career. He scored 33 goals and 71 points last season, both career highs, finishing second on Ottawa behind Tim Stutzle’s 83 points.
Those numbers give Batherson a compelling case heading into his age-27 season. If he reaches unrestricted free agency next July, comparable players such as Alex Tuch and Adrian Kempe provide a framework for contracts in the $10 million-to-$11 million annual range. Ottawa’s reported opening position has been lower, and the two sides were described as distant as recently as August.
That gap is what made Tuesday’s appearances notable.
Batherson did not publicly turn the negotiations into leverage. He did not point toward free agency, mention other potential destinations or use the approaching CBA deadline as a negotiating weapon. He simply said he wants to remain in Ottawa.
Staios was similarly direct. He said the Senators want to keep Batherson and confirmed that negotiations are continuing, without disclosing the financial terms.
The public message from both sides is therefore unusually aligned. The disagreement, for now, is happening behind closed doors — with the contract clock steadily narrowing the options available to both of them.
What happened between August’s distance and Tuesday’s alignment is not publicly known. The numbers may have moved. The parties may have simply decided that the pre-training-camp moment demanded a public signal, regardless of where the gap stands. Either way, the public posture shifted from reported stalemate to stated intent, and that shift matters for a franchise that needs its players to want to be there.
Ottawa has had an uneven few summers on that front. The Senators lost key pieces to free agency in recent seasons, and Tim Stutzle’s eight-year contract extension was the organizational statement that the core would remain intact. Batherson is the next piece in that project, the right wing who provides the secondary scoring that makes Ottawa’s offense function as more than one line.
That convergence is harder than the public statements make it sound. Players entering their prime years in an environment of rising salary caps routinely receive more on the open market than their current teams offer in extensions. Batherson has the leverage of a contract year, a career-high production season, and a July free agency date that would give him a full offseason to test the market. The Senators have six days to make the offer compelling enough that none of that needs to happen.
The players who signed eight-year extensions with their current teams this summer did so because the certainty of a long deal outweighed the risk of free agency. The NHL’s CBA deadline pushed players and teams across the league toward resolution on timelines they would not otherwise have chosen. Batherson has not made that calculation yet. What Tuesday demonstrated is that he wants to make it in Ottawa’s favor.
In a week when Sidney Crosby was telling Pittsburgh he did not know how many more seasons he had left, Batherson was doing the opposite: a player at the beginning of his prime years, saying publicly that he wants to be somewhere specific, asking only that the organization meet him there on the number.
Staios has managed this negotiation without the public friction that has defined other extension conversations this summer. No reports of competing offers that have stalled talks. No suggestions from the player’s camp that the team is not serious. What has been described is a financial gap, the normal, boring, consequential kind that resolves itself, or does not, when one side or both decides the trade-off is worth it.
Six days is not a long time. But it is also not nothing. The Senators have a general manager, a player who said publicly that he wants to stay, and the straightforward problem of closing a number. In a league where this summer has been defined by franchises that cannot get out of their own way, Ottawa is at least playing the right game.
Whether they win it before September 15 is what nobody at that golf event could answer Tuesday.
