Senators' Brady Tkachuk Responds to Rumors After Absence from Exit Interviews

The Ottawa Senators wrapped their season, getting swept in a first-round exit, dropping four straight games while scoring just five total goals against the Carolina Hurricanes.

The Senators' collapse marked a second consecutive early playoff departure after last year's first-round loss to the Toronto Maple Leafs, and it quickly shifted the attention toward the offseason.

Senators captain Brady Tkachuk was not present for the team’s exit interviews on Monday, and that generated some buzz around his long-term commitment to the franchise.

Tkachuk, however, was away attending to family matters and the birth of his second child. That didn't stop the speculation about his future with the organization, and Tkachuk finally addressed the rumors on Wednesday morning.

When asked directly about that speculation, Tkachuk pushed back on the narrative once again.

“I feel like I’ve answered this hundreds of times. I feel like I’ve never shown or said any of those things,” Tkachuk said. “Honestly, it’s just getting frustrating. It’s becoming a distraction because I have been fully committed to this team, to the city, and it’s just becoming a distraction, frustrating to deal with.”

Tkachuk scored 22 goals and 59 points in 60 regular-season games after returning from early-season thumb surgery. That said, the captain failed to score even a single point in the playoffs.

General manager Steve Staios also dismissed any trade speculation earlier in the week, with Tkachuk under contract (seven years, $57.56 million) through June 2028.

“It’s nonsense is what [the speculation] is,” Staios said. “It depends on what link and what fan base it’s coming from. I don’t read it, I don’t bother with it. We know what we have internally, we have great communication with our players. We really don’t focus on it.

“There’s nothing that we have talked about or thought about where that conversation should happen.”

Despite the 4-0 elimination, Tkachuk still saw progress in the Senators' 2026 season.

“Everything is very dampened by how the playoffs went, but I think in the grand scheme of things, there’s a lot that we dealt with as a group and how we handled the adversity,” Tkachuk said.