Senators recall top defenseman prospect

The Ottawa Senators announced that defensemen Tyler Kleven and Nikolas Matinpalo have been recalled from the club’s AHL affiliate, the Belleville Senators.

These moves have been made in the aftermath of two significant injuries that have hit the Senators’ blue line. Yesterday, it was announced that Thomas Chabot would miss significant time with a fractured hand, while defenseman Erik Brännström also suffered an injury as well.

In a corresponding move to create the necessary cap space for these recalls, CapFriendly reports that Chabot has been placed on long-term injured reserve, creating $8M in LTIR relief for Ottawa. 

The result of this absence: the Senators have a massive number of minutes that need to be filled on their blue line.

Chabot is the club’s most highly-utilized defenseman, soaking up time at both even strength and on the power play. There’s no way what he offers the Senators can be truly replaced by any call-ups, although that’s not to say the Senators’ call-up options aren’t quality players in their own right.

Kleven, 21, is an expected call-up as he’s widely viewed as the top Senators defenseman in Belleville. The 21-year-old 2020 second-round pick got a small taste of life in the NHL at the end of last season, skating in eight games for the Senators after the conclusion of his three-year NCAA career at the University of North Dakota.

The six-foot-four, 200-pound stay-at-home blue liner excels in his own end and will be able to offer size, physicality, and shutdown ability to head coach D.J. Smith.

As for Matinpalo, he’s a player with a very different background and someone who has taken a very different path to receiving this call-up. Like Kleven, Matinpalo also offers above-average size (he’s six-foot-three, 207 pounds) as well as defensive responsibility.

But unlike Kleven, Matinpalo’s standing in the Senators organization isn’t backed by a valuable draft pick they invested in him.

The 25-year-old wasn’t a high draft pick like Kleven, instead he’s an undrafted player who only joined the organization this past summer, signing his one-year entry-level deal after establishing himself in his home country’s Finnish Liiga for three seasons with Ässät Pori.

As a result, this recall represents a massive opportunity for Matinpalo. With Chabot injured, the right side of the Senators’ defense is relatively wide open. Artem Zub is still dealing with an upper-body injury and did not travel with the Senators for their two-game road trip.

As a result, Matinpalo is positioned to make his NHL debut against the Pittsburgh Penguins tonight, and he has just two healthy players ahead of him on the team’s right-shot depth chart: Travis Hamonic and Jacob Bernard-Docker.

With some strong play as well as some luck, Matinpalo stands a chance of playing a bigger role in the NHL than anyone could have anticipated, at least for one game, which would be a major opportunity for him to showcase his skills.

While these Senators’ injuries are hardly ideal, they do offer opportunities for two less-experienced Senators defensemen to get into NHL contests.

Ottawa’s competitive chances have undoubtedly been reduced by these injuries, but the silver lining of this situation is that the Senators now has the chance to evaluate the progress of two younger blue-liners at the NHL level.