The Ottawa Senators' decision to trade down during the first round of the 2025 NHL Draft was, as everyone likes to say now, a nice piece of business.
GM Steve Staios traded the Senators' 21st overall pick to the Nashville Predators' for Nashville's 23rd and 67th picks. Basically, he got an early third-round draft pick for almost nothing. The only cost was waiting two more picks to get the player he was going to take anyway. Then, Staios flipped that third-round pick he got for almost nothing, along with a sixth-rounder, for Los Angeles Kings defenseman Jordan Spence.
With the pressure of the clock ticking down and top players quickly disappearing off the board, it's amazing that deals can get done at all. It would be intriguing to see all the inner workings and how a deal comes together in those circumstances.
The Senators announced on Monday that they'll be providing a behind-the-scenes look at the draft trade discussions that were going down in their NHL Draft Day war room 10 days ago in the premiere of season six of Breakaway. In the trailer they posted to social media today, you can hear a portion of the actual trade call between Staios and Nashville GM Barry Trotz, at least Staios' end of it.
The call that landed us the Sensler and then later Jordan Spence 📞
— Ottawa Senators (@Senators) July 7, 2025
Go behind the scenes of the draft night trade in the premiere of season six of Breakaway presented by @bell debuting this Wednesday 📺 pic.twitter.com/q9ScdQfSJc
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Presumably, there will be a lot more of that.
This year's draft was a unique one, sort of a throwback to COVID when big social gatherings were frowned upon. In what appeared to be a league-wide cost-cutting attempt, all teams drafted remotely from home. The Senators hockey operations team set up shop in the team dressing room, surrounded by the jerseys of many of their past first-round draft picks and made their selections remotely.
If you enjoyed the movie Draft Day with Kevin Costner, where much of the film takes place in the draft day war room of the Cleveland Browns, as Costner grinds out trades over the phone with rival GMs, you'll probably get a kick out of this episode. Mind you, no one in Ottawa gave up three years' worth of first-round draft picks like Costner did in the movie, which was a worse decision than plowing under his corn field.
It will be interesting to see how far inside the episode takes us, or whether they include the botched video conference call between the Sens brass and first-rounder Logan Hensler. When the audio didn't work and Sportsnet pulled the plug, owner Michael Andlauer looked disappointed on the video stream and probably had some things to say afterward.
The episode airs on Wednesday on the Sens YouTube channel.
By Steve Warne
The Hockey News/Ottawa
Image Credit: Kirby Lee-Imagn Images
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