Meet the player who is the key to the Ottawa Senators' future

Twenty-five minutes a night against the NHL’s best superstars? That’s nothin’. Not when you’ve spent entire days fighting 200-pound fish.

That, Jake Sanderson says, is truly exhausting and thrilling work. He tried it last offseason when he took a trip to the Florida Keys. Catching tarpon is no joke. They’re not the type of fish you bring home and eat. They’re so prehistorically big and strong, so known for their thrashing and leaping ability, that deep-sea adventurers attempt to catch and release them to prove their mettle.

Are you picturing Robert Shaw, strapped into a harness aboard The Orca in Jaws? Same here. It’s not quite that hardcore, Sanderson explains, but it’s physical business trying to catch tarpon, which can weigh up to 280 pounds. He estimates the ones he battled were 150 pounds each.

“You fight it for an hour and a half,” Sanderson said. “You don’t strap in. You just jam your pole into your stomach so it doesn’t run off on you. I couldn’t believe it, but it was so much fun. I was tired at the end. I caught three, and it took six hours.”

Once you understand what Sanderson’s idea of fun is, it makes more sense that he has the endurance to play almost half of every game manning the point for the Ottawa Senators, not even 90 games into his NHL career. Shutdown work? He wants it. Penalty kill? Sure. Power play? Yes, please. What’s the Jedi mantra about bringing balance to The Force again? He tells Daily Faceoff he craves balance in his on-ice deployment, that playing in one situation feeds him into the other. He believes he’s a better defender when he’s driving offense and vice-versa.

Watching Sanderson over the course of a game, he feels omnipresent, like he’s out there on virtually every shift, using his flawless skating and long reach to thwart plays. And that’s because he is out there. Just 12 games into this young season, Sanderson has already logged more than 25 minutes on five different occasions, shouldering a heavy workload for a 21-year-old as the Senators try to stay afloat in the Atlantic Division minus injured top-four blueliners Thomas Chabot and (until Thursday) Artem Zub. The forwards Sanderson has faced more than any other so far this season? The Nikita Kucherov line, the Alex Ovechkin line and the Sidney Crosby line. In 18 minutes with Sanderson out at 5-on-5 in two games versus the NHL’s leading scorer in Kucherov, the Sens have more than double the shots and chances the Lightning have.

“He’s nasty,” said star Ottawa center Tim Stutzle. “He’s so fun to watch. I haven’t really seen a guy that young come into the league and be able to just shut everybody down and play as hard as he does every night.”

How does Sanderson handle such responsibility when he’s barely gotten used to playing pro hockey?

Let’s get back to those giant fish. Over the course of his life, Sanderson has built an incredibly active, almost swashbuckling lifestyle. He grew up the son of a 355-goal scorer in longtime NHLer Geoff Sanderson, but while Jake remembers trips to NHL dressing rooms as a kid, Geoff’s career was nearing its end when Jake was born. Most of his greatest childhood memories came growing up in Whitefish, Montana. The Sanderson family was big on the outdoors. As Geoff Sanderson tells Daily Faceoff, he wanted his three sons, Ben, Jake and Sawyer, to grow up well-rounded, exposed to many different pursuits before they chose their life paths.

So does that mean Jake grew up a survivalist? Could he make it on that reality show "Alone"?

“To survive? I could probably find a way,” Jake said, tongue in cheek. “I feel like my dad’s definitely a different level than me. He’ll go hunting and he’ll just be in the middle of nowhere for a week. I’m not a big hunter myself, but I’ll definitely go camping, fishing.”

Most of all, Jake loved to ski. He was gifted on the slopes, too, especially when it came to jumps, spins and tricks, Geoff says, It was such a serious passion that Jake says it would’ve been his alternate career pursuit had he not gone the hockey route. He misses it dearly but refuses to risk doing it during his playing career. He settles for hiking the vacated hills during the off months after the snow melts.

“You don’t want to accidentally tweak something when you’re skiing,” he said. “It’s not the best look. It’s tough, but at the same time, you’re living your dream and you never want it to end.”

The path to living that hockey dream didn’t initially point precisely to where Jake is today. He was a goalie. Not in the cliched sense that many current NHLers donned the pads for a game at five years old. No, he was serious about it for several years.

“When I was younger, probably 10 through 13, I did really want to be a goalie,” Jake said.  “Whenever we played road hockey or mini sticks, or any chance on the (outdoor rink), I’d put on the pads, I’d be the first one.”

“He actually was a really good youth goalie, whether that was on the ice, in the soccer net or playing mini sticks,” Geoff said. “It’s just being an athlete and the good-eye hand-eye co-ordination.”

Jake jokes that he wonders if his parents saw a hole in his game that destined him to fail as a netminder, but the truth, Geoff says, is that after years of coaching youth hockey, he couldn’t stomach the idea of being a goalie parent lugging the equipment around.

Still, the years as a goalie arguably added something to Jake’s considerable toolbox. He’s a prolific shot blocker now, leading the Senators in that stat since debuting in the NHL last season, and it’s possible that years of stopping pucks in a mask hardwired him not to fear them.

“Honestly I don’t even know,” he said with a laugh. “Pucks hit me and I don’t even notice.”

The most prominent element in Jake’s toolbox, of course, is his skating. In NHL Edge’s data, he ranks fourth among defensemen in max speed this season, is tied for second in bursts of 22 mph or more and leads the league in bursts of 20 mph or more. His explosive footwork was forged in childhood, no doubt. He had the genetic advantage given his dad was one of the best skaters in the sport during his career, but environment contributed as much as heredity. As Jake remembers it, Geoff championed power skating and edge work and had Jake and his brothers doing it for months in the summer, “barely touching pucks.”

But to consider Jake’s skating a carbon copy of his dad’s is to oversimplify.

“I’m not taking credit for his skating,” Geoff said. “He really worked on it. His skating ability comes a lot with flexibility of his hips and his ankles, and I never had that. I was straightaway north-south speed. He’s got east-west, long stride and flexible hips and ankles.”

Despite the projectable 6-foot-2 frame the phenomenal skating, the high hockey IQ and NHL pedigree, Sanderson didn’t fully understand how well his traits came together until he showed up at USA Hockey’s National Team Development program as a 16-year-old. It was then, once he was competing and excelling against other projected first-rounders, that he says he finally understood he had potential to be a pro.

After that, it didn’t take long for him to rocket up draft boards. Even when the Senators grabbed him at fifth overall in 2020, two picks after Stutzle, they were applauded for landing a future all-around shutdown horse. It was specifically the balance in his profile that made him such a promising prospect.

“There were different types of defensemen that I didn’t like playing against,” Geoff said. “And a lot of them I would call middleweight defensemen. Whether it was Gary Galley or Don Sweeney in Boston, you couldn’t get around them, they would hit you physically, and I couldn’t get away from them. So I didn’t like playing against those guys. But there are other D-men too that have such a good stick on puck and good hand-eye that you try and short-chip it by them and they can bat it out of the air. Or you think you’ve got a step on them and all of a sudden their stick is on the puck and you’re pokechecked. I think Jake is that kind of player where he’s just got an annoyingly good stick and can bat pucks out of the air. And you can’t really beat him wide with speed.”

There’s a maturity Sanderson brings as a player. You see it on the ice in his hockey sense. And off it, his dad explains, Jake is a meticulous preparer, treating hockey as a 24/7 science, whether it’s nutrition or wearing compression boots on his legs for recovery. Maybe that very-adult approach is why, after he played just 77 NHL games, the Senators raised many an eyebrow with a projection-based contract paying him $8.05 million annually for eight years beginning next season. How could they be so sure so soon about someone so unproven? That commitment meant the world to him.

“Obviously management’s changed (with GM Pierre Dorion fired last week), but I’ve been blessed and grateful to be in this situation,” Jake said. “I wasn’t really thinking about it too much this summer. I only played one year, but I knew I worked hard and was trying to do all the right things and I was only going to get better from there. It just happened and I’ve been pretty lucky.”

The Sens have made a point of projecting out their young stars, paying them more than they’re worth in the early going in hopes that they will become bargains over the course of their deals. It remains to be seen if injury-prone Chabot will make good on his $8 million AAV, but Stutzle’s and Brady Tkachuk’s contracts look like steals already, and Sanderson’s could soon trend that way quickly, too.

The question is whether the team will begin trending upward just like its individual stars have. The fact Ottawa went the first five seasons of Tkachuk’s career without a trip to the playoffs was one of the many reasons Dorion lost his job. The rebuild was supposed to end. The contention window was supposed to open.

In this young season, the banged-up Senators haven’t met expectations, sitting last in the Atlantic Division. But Sanderson believes in the core – and he goes out of his way to praise the coaching staff for its ability to instill game plans, a relevant piece of information given the heat on D.J. Smith right now. The franchise displayed faith in Sanderson with the contract, but the faith went both ways.

“You’re not going to sign in a place where you don’t believe,” Jake said.

Whatever happens next, Jake Sanderson will be a big part of it. He may already be Ottawa’s best defenseman and one of its three most important players. While no one has doubted the franchise’s long-term forecast for flashy offense, the key to becoming a real threat in the Eastern Conference is to do a better job keeping pucks away from, and out of, their own net. It’s all about balance, remember? And no one is more important to achieving it than Sanderson.