Alex DeBrincat is settling into life in Ottawa: ‘I feel good right now. I feel comfortable’

At his introductory press conference in September, Alex DeBrincat admitted he was getting used to some nuances of living in Canada for the first time in his life.

“The only thing is the trash only comes every other week,” DeBrincat said with a laugh on September 7.

Now four months later, the Michigan native is still adjusting to life north of the border.

Take his game day routine, for example.

“I get home, I sit on the couch and I drink a ginger ale,” says DeBrincat. “That settles the stomach. And then I get a good nap after that.”

DeBrincat is a creature of habit who only drinks Canada Dry ginger ale. Ironically, despite the brand name of his favourite ginger ale, he’s having a hard time buying them in bulk in Ottawa.

“It’s hard to find in stores in a pack. So I have to buy them in singles,” says DeBrincat.

And he admits he was a bit thrown off when reading the Canada Dry label for the first time in this country.

“It’s all in millilitres up here — not in ounces,” adds DeBrincat. ” So I had to look up to see what the right one was.”

Without missing a beat, DeBrincat can now tell you that a 500-millilitre bottle translates to 16.9 fluid ounces — which is the preferred size he drinks before his pregame nap.

Like other American-born players on the team, DeBrincat laments the fact that one of his favourite chain restaurants has only one location at the Rideau Centre in Ottawa.

“It’s hard to get Chipotle here. You have to go all the way downtown,” says DeBrincat.

But these minor food and drink-related hiccups aside, DeBrincat is certainly embracing life in Canada.

The speedometer on his vehicle is now set to kilometres.

“And with Fahrenheit to Celsius, I’m getting better at that,” says DeBrincat. “It just takes some time.”

And that’s probably an accurate description of DeBrincat’s transition to Ottawa, too. It’s just taken some time for the two-time 40-goal scorer to find his niche as a member of the Ottawa Senators.

When you listen to DeBrincat speak, he sounds genuinely content to be living in Ottawa. He’s a mild-manner, low-key player who doesn’t seem like he wants to find the spotlight. He often jokes that he’s a homebody who doesn’t mind living a quiet lifestyle in a place like Ottawa.

“I don’t really do too much. I’m usually at home anyways,” DeBrincat says. “And overall, I feel good right now. I feel comfortable and I have fun at the rink every day. So it’s been good.”

After a torrid month of December — in which he scored seven goals and 19 points in 14 games — DeBrincat is now on pace to match a career-high 78 points this season. And he credits his success to playing with Shane Pinto and Drake Batherson on a regular basis over the past several weeks.

“I’ve had consistent linemates, which is nice. You gain chemistry with them and you know what’s coming each night and how to play,” says DeBrincat. “Just that familiarity is a lot easier than at the beginning of the year, when everyone is new and you have to gain chemistry with everyone.”

DeBrincat has also found a home on Ottawa’s top power-play unit. When the Senators started the season by keeping their original power-play unit from last season together — featuring Brady Tkachuk, Tim Stützle, Josh Norris, Drake Batherson and Thomas Chabot — it forced DeBrincat to be placed on the second unit. But injuries and underwhelming output from the power play forced the Senators to change things up in November. And since November 25, DeBrincat is seventh among all NHL players with 12 power-play points.

His shooting percentage is now creeping back up to around 10 percent on the season. While it’s still below his career normal of 15.5 percent, he appears to be gaining confidence with each passing month.

As DeBrincat’s production returns to its normal rate, the conversation around his next contract has started to gain momentum among Ottawa fans. During that introductory press conference in September, DeBrincat suggested that both sides needed some time to become acclimated with each other.

“I think we’re just going to start by playing it out and see how it works,” said DeBrincat on September 7. “I’m obviously open to anything. I’m excited to play with these guys. I think both sides want to see how it works. And I know they’ve got a lot of goal scorers, so we’ll see how that works.”

Drake Batherson, Tim Stützle and Alex DeBrincat. (Chris Tanouye / Getty Images)

On Wednesday, DeBrincat sounded like the status quo prevailed on that front.

“Nothing has really changed. Still taking it day by day, just trying to focus on hockey rather than things outside of hockey,” said DeBrincat. “I keep that stuff to other people and let them deal with it. I think it’s kind of out of my mind and trying to just focus on playing well. Getting back in the playoff race, I think that’s the most important thing.”

The Senators have one more year of team control over DeBrincat, but would need to qualify him at a $9 million salary to retain his rights for the 2023-24 campaign. The assumption is the Senators would like some degree of control over DeBrincat beyond next season — otherwise, they enter the dangerous territory they navigated with Mark Stone in the 2018-19 season. When you have a player in the final year of his contract, you run the risk of walking him right into unrestricted free agency.

But this would be a different feel than the Stone conversation, considering the Senators are in a much different place in their competitive cycle. Pierre Dorion has always subscribed to the theory from longtime baseball executive Dave Dombrowski that teams need to be aggressive when they make that shift from a rebuilding team to a contender.

“I don’t recall if he was with the Tigers or the Red Sox at the time, but he said ‘Great prospects are nice, but they’re not all going to play. And at some point in time, you have to move some of them to hit the next step,’” Dorion said in May of 2021. “I don’t know Dave Dombrowski, but I respected that quote and it’s something that always stuck with me.”

And that’s exactly what the Senators did when they traded for DeBrincat last summer. They parted with three draft picks — including their No. 7 selection — in order to land the highly coveted winger. It was a clear signal that the club was ready to start competing, so to turn around and trade DeBrincat for a package of youthful assets would seem counterproductive.

Besides, looking at Ottawa’s prospect cupboard, they don’t have anybody who really projects as a high-end, skilled forward that could replace DeBrincat on a cheaper deal. Players like Ridly Greig, Tyler Boucher and Zack Ostapchuk all project as future NHLers, but none of them carry the offensive ceiling of a player like DeBrincat.

The Senators will likely have to make DeBrincat the highest-paid player in franchise history if they want to retain his services. Considering his established resume, it seems plausible that DeBrincat’s next deal might eclipse the $8.35 million AAV carried by Stützle’s new contract.

The concern from some Ottawa fans is that another contract in that range could hamper the club’s ability to add other key pieces. The Senators still need new contracts for Jake Sanderson and Shane Pinto. There is the never-ending talk about adding a top-four defenceman. Plus, it feels like their goaltending situation is far from decided.

Next season will absolutely be a challenge for Ottawa on this front. The Senators only have roughly $17 million in salary cap space according to CapFriendly. They are carrying a significant amount of dead money on the books, paying money to the likes of Matt Murray, Bobby Ryan, Colin White and Michael Del Zotto. Plus, they have the final year of Nikita Zaitsev’s $4.5 million to navigate as well.

So the idea of DeBrincat taking up roughly half of that $17 million in available space seems a little daunting when you consider the Senators would also need to find room to give new contracts to Pinto, Erik Brannstrom and potentially Cam Talbot.

Talbot, for the record, told reporters on Wednesday that he is willing to sign an extension in Ottawa beyond this season, but he conceded the Senators are in control of that situation.

“Hopefully something comes to fruition at some point. We’d love to stay here. It’s a great group and we want to be part of it longer,” Talbot said. “So the ball is in their court at this point.”

But if we shift ahead to the 2024-25 season and beyond, the salary cap situation theoretically opens up for the Senators. Ottawa already has many key players signed to long-term contracts, but they still have roughly $33 million in available cap space for that season according to CapFriendly.

This table above shows that Ottawa has seven forwards under contract, but there is a good chance they could see players like Greig, Boucher and Ostapchuk in the NHL on entry-level deals. A player like Parker Kelly can probably be retained at a team-friendly contract in the neighbourhood of $1 million. In other words, there should be room for DeBrincat to slide in here — even if his cap hit comes in around $9 million. The Senators would still need to sign Pinto to a new deal, although he might be a candidate for a bridge contract coming out of his entry level.

One thing Dorion has adamantly stated is that the club would have to use bridge contracts on certain players to try and get them to the next phase in their competitive cycle.

Sanderson will be the wild card in all of this. He might fetch a bridge deal similar to what Rasmus Dahlin received in Buffalo, a three-year contract worth roughly $6 million per season. But maybe the Senators have seen enough out of Sanderson that they want to make him a bigger deal right out of his entry-level contract. They can technically sign him to his contract extension for the 2024-25 season as early as this summer. So let’s play with the remaining cap space for that 2024-25 season and see if we can round out Ottawa’s roster.

This roster above comes out to roughly $87 million — which would be right around the projected $87.5 million salary cap for that 2024-25 season.

But there are a few things to note here:

• For the purposes of this projection, we’re giving Sanderson a contract that matches Chabot’s. And we’re also adding another top-four defenceman whose AAV would match Artem Zub’s.

• Shane Pinto’s $3 million contract is admittedly some guesswork. Given his age and career arc, there aren’t too many comparables for him right now, so a bridge deal in that $2.5 to $3.5 million range seems like a safe estimate. It might be a lot easier to project Pinto’s next contract when his rookie season is complete and we can have a little more of a sample size to work with on him. But it does feel like he has some significant upside too.

• There are other players like Angus Crookshank, Tyler Kleven and Roby Järventie who could certainly push their way into the equation on cheap, entry-level deals.

• This projection doesn’t factor in a goalie beyond Anton Forsberg and Mads Søgaard either, so if Ottawa wanted to upgrade that position, they would theoretically have to pay more money.

It will be awfully tight against the salary cap ceiling, but there is a way for them to lock up their key players to fair market contracts. Dorion has done a nice job in keeping the long-term contracts under $9 million per season for the majority of his core, but an educated guess says he might have to go there to keep DeBrincat on an extension.

When you listen to DeBrincat speak, he sounds like a player who is genuinely intrigued by the idea of staying with this group and in this market for the long term. And when you crunch the numbers, we can see a path here for the Senators to keep DeBrincat in the fold for the long haul.

(Top photo: Richard A. Whittaker / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)