Carter Yakemchuk, the Ottawa Senators’ seventh overall pick in the 2024 NHL Draft, made his professional hockey debut on Saturday night, playing his first regular-season game with the American Hockey League’s Belleville Senators. Yakemchuk quarterbacked the power play, didn’t get on the scoreboard, had one shot, and was a minus-3 in a 5-2 loss to Lehigh Valley.
In some ways, the game resembled the parent club’s 6-2 loss Saturday to the Florida Panthers. The B-Sens fell behind early and certainly didn’t get much of a goaltending performance. Mads Sogaard allowed 4 goals on the Phantoms’ first 9 shots. At least Sogaard stopped the bleeding after that, but too much damage had already been done.
In a conversation with David Foot from the Belleville Sens Entertainment Network, Yakemchuk – always a young man of few words – says overall, he felt pretty comfortable in his first game.
Yakemchuk is regarded as the Senators’ top prospect and hopes to get his scoring swagger back in the AHL this season. He was drafted as an offensive defenceman, scoring 30 goals and 71 points in his draft year, but since then, the organization has been asking him to focus more on the defensive side of the game.
He is a defenseman after all, so it’s not an unreasonable request. But it’s impossible to ignore that his big numbers – the ones that made him such a high NHL Draft pick to begin with – have tailed off.
The Senators aren’t concerned about it, though. And why would they be? It’s way too early for that.
“Carter’s continued to grow and develop,” Sens GM Steve Staios said on the first day of training camp. “I think you can look at his season last year in the WHL and be a little bit misled by the point totals, but there are certain areas of his games that he started to round out and pay more attention to.
“It’s always difficult for an offensive guy, that talented of an offensive player at that level, because that’s really what you gravitate to, because you can dominate the game at that level. But we were pleased with his progression.”
For the second straight season, Yakemchuk was caught up in last week’s final wave of NHL roster cuts. But unlike last year’s camp, when he led all Senators in preseason scoring with 7 points in 4 games, he failed to get on the scoreboard in 4 games this season.
The Sens seem to be using the ‘better to be overripe than underdeveloped’ tactic they decided on with Tyler Kleven. Staios admitted that Kleven could have played in the NHL before last season when he became a full-time player. But the Sens had Jake Sanderson, Thomas Chabot, and Jakob Chychrun, so there was absolutely no rush.
The same is true now for Yakemchuk, who’s blocked by the new blue line surplus on the right side. At the moment, through two games, Jordan Spence can’t even get into the lineup – and that’s a young guy with 180 NHL games under his belt. He was a regular on the LA Kings the past two years, a team that finished last season with the second-best goals against in the NHL. So there’s zero need to rush Yakemchuk either.
Spence and Nick Jensen are both free agents next summer, and so the kid’s path could clear up quickly if the Sens decide he’s ready.
In the meantime, with Yakemchuk’s pro career officially nunderway, he’ll be a fascinating player to monitor as he continues to try to assimilate the defensive level required at the NHL level without fully sacrificing the swashbuckler offensive style that got Sens amateur scouts so excited in the first place.
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