The Ottawa Senators are a fascinating team right now. They have a ton of exciting young players up and down their lineup. They’re a team that seems on the cusp of breaking through. But they seem to lack a critical mass of talent to do that.

So when you hear that the Calgary Flames could be closing in on a trade involving Rasmus Andersson, when you look around the league, the prospect of him landing with the Ottawa Senators seems pretty tantalizing.

The Senators have a really fun blueline group on paper. When you look at their current pairings at Daily Faceoff, their top pairing has Jake Sanderson and Artem Zub, while their second pairing features Thomas Chabot and, currently, Nick Jensen. That pairing is fine, but Chabot is a really talented player while Jensen is rock-solid, but at age 35 his best years are arguably behind him. (Tyler Kleven and Jordan Spence seem well-suited to their third-pairing gigs right now.)

If you’re the Senators, the idea of adding a player like Andersson, a right-shot defender that can play in any game situation and help ease the burden on special teams on their top guys, is definitely appealing.

So what might it cost, and why might the Flames be interested?

We’ll turn the clock back and use the Elias Lindholm trade with the Vancouver Canucks as a bit of a template.

According to PuckPedia, the Senators have $5.68 million in cap space available right now. They could take on all of Andersson’s $4.55 million cap hit, but it would make things a bit tight for them cap-wise, and it would make it tough for them to do much else prior to the trade deadline.

The Flames have oodles of cap space and could use someone to help insulate their younger defenders for the rest of the season. They could also use more draft picks and some right shot forwards for their prospect group.

So here’s what we would propose:

The Senators upgrade Jensen’s second-pairing slot at just a $500,000 net cap hit gain, which still leaves them with over $5 million of space to upgrade other spots of their lineup. And they do so at the cost of a first-round pick in 2027, one of their depth prospects, and one of their three third-rounders in this year’s draft (they have their own, Washington’s and Florida’s). The third-rounder is a premium for the Flames “settling” for a lower-tier prospect.

We could see something coming together that looks something like this.

This article is a presentation of Platinum Mitsubishi, family owned and operated by lifelong Calgarians. Home of the industry-leading 10-year, 160,000-kilometre powertrain warranty. Check out their showroom at 2720 Barlow Trail NE or online at www.mitsu.ca.