Staff Grade: B-; Reader Grade: B-
The staff and readers agreed on Eller’s grade this year, after the 37-year-old Dane did just about what was expected of him in his first and probably only season with the Senators.
Ottawa signed Eller to a one-year contract last offseason, clearly hoping he could provide depth and a veteran presence. In the end, he didn’t contribute much, with 5 goals and 10 assists in 68 games, but he wasn’t a negative to his team, either.
Lars Eller’s 2025-26 season was simply fine. He played almost exclusively on the fourth line. Travis Green mostly trusted him in defensive situations, although not usually against particularly difficult competition, and he handled them well enough. His line didn’t get much going when they were on the ice, and they were a bit of a liability, but not so much that it was really noticeable.
Eller’s underlying numbers this year were, in fact, so incredibly mid that it’s hard to draw any real conclusions about them. Natural Stat Trick says he had the second most rush attempts on the team, with 5, and gives him decent offensive numbers given his role and icetime. MoneyPuck gives him one of the worst expected goals share on the team, which means that the team was giving up more scoring chances than they were creating when he was on the ice, at a higher rate than with anyone else on the ice.
He generally had some of the worst numbers on the team, but those numbers still weren’t bad. A chart that illustrates this well is Hockeyviz’s With or Without chart, which shows how the team did with each player on the ice. You want players to be in the top right corner, because that shows that the team is creating a lot of chances and not giving much up defensively. Eller is one of only three Sens players on the wrong side of the red line, which is not good, but he’s right on the edge of the line, at a perfectly acceptable spot for a fourth liner.
Another hockeyviz chart suggests that Eller was basically an offensive black hole when he was on the ice. Just look at the amount of blue on the first chart, which shows how many expected goals the Sens had with Eller on the ice, compared to the second one, which shows the same metric without Eller. For offensive zone charts, blue is very bad, because it means the team created fewer expected goals than they should have.
The good news is that the fourth liner didn’t make many big, noticeable mistakes this year, which probably contributed to him getting a B- instead of a lower grade. He didn’t have many giveaways or penalty minutes, and the team didn’t give up much with him (or anyone else) on the ice. He even showed flashes of offensive skill from time to time:
Lars Eller, you’re a baaaaad man with that feed 🤯🤯#GoSensGo pic.twitter.com/82PLzjqEdy
— Ottawa Senators (@Senators) October 24, 2025
He generally passed the eye test, in the sense that he wasn’t noticeably bad, which is pretty much what you want from a fourth liner.
Overall, Eller was a perfectly fine addition to Ottawa’s bottom six. They could have done better, but they also could have done worse. Unfortunately for the 37-year-old centre, it doesn’t sound like the Sens plan on bringing him back next season, so this year will probably stand as his only stint in Ottawa.