Article content continued

Best of all, Chabot is not alone.

While The Hockey News ranked the 20-year-old defenceman as the No. 3-overall prospect in the NHL in its latest Future Watch magazine, Ottawa forwards Colin White (12th overall) and Logan Brown (14th) were also ranked in the top-15. The last time the Senators had something like this to be excited about was when Mika Zibanejad, Jakob Silfverberg and Patrick Wiercioch entered the league together in 2012.

Photo by Wayne Cuddington / Postmedia Network

For a team that was one win away from defeating the Pittsburgh Penguins and reaching the Stanley Cup final last year, it bodes well for the immediate and long-term future of the franchise.

“We were talking about it last night. It’s a good group of guys here,” said Brown, who was selected with the 11th overall pick in 2016. “Just in the skates before coming here, guys were saying they’ve never seen a rookie camp like this. Usually there’s a bunch of fillers, but now there’s a whole crop of guys who are really talented and have a chance to play in the NHL one day.”

It’s easy — and maybe a tad unfair — to look at Ottawa’s trio of prospects and compare them to what Toronto had a year ago in Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner and William Nylander. After all, Matthews was a No. 1 overall pick and at this time last year Nylander and Marner were ranked as the No. 2 and No. 3 best prospects in the NHL. But the success of the Leafs’ rookies, which also included Connor Brown, Nikita Zaitsev and Zach Hyman, is not lost on the Senators’ next wave of youngsters.