Senators plan home-opener tribute for Ray Emery, 20 years after the club’s Stanley Cup Final run

The Ottawa Senators will honor Ray Emery during the club’s home opener on Thursday night, marking the goaltender’s impact more than two decades after his team’s run to the Stanley Cup Final. Emery’s name has remained tied to the Senators’ breakthrough postseason in 2006-07, when Ottawa’s goaltending play carried it deep into the spring and into hockey’s championship series.

The tribute comes with a long look back at Emery’s relationship with the franchise. The Senators will recognize him 25 years after Ottawa drafted him, and also eight years after his death. The team is treating the home opener as a moment for remembrance and for connecting that 2006-07 playoff identity to a modern fan base that may know the story primarily through highlights and history.

Emery’s role in the 2006-07 run was defined by his work as the team’s primary goaltender during the postseason stretch that led to the Stanley Cup Final. In that capacity, he represented the kind of steady, high-leverage goaltending that can reshape a team’s ceiling, particularly in the late rounds when margins shrink and every save can carry equal weight with the next one.

From a franchise perspective, the tribute also indicates how the Senators view legacy-building beyond the immediate season. For clubs that have cycled through rosters and coaching staffs over the years, home openers often serve as a reset point for the current group. Adding an Emery tribute gives the organization a bridge between the club’s past expectation, the moment that arrived in 2006-07, and the current season’s need to define its own identity.

The ceremony itself, as described in advance, is planned for Thursday night at Ottawa’s home opener. The particulars of how the Senators will conduct the remembrance are not detailed in the available reporting, but the timing is clear: the franchise is using the opening of the home schedule as the platform for the acknowledgment rather than waiting for a later anniversary date.

For fans and observers, the tribute offers a reminder of how quickly postseason stories can become part of a team’s permanent memory. Emery’s 2006-07 run helped establish a championship-season narrative for Ottawa, and the Senators’ decision to honor him now underscores that the franchise still treats that chapter as foundational. What to watch next is not only whether the club shares additional specifics about the on-ice or arena elements of the tribute, but also how Ottawa’s players and goaltending group respond in the days surrounding the ceremony, as the team turns from remembrance back to competition.