Senators hire Maciej Szwoch to boost goaltending pipeline

Ottawa gave Maciej Szwoch a much bigger job in its crease, promoting the goaltending consultant who worked with Linus Ullmark last season into coordinator of goaltending scouting and development. Steve Staios announced the move on May 29, and the new title stretches Szwoch’s reach across the NHL roster, the AHL pipeline and the club’s younger prospects.

That is the real story here. This is not just another staff shuffle, it is Ottawa adding a dedicated voice to a position that has haunted the franchise for years. Szwoch spent the 2025-26 season around the team as a consultant, and the Senators said he was in attendance for many practices and games in the second half of the year. Now he will be part of the daily work, not just a nearby adviser.

The timing says plenty about where the Senators think they still need help. Ottawa traded for Ullmark from Boston on June 24, 2024 to address what had become one of its biggest needs in net, after the club finished the 2023-24 regular season with the NHL’s worst team save percentage at .884. The organization had missed the playoffs for seven straight seasons, so the move for a proven starter was supposed to be the first step, not the last.

Ullmark, who won the Vezina Trophy in 2023, gave Ottawa stretches of exactly that kind of stability in 2025-26. He finished the regular season with a .891 save percentage and a 2.73 goals-against average in 49 games, then posted a .932 save percentage and a 2.03 goals-against average in the playoffs, even as the Senators fell in a first-round sweep to Carolina. That late-season work likely reinforced the value of specialized goaltending instruction, even if it also showed how far Ottawa still has to climb.

Szwoch, 41, is from Gdansk, Poland, and brings nearly 20 years of experience as a goaltending coach and consultant. His background includes work with the Swedish National team program, the Detroit Red Wings, MODO Hockey and Färjestad BK in the SHL. A Red Wings report also tied him to the selection of Filip Larsson in the 2016 NHL Draft, a reminder that Ottawa is not only hiring a coach for the present, but a scout for the next wave.

For Belleville and the rest of the organization’s netminders, that matters. Szwoch’s mandate reaches beyond Ullmark and into the group trying to become Ottawa’s next reliable backup, call-up or long-term answer. The Senators have already invested in one established name, and this hire shows they now want the structure to produce the next one.