John E. Sokolowski-Imagn Images
The Ottawa Senators announced that goaltender Linus Ullmark would be taking a leave of absence at the end of December. No explanation was offered at the time, and the franchise went out of its way to push back against a salacious rumor that began to spread this week.
Professional athletes are expected to battle through adversity on a regular basis, and it’s only natural for people to speculate in situations where they step away from their team in the middle of the season without providing any concrete explanation.
Those scenarios usually coincide with the teams they play for issuing a statement asking fans to respect their privacy, but there are almost inevitably going to be people who not only ignore that request but are spurred to try to figure out what’s going on as if they’ve been tasked with solving some sort of mystery.
On December 28th, the Senators revealed Linus Ullmark would be leaving the team for an undetermined amount of time over unspecified “personal reasons” one day after he was pulled in the second period of a game where he surrendered four goals on 14 shots against the Maple Leafs.
It didn’t take long for rumors about the circumstances of that leave of absence to start to swirl, and Ottawa has made the fairly unusual decision to issue a public rebuke shutting them down.
The Senators issued a statement that sternly shut down rumors concerning the circumstances surrounding Linus Ullmark’s leave of absence
One of the many downsides of the internet is that literally anyone can hop online and use the veil of anonymity to spread lies while pretending they’re privy to inside information that doesn’t have any actual basis in reality.
A lot of fans are more than happy to take those claims at face value if they’re juicy enough, and that was the case with many people who bought into the rumors that were spread earlier this week by someone who claimed they knew the real reason Ullmark was nowhere to be found.
The claims, which were shared by an anonymous user who deleted the social media account where they first surfaced, baselessly asserted that Ullmark had a habit of telling his wife about players who cheated on their significant others on road trips before he was exposed for doing the same, which supposedly led to his spouse alerting other wives and girlfriends on the team about similar infidelities and sparking plenty of drama in the locker room.
There was literally zero proof offered to substantiate the rumor, but that didn’t stop it from gaining some traction to the point where the Senators issued a statement on Thursday in an attempt to shut it down.
A statement from President of Hockey Operations and General Manager Steve Staios. pic.twitter.com/aTb7taO2av
— Ottawa Senators (@Senators) January 9, 2026
This isn’t the first time an NHL team has gone that route, as the Blackhawks and Corey Perry were also forced to respond to similarly crude chatter about the veteran being kicked off the team for engaging in a relationship with Connor Bedard’s mother in 2023.