The Ottawa Senators are in one of the toughest divisions in the National Hockey League.
An ugly 5-0 loss to the Montreal Canadiens in the pre-season at the Centre Videotron on Tuesday night in Quebec City has the Senators facing questions about whether they’ve got enough muscle.
Is this an area that Steve Staios, the club’s president of hockey operations and general manager, needs to address before the Opening Night roster has to be submitted to the NHL by 5 p.m. on Monday?
It’s fair to say the two-time Stanley Cup champion Florida Panthers, along with the Toronto Maple Leafs, Tampa Bay Lightning and the Habs, can all be hard to play against, which is why the Atlantic Division is difficult.
While the Senators haven’t dressed a full lineup in the five exhibition games they’ve played this fall, the game against the Habs featured a combined 150 penalty minutes by both teams.
The Senators didn’t have captain Brady Tkachuk, who made a quick visit to his hometown of St. Louis on Thursday night to face the Blues, for the game against Montreal.
You have to think that if Tkachuk had played, Montreal tough guy Arber Xheka, and his brother, Florian — who is cut from the same cloth — wouldn’t have been able to run around the way they did.
“It was eventful. That’s for sure,” Tkachuk said when asked about the loss to the Habs before heading to St. Louis. “Things like that happen in exhibition games when guys do whatever it takes to make their impact on the game.
“It’s not the first one, it won’t be the last one, so I will leave it as very eventful.”
The way the loss unfolded has put the Senators roster construction under the microscope. The club has the skills to pay the bills, but when the going gets tough, can the Senators get going?
The Senators did their part to stand up to the Xhekaj brothers and it didn’t help that the officials let the game get out of control, but coach Travis Green noted that this stuff is going to happen in the pre-season.
Forwards Zack MacEwen, Jan Jenik and Cody Hodgson, along with defenceman Donovan Sebrango, all dropped the gloves to try to make sure the Senators weren’t run over.
Hodgson was fined by the NHL’s department of player safety for boarding Alex Newhook while Nick Cousins also had to dig into his pockets for a slash on winger Ivan Demidov.
The trouble started when Montreal’s Jayden Struble cross-checked Jenik in the face in the first.
“You look at the game the other night and, I know people are talking about, but it was a physical, hard game,” Green said. “We’ve got some guys who are on the bubble and they’re trying to make the team. They’re physical players.
“I didn’t like the hit Hodgson made and it shouldn’t have been made, but I didn’t like the cross-check to the face. I didn’t like the guy coming off the bench to fight. But it’s an exhibition, things get out of hand sometimes in the heat of the moment.
“It wasn’t a game where we went in hoping to have a bunch of fights. They’ve got a few tough guys on their team, too. But when guys are trying to make the team, they’re emotional players, sometimes things cross the line a little bit. And that happens, it’s part of hockey and it’s not something you want to see all the time.”
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The Senators were pleased with the way they stood up for each other in the game against the Habs. Often, the club relies on Tkachuk to lead the way in that department.
“We don’t really want Brady fighting all the time and being the guy who has to step in,” centre Tim Stutzle said.. “We have a pretty tough team, a lot of guys stepped up and had each other’s back. I don’t want to get into what happened the other night.
“Every team builds their team the way they want to build their team and I think we’re built the right way. We have a lot of tough guys. My first year, we might have had seven guys and it was great.”
MacEwen is on a one-way contract at $750,000 US this season and isn’t afraid to drop the gloves or step up for a teammate. But Green said that tough players also have to be able to contribute.
“The game is physical, it’s hard and there is fighting allowed,” Green said. “It’s not illegal, you’re not going to get suspended for fighting, and that’s part of our game.
“But it is dwindling and the game has never been better. The speed of the game, the skill of the players, is amazing to watch, but when you watch the Stanley Cup final, time and space are taken away very quickly.
“If you don’t play courageously, don’t go to hard areas, you’re not going to win.”