Good teams don’t come apart at the seams.
That’s why the Ottawa Senators have left many of their faithful wondering just how “good” they are really, with only 32 games left in the season.
The Senators’ Meltdown in the Music City on Thursday night saw them blow a 3-0 lead and surrender five unanswered goals in a 5-3 loss to the Nashville Predators at Bridgestone Arena.
There is no need to reach for the panic button yet, but you can take it out of the closet and keep it within reaching striking distance because this was by far the most disgraceful loss of the season, bar none.
A season that was supposed to be special by making the next step after getting to the playoffs for the first time in eight years last spring is on the verge of being a complete and total disaster.
The Senators sit seven points out of the final wild-card spot in the Eastern Conference heading into a pivotal four-game homestand, and here’s why:
Bad goaltending
The Senators have the National Hockey League’s worst save percentage at .866 through 50 games.
Nobody could have predicted coming into this year that Linus Ullmark, the club’s top goaltender, would not only struggle in the net, but also be forced to take a lengthy break for mental health reasons.
The Senators hope to have Ullmark back this weekend. He had posted a 14-8-5 record with a 2.95 goals-against average and a .881 save percentage, so those numbers will have to improve when he does return.
They didn’t skate on Friday, so we’ll have to wait until Saturday morning to see if Ullmark is ready to return, but he wasn’t on the active roster.
The club signed veteran James Reimer when Leevi Merilainen was thrust into the No. 1 job and struggled mightily. The 37-year-old Reimer deserved a better fate in Nashville, but he can’t do it alone.
It’s actually incredible that the Senators have been able to keep themselves in the race with the goaltending they’ve received. Even if they just got average netminding, they’d be fine.
Dysfunctional penalty kill
Head coach Travis Green didn’t want to talk about the club’s lousy penalty killing following the loss in Nashville.
“I’m not going to talk about the penalty kill. We’ve done it a lot. There’s been a lot of factors,” Green said.
Why would he? It has been bad all season.
Just when you think the situation might improve, the Senators fall apart again. The game sheet says they only allowed two power-play goals against the Predators, but it was essentially three.
It’s hard to decide where to start with why the penalty kill is so bad. One area that might help is to be more aggressive in the zone entry because once the opposition gets set up, it’s just too hard to defend.
“It’s really good at home. It hasn’t been good on the road. If we can pin it down, it’d be fixable right away. But it’s not as simple as that,” Green said.
The job of the coaching staff is to pin it down. The club has given up 43 power-play goals this season. Yikes.
Best players not at their best
We agree with Green’s assessment that the Senators didn’t have enough players going in Nashville.
That’s why you blow leads and, after a strong 40 minutes, the Predators lifted their game and the Senators had zero ability to match. You wonder how that can happen in such an important game, but trying to find answers is difficult.
This team is built around its core: Captain Brady Tkachuk, top centre Tim Stutzle, along with top defenceman Jake Sanderson, Thomas Chabot, Drake Batherson, Shane Pinto, Ridly Greig and Dylan Cozens.
Some of those players were barely noticeable in Nashville.
The Senators will face the Carolina Hurricanes at home on Saturday and then host the Vegas Golden Knights on Sunday. Victories have to happen and they have to happen now or this team will be done before the Olympic break.
Related
All the goodwill that the Senators built up by making the playoffs last spring is gone. It’s now or never. A season hangs in the balance and the Senators need to get up off the mat.
The last words
The Senators are 3-5-2 in their past 10 games and they’ve squandered leads in four of their past five. The positive spin is that they went into Nashville on a five-game point streak.
A season is slipping away for the Senators. They can argue they’ve played well many nights and deserved a better fate, but that doesn’t count for anything when they hand out tickets to the National Hockey League’s big dance in the spring.
The loss in Nashville has the potential to be a turning point in the wrong direction for the Senators. Only they can prevent that from happening and they’d better dig deep for that to be the case.