A while ago, Ottawa Senators winger Claude Giroux told reporters he wasn’t ready to start looking at the NHL standings, for a gauge on the team’s progress.
He may want to hold off for a while yet. As well as the Senators have played in the past three weeks, earning 17 of a possible 24 points (8-3-1), they have plenty of work to do to threaten for a playoff spot.
And yet, there is no denying the progress made. Despite Sunday’s 4-2 loss in Minnesota, ending a five-game winning streak, the Senators have 30 points in 31 games.
Ottawa is within striking distance of several teams in the Atlantic Division and just seven points out of the final wild card spot in the Eastern Conference. That proximity gets complicated by the number of teams between the Sens and that final spot.
Best for the team, like Giroux says, to avoid worrying about the standings and continue to plug away, get some injured players back and see what happens.
When he was asked following Saturday’s 6-3 victory in Detroit how far this Senators team can go, Giroux was coy.
“That’s a big question,” Giroux said. “It’s not something I . . . I don’t know. I guess we’ll just have to find out.”
That sounds a lot like a player – and a team – that quietly hopes to achieve something special before this season is out. A team that wants to at least make things interesting down the stretch.
Busy week
The Senators might want to avoid fretting about the schedule, as well as the standings. After they finish up a three-game road trip in Winnipeg on Tuesday, the Senators come home to back-to-back games against the Washington Capitals and Detroit Red Wings on Thursday and Friday to close out the pre-Christmas schedule.
If you are scoring at home, that adds up to five games in a seven-day stretch.
The next five games, through to New Years’ Eve, are big because they come against Eastern opponents – two each against the Capitals and Red Wings and one against the Boston Bruins (Dec. 27). This is a huge opportunity to make up ground on teams Ottawa needs to pass, aside from the front-running Bruins.
Lack of energy at Xcel
It felt like separate games in Minnesota, the first couple of periods in which the Senators were outclassed and outplayed by the Wild, followed by a third period comeback by the visitors.
We might have blamed the back-to-back day games and the travel from Detroit to Minnesota, except that the visitors found their legs in the third period to make the game interesting, after falling behind 3-0 through two periods.
Mark Kastelic and Giroux, with Anton Forsberg pulled for an extra attacker, scored to make it a one-goal game until the Wild scored an empty net goal to seal it.
“It just wasn’t good enough,” said Senators head coach D.J. Smith. “We came out flat. We shot ourselves in the foot in the second period and that’s something we haven’t been doing.
“The third period was better but clearly they (the Wild) were laying off and playing defensive. You can’t fault our effort but we’ve got to be better in the second period.”
Minnesota outshot Ottawa 11-5 and 9-7 over the first two periods. The Sens held a 16-3 shot advantage in the final period as the Wild took a defensive posture.
The Senators torrid power play finally had an off-day, coming up empty on three power play attempts.
“It’s not like we didn’t have chances,” said defenceman Thomas Chabot.
Big win for Gus
Ex-Senators goaltenders are famous for getting revenge on Ottawa after they leave the organization, and Filip Gustavsson was the latest to earn a win against his former team.
Gustavsson extended his win streak to six games, including an overtime and shootout victory in that stretch. His numbers this season are outstanding: 7-4-1, with a 2.31 goals against (4th in the NHL) and .922 save percentage.
Gustavsson, of course, went to Minnesota over the summer in the trade that brought Cam Talbot to Ottawa, adding experience to the goaltending position for the Senators. Talbot has played well, after recovering from a rib injury suffered in the pre-season, but any chance of a Gustavsson-Talbot matchup went out the window when Talbot played Saturday in the 6-3 victory over Detroit.
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Smith No. 2 on games coached list
Reduced expectations can have an interesting side effect on personnel decisions. Once the Senators got past their expansion days, from 1997 on, there was an expectation that they would be a playoff team, year after year. Coaches were under pressure to win.
That ended following the 2017 playoffs when the Senators went into a rebuild. D.J. Smith was hired as head coach in 2019 with a mandate to develop Ottawa’s young core of talent, supplemented by veterans here and there. Until this season, there had been no expectation of contending for a playoff position.
As a result, Smith has quietly moved up the franchise all-time coaching list of games coached. On the weekend, Smith reached the 240-game mark, passing Paul MacLean (239) for the No. 2 spot on the all-time games coached list. Of course, Jacques Martin tops the list with 692 games and 341 regular season wins with Ottawa, for a points winning percentage of .577.
Martin also coached the Senators in 69 playoff games, with 31 playoff victories.
Smith’s overall record part way through his fourth season is 95-119-26.
In an interesting twist, the Senators play a Winnipeg Jets team on Tuesday coached by the man who is No. 4 on the Senators all-time games coached list – Rick Bowness. Bowness, whose son, Ryan, is assistant general manager of the Senators, was Ottawa’s original head coach in 1992.
He coached 235 games with the Senators before the strain of expansion losses on the organization resulted in Bowness being let go. To say the least, he has had a lengthy career as a head coach and valued assistant in the NHL. Bowness has been behind the bench for more games as either an assistant or head coach than any man in NHL history.
