The Ottawa Senators are fresh off of back-to-back wins over the Montreal Canadiens and have now won four in a row and five of their last seven. Do they have a chance of making a playoff push?
Matt Larkin and Steven Ellis talked about how likely that is on today’s episode of "Daily Faceoff Live."
Steven Ellis: I do think it’s still a bit of a mini-surge. Statistically, they’ve still got a shot. The good thing for them going forward is they’ve got this time off right now to recharge like everyone, but then they also have a pretty decent schedule coming up with a lot of teams they can go out there and beat. I’m looking at Columbus. I’m looking at Montreal. They’ve got Washington on the schedule and that one will be interesting.
You definitely can’t count the Senators out, and you’re getting some great performances from Tkachuk and Stutzle and everything. My biggest concern there still is goaltending. Cam Talbot has not lived up to expectations this year. Anton Forsberg’s been able to steal a couple of games from there, but I’m not convinced that goaltending’s good enough to take them to the playoffs.
While I was one of the few that probably believed they had a good chance at making it this year, losing Josh Norris didn’t help. Let’s be fair, they went out and beat the Laval Rocket last night, they didn’t go out there and beat an NHL-caliber team, but that’s just one game. They went out there and beat the Leafs, and they went out there and had a good stretch, but I think this is just a nice mid-season little run more than a team really showing true promise this season.
Matt Larkin: I think you’re mostly right. I wouldn’t say I’m a believer quite yet, but I am intrigued. If you look at the possession numbers, there are some encouraging signs for the Senators. They’re a top-five team in terms of chance generation and play driving at five-on-five, and they’re near the bottom of the league in shooting percentage. They’ve actually been unlucky, so there should be more goals coming.
And they do have Anton Forsberg getting hot, maybe staking his claim to that job with Cam Talbot being a trade candidate as we get closer to March 3rd. But I’m still thinking this team isn’t quite good enough defensively. Of course, they miss Artem Zub, they’re in the bottom half of the NHL 5-on-5 expected goals against per 60, so I think they’re settling into being the team that I thought they were going into the season.
This is an 85-90 point team that is pretty exciting at offense, the No. 2 power play in the league, but this is still a bubble team. They’re a work in progress, they’ve got a lot of progress to make on the defensive side on the puck, so I’m thinking they’re going to hang around this bubble and be competitive and have some exciting games, but ultimately miss the playoffs.
That’s exactly what I would have said about them going into the season, so I think this is just a course correction to the mediocre version we expected to see, or at least I expected to see.
You can watch the full episode here…
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