FIVE QUICK THOUGHTS
-The Las Vegas Golden Knights are off to an impressive start. They continue to catch teams off guard and they’ve earned those nine wins. All that being said, that game was there for the taking. They’ll deny it but it sort of looked like the Senators thought they were going to have a relatively easy afternoon. The Senators turned it on for stretches, including late in the game, but they were nowhere near good enough over the full sixty minutes. Ottawa’s penalty kill has been one of the best parts of their game in the early part of this season but it struggled on Saturday.
-One of the most impressive things about that Vegas team is the speed they play with in all three zones. Like the New Jersey Devils, they may not have a lot of household names but they beat you with speed and by putting pressure on you in all three zones. The Senators looked like they were surprised by that speed and puck pressure for the first half of the game and it forced them into a lot of turnovers and costly penalties.
-In the last few games, we’ve seen Head Coach Guy Boucher consistently go to a trio of Mike Hoffman, Derick Brassard and Mark Stone. He’s used them early in games to get off to a good start and gone to them just as often when in need of a goal. This may seem like common sense (putting your three best forwards together) but it runs contrary to the Boucher’s preference to balance out the top three lines as much as possible. Those three have had some dominant shifts but it really doesn’t leave much for the rest of the line up.
-After a strong bounce back game against the Detroit Red Wings, Craig Anderson had another less than stellar outing on Saturday afternoon. The Knights were peppering him with shots in the first half of the game and while he had made some good initial stops, there were some uncharacteristic rebounds that landed directly on Vegas sticks. Anderson is going to have a chance to reset a little bit with the light schedule coming up. Presumably he and Condon will split the games in Sweden meaning Anderson will only start one game in the next couple weeks. Maybe a good chance to refocus. The Senators definitely need him to be more consistent.
-While looking at the scores on NHL.com confirms the Senators played a hockey game last night, the 1000+ comments on here about a Turris/Duchene deal suggests our minds may have been elsewhere. It was a wild day of speculation kicked off by that late-night tweet by respected shit-disturber Darren Dreger. Information on the would-be deal continued to filter out throughout the day although not all of it lined up (Dreger said the Avs nixed the deal early in the day but then backtracked later, McKenzie hinted that Preds GM David Poile was the one that slunked). We also heard that Matt Duchene would love to be a Senator, that Turris and Nashville never talked deal and that the package going to Colorado bordered on insanity. Quite a day. What I can confirm today, according to what I’ve heard, is that the Senators and Avalanche are still trying to work something out. And they’ll have plenty of time to hammer out the details on their Swedish getaway.
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