FIVE QUICK THOUGHTS
-An afternoon game in Boston certainly seemed like a recipe for disaster for this Senators team. Instead what we saw was one of the most complete sixty minute efforts of the season. The Senators played with terrific pace in all three periods and made life pretty difficult for the Bruins defeneceman.
-Strong performance from Robin Lehner. That first goal he let in was a stinker but he bounced back nicely. If not for the play of Lehner over the last 40 minutes and especially in the third period, the Senators may have come away empty-handed in this one.
-Bobby Ryan is heating up. No other way to describe it. He’s clearly battling through the pain of that finger injury but it really doesn’t seem to be slowing him down at this point. He scored one of the goals of the season against the Kings on Thursday and followed that up with an equally dazzling goal to win the game in a shootout yesterday afternoon. I sort of think Ryan was dealing with a lower body injury coming out of training camp that seemed to slow him down a little bit. Safe to say that injury has healed because he seems to have a lot more jump recently.
-Speaking of heating up, David Legwand is on a nice little run for the Senators. Fans were pretty hard on him early in the season, particularly all the power play time he was getting. He’s making it count recently though. Legwand has a point in seven of his last eight games, including four power play goals during that stretch. The Senators are a more dangerous team when they are getting contribution from the centre ice position and they’ve been getting plenty of that lately from Legwand and Mika Zibanejad.
-The sample size is pretty small but there are some pretty clear differences in the way this team plays under new Head Coach Dave Cameron. The simplest way to put it is that they seems to playing to win rather than playing not to lose. They are more aggressive in all three zones and it’s paying off. Under MacLean, they often looked like a group scared to make a mistake and maybe a little too focused on doing the right thing instead of just letting their instinct take over. Again, it’s been two games but definitely some good signs early under Coach Cameron.
