No excuses.
It’s a familiar refrain in the sporting world. No matter how difficult things get for a team, you’ll hear players and coaches uttering those same two words. It’s an internal rallying cry of sorts that professionals use to remind themselves that no matter how challenging the circumstances, they still have a job to do.
What’s strange is when it enters into the fan and media discourse.
Particularly in situations when there are clearly many compounding and entirely legitimate excuses. For example…Down two of their top three centres, in a season that was clearly a transition year of sorts, without their top scorer, after a nearly unprecedent mid-season week-long pause, against one of the top teams in the league at HIGH FUCKING ALTITUDE, the Senators lost the other night. They were close but they lost.
And yet yesterday, we had people calling for a change behind the bench, suggesting a young star-in-the-making be sent to Belleville for…reasons and more than one fan and/or media type saying…no excuses. Give me a break.
The Ottawa Senators head west to kick off a three-game California swing against the San Jose Sharks.
The Sharks, like the Senators, have had their own internal battles with COVID-19. While the situation never reached the same level as it did here in Ottawa, the Sharks had as many as seven guys out of the lineup and in the league’s COVID protocol at one point. While San Jose and Ottawa have been hit the hardest so far, you get the sense that this is going to be a reality most teams have to navigate at some point in the year.
For DJ Smith and his team, the focus is on taking the good parts of that game against Colorado, and building off it. While they were dominated for large stretches of that game, they did a hell of a job hanging around against a tough Avalanche team and hopefully, shook off a bit of a rust in the process.
The Senators are on the ice for a game day skate at 2:30 PM this afternoon so we’ll find out more about the lineup then. Nikita Zaitsev has joined the team on the road trip though so he may be available to step in tonight. Meanwhile Josh Brown is expected to miss some time with an injury.
Single-game betting is now legal in Canada. With that in mind, each province will dictate how to regulate sports betting within their own provincial guidelines and according to Sports Betting Dime, the province of Ontario is in good spot to support single-game betting as it grows which means more options that will benefit sports fans looking for the best odds out there.
We’ll see if they have any other changes in mind.
Tkachuk-Norris-Sanford
Paul-Stützle-Brown
Formenton-Tierney-Ennis
Kelly-Gambrell-Watson
Chabot-Thomson
Mete-Zub
Holden-Zaitsev
No word on a starting goalie yet either.
Puck drop is scheduled for just after 10:30 PM. So basically it’s barely even game day. In fact, a good portion of this game will be played tomorrow. Which means PaV has been lying to us all. The game is available on TSN5, RDS, TSN1200 and on shady streaming sites all across the information super highway.
Here’s a closer look at the how these team’s match up via something I call the HEAD2HEAD table.
| HEAD2HEAD |  |
 |
|---|---|---|
| Record | 4-11-1 (9 pts) | 9-8-1 (19 pts) |
| Goals For | 2.56 (T-23rd) | 2.56 (T-23rd) |
| Goals Against | 3.69 (31st) | 2.78 (T-12th) |
| Power Play | 20.4% (T-13th) | 18.8% (17th) |
| Penalty Kill | 73.9% (28th) | 88.0% (4th) |
| Shots For | 28.8 (26th) | 28.2 (30th) |
| Shots Against | 34.6 (32nd) | 30.1 (10th) |
| Leading Scorers | Batherson- 16 pts Norris- 11 pts Ennis- 9 pts Tkachuk- 9 pts Brown- 8 pts |
Meier- 15 pts Couture- 14 pts Burns- 12 pts Hertl- 12 pts Dahlen- 9 pts |
| Starting Goalie | Matt Murray 0-4-0 3.10 GAA, .897 sv% |
James Reimer 5-3-1 1.87 GAA, .940 sv% |
