In the intro, I usually go with some sort of attempt at humour. A quick one-liner that sets the tone for the mediocrity that will follow and mostly tries to distract you from what is always a terrible headline.
Usually, you leave Vegas with a punishing hangover. But the Ottawa Senators are showing up with a real doozie.
This next paragraph is as close as you’ll get to analysis in the Game Day post. Two or three sentences- often littered with spelling mistakes and bizarre use of commas, dashes and hyphens- that either references the game ahead or games recently played.
The Sens have now dropped four straight, with each loss serving as a unique form of torture. A Saturday night loss to a rival, a two-goal lead coughed up, a full-on rage-inducing debacle and then a four-goal comeback that somehow turned into a three-goal loss.
Then a quick transition line of sorts. Always oddly serious and entirely fact-based.
The Senators will look to right the ship when they take on Jack Eichel and the Golden Knights on a Sunday night in Vegas.
At this point, it’s often clear that I’m running out of steam. Sometimes you’ll find one more attempt at humour but you usually have to look pretty hard for it.
DJ Smith’s team will forego the usual pre-game skate and instead do some skating in the game itself. The Head Coach is set to meet with the media at 5:20 PM so we’ll find out the lineup then.
And now the lineup. Fans really like to know how a team will arrange themselves to start the game. It gives us something to argue about leading up to puck drop even though we all know it’s going to change often during the game. And sometimes, I’m completely guessing. The most important part of the lineup portion of the Game Day post is remembering to add the umlaut on Stützle and not letting them auto-correct it to Stubble.
Tkachuk-Norris-Sanford
Formenton-Stützle-Brown
Paul-White-Ennis
Kelly-Gambrell-Watson
Chabot-Zaitsev
Holden-Zub
Heatherington-Mete
Anton Forsberg is expected to get the start in goal.
With the game day post wrapping up, sometimes I’ll get a bit of a second wind. I’ll tell you when the game starts and with a little bit of unexpected and entirely unnecessary snark.
Puck drop is scheduled for 8:08 PM at the Fortress although that may be pushed back depending on what kind pre-game theatrics they have planned. By the way, that pregame pomp everybody loves so much in Vegas- the Senators invented that. And it was awkward then too.
In this portion of the game day post, I tell you what networks will be broadcasting the game for some reason, as though you don’t have any other way of knowing that information. I cycle through about six different jokes here and just hope nobody notices it’s a repeat.
The game is available on TSN5, TSN1200 and if you’re looking for a stream, I know a guy who knows a guy (they are both named Bort).
And now, I traditionally share a smattering of statistics. None of this is relevant but what it does is provide me with an effective way of wrapping up a Game Day post that really told you nothing about anything.
And now, the HEAD2HEAD table!
| HEAD2HEAD |  |
 |
|---|---|---|
| Record | 19-30-5 (43 pts) | 31-21-4 (66 pts) |
| Goals For | 2.61 (25th) | 3.18 (13th) |
| Goals Against | 3.26 (23rd) | 2.5 (T-16th) |
| Power Play | 16.5% T-27th) | 17.6% (T-24th) |
| Penalty Kill | 80.5% (13th) | 79.5% (T-16th) |
| Shots For | 29.9 (20th) | 33.6 (8th) |
| Shots Against | 33.9 (28th) | 29.7 (8th) |
| Leading Scorers | Tkachuk- 38 pts Batherson- 34 pts Chabot 31 pts Brown- 30 pts Stützle- 29 pts |
Stephenson- 42 pts Marshmallow- 40 pts Smith-37 pts Theodore- 36 pts Pietrangelo- 30 pts |
| Starting Goalie | Anton Forsberg 11-9-2 2.80 GAA, .918 sv% |
Robin Lehner 20-14-1 2.84 GAA, .907 sv% |
