That title speaks for itself, really.
Twenty-four hours after what may have been their ugliest loss of the season, the Ottawa Senators are right back at it against one of the league’s top teams in the Carolina Hurricanes.
Joe Corvo is definitely getting a hat trick tonight, by the way.
The term “rock bottom” gets thrown around a lot in pro sports but rarely are there so many viable candidates for a single franchise. Okay, that’s a slight exaggeration. Clearly spending too much time on Sens Twitter.
The Senators are struggling badly right now but there are some fairly legitimate reasons for those struggles. Losing two key centres was the start of it. That was compounded by both a viral illness ripping through the locker room as well as a fairly dramatic team-wide battle with COVID-19.
And now, on top of those earlier issues, this is a team that is just in its own head. Fragile is a word the Head Coach has used for it in the past and you can see it again lately. It would be easy to blame this on one or two depth guys but the fact is, this is a top-to-bottom thing right now. Their confidence is at an all-time low and they look like a group waiting for something bad to happen.
And recently, they haven’t had to wait long.
Maybe a big ol’ road win against a Eastern Conference powerhouse is just what the doctored ordered for our dear Senators. That or fire everyone and launch the franchise into orbit. Either one works.
DJ Smith met with the media earlier and laid out a plan to get this thing back on track. Work hard. It’s that simple, folks. No morning skate today but here’s hoping they have some skating planned for this evening.
Tyler Ennis comes in. No word on who comes out.
Tkachuk-Norris-Batherson
Stützle-Paul-Brown
Formenton-Gaudette-Sanford
Tierney-Gambrell-Watson
Chabot-Zub
Mete-Zaitsev
Holden-Thomson
Anton Forsberg is the likely starter.
Puck drop is scheduled for just after 7:00 PM. The game is available on TSN5, RDS2, TSN1200 and if you manage to avoid all those mediums, rumour has it the game can also be streamed via your mobile device.
Here’s a closer look at this evening’s match-up. This HEAD2HEAD table is extremely NSFW.
| HEAD2HEAD |  |
 |
|---|---|---|
| Record | 4-15-1 (still 9 pts) | 15-5-1 (31 pts) |
| Goals For | 2.42 (27th) | 3.30 (8th) |
| Goals Against | 3.84 (3nd) | 2.15 (3rd) |
| Power Play | 17.5% (T-19th) | 19.4% (13th) |
| Penalty Kill | 74.1% (28th) | 87.3% (3rd) |
| Shots For | 29.3 (24th) | 32.6 (13th) |
| Shots Against | 34.3 (31st) | 28.2 (3rd) |
| Leading Scorers | Batherson- 16 pts Norris- 13 pts Tkachuk- 11 pts Brown- 10 pts Ennis- 9 pts |
Aho- 20 pts Svechnikov- 20 pts DeAngelo- 19 pts Teravainen- 14 pts Trocheck- 13 pts |
| Starting Goalie | Anton Forsberg 1-4-0 4.44 GAA, .883 sv% |
Antti Raanta 3-0-1 2.36 GAA, .903 sv% |
