Game 27 Preview + Open Thread: Ottawa Senators @ Tampa Bay Lightning
Can they sens the lightning again?
The Ottawa Senators are rolling into Tampa Bay tonight with more confidence than they’ve had all season.
The Lightning are good. I don’t need to tell you that. The Sens will definitely have their work cut out for them tonight, but we’ve also seen them rise to the occasion against lots of good teams recently. The last time these two met, the Sens won 4-0.
Everything is clicking right now, and against the top teams in the league, too. The Sens dug themselves into way too big a hole at the beginning of the season to be talking about playoffs, but they do have a chance to move up a spot in the standings with a win tonight, and their best players are beginning to climb the NHL leaderboard.
The lineup will be announced at game time. It seems likely they’ll go with the same one we saw against Florida, since that’s what we’ve been seeing at practice so far. That would be:
Tkachuk - Norris - Batherson
Formenton - Stützle - CBrown
Sanford - Tierney - Ennis
Paul - Gambrell - Watson
Chabot - Zaitsev
Holden - Zub
Heatherington - Mete
No news on who starts in net.
Game Notes
- We’ve reached a milestone in the season: a team playing their actual starting goaltender against the Sens. Vasilevskiy starts in net for the two-time defending champs.
- I guess the Lightning saw what happened to the last backup goaltender who tried to take on this group. Poor guy got sens’d:/
Spencer Knight has been sent to the AHL, per the transactions page.
— Mark Scheig (@markscheig) December 16, 2021
- The Lightning are riding a big home winning streak, and Vasilevskiy has been incredible. But then again, the Panthers were in a similar situation before getting sens’d, so you never know.
- Ottawa has been excellent on special teams recently, including against Tampa Bay, but they can’t keep relying on their penalty kill. The coach talked about the need to stay out of the box in his most recent media availability. We’ll see if that happens.
- Puck drop is at 7pm ET. You can watch live on TSN5 or RDS2, or listen on TSN 1200./
Stats Preview
Player Stats
| Game 42 | Ottawa | Senators | Carolina | Hurricanes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Category | Player | # | Player | # |
| Goals | Josh Norris | 18 | Sebastian Aho | 19 |
| Assists | Drake Batherson | 21 | Sebastian Aho | 26 |
| Points | Drake Batherson | 34 | Sebastian Aho | 45 |
| Shots | Brady Tkachuk | 133 | Andrei Svechnikov | 130 |
| Time on Ice/GP | Thomas Chabot | 27:08:00 | Jaccob Slavin | 23:51:00 |
Team Stats
| Game 42 | Ottawa | Senators | Carolina | Hurricanes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Category | # | Rank | # | Rank |
| Goals/GP | 2.76 | 21st | 3.47 | 5th |
| Goals Against/GP | 3.32 | 24th | 2.37 | 1st |
| Shots/GP | 30.3 | 19th | 32.9 | 12th |
| Shots Against/GP | 33.3 | 27th | 28.3 | 2nd |
| Powerplay % | 18.4 | 22nd | 24.8 | 10th |
| Penalty Kill % | 80.0 | 15th | 88.7 | 1st |
| Corsi % (5v5 SVA) | 46.66 | 28th | 55.25 | 3rd |
| xGF % (5v5 SVA) | 46.82 | 24th | 53.99 | 5th |