Game 12 preview: Minnesota Wild @ Ottawa Senators
A preview of the game between the Ottawa Senators and Minnesota Wild on 6 November 2014.
The Ottawa Senators will host the Minnesota Wild in the second of four consecutive games at home. Ottawa is coming off a 3-1 win over Detroit and are undefeated in regulation at home with a 3-0-2 record. The Wild lost 4-1 at home to the Penguins and had won five out of six before that.
Craig Anderson will start again, Alex Chiasson will return for Erik Condra and Mark Borowiecki will play for the injured Chris Phillips.
Here are the lines and pairings for Ottawa from Sylvain St-Laurent.
Ottawa
MacArthur - Turris - Ryan
Michalek - Zibanejad - Chiasson
Smith - Legwand - Neil
Hoffman - Lazar - Stone
Borowiecki - Karlsson
Cowen - Ceci
Wiercioch - Gryba
Anderson (starter)
Lehner
Some notes for tonight:
- Zach Parise is out with a concussion for the Wild. Niklas Backstrom will start in net.
- The Senators will rotate all of their left-handed defencemen with Erik Karlsson tonight.
- With his empty net goal, Clarke MacArthur now has four goals in his last four games. MacArthur and Erik Karlsson are the only players on the team with a shot on goal in all 11 games.
- Cody Ceci is one of seven defencemen in the NHL that has played at least 10 games this season and not taken a penalty.
- Ottawa is ranked 10th in both power play conversion (20.4%) and penalty kill (84.4%).
- Erik has played 326 NHL regular season games and the other five defenceman tongight have combined for 465.
- Patrick Wiercioch has only been on the ice for one opposition goal so far this season. It was on 18 October against Lumbus. Wiercioch has been on the ice for 80 minutes since then.
- Zack Smith has seen his ice time shrink compared to last year by over two minutes per game.
Here are some stats from last season for the two teams tonight. All stats are from NHL.com except Corsi and Fenwick are from naturalstattrick.com
Category | Ottawa | Minnesota | ||
Player | # | Player | # | |
Goals | Clarke MacArthur | 6 | Jason Zucker | 5 |
Assists | Kyle Turris | 6 | Thomas Vanek | 7 |
Points | Clarke MacArthur | 9 | Zach Parise | 10 |
Shots | Erik Karlsson | 45 | Zach Parise | 47 |
Average Ice time | Erik Karlsson | 27:35 | Ryan Suter | 28:59 |
Category | Ottawa | Minnesota | ||
# | Rank | # | Rank | |
Goals For | 2.73 | 13th | 3.18 | 4th |
Goals Against | 2.36 | 12th | 2.00 | 5th |
Corsi Close % | 44.54% | 27th | 57.20% | 1st |
Fenwick Close % | 42.18% | 29th | 60.57% | 1st |
Shots For | 30.5 | 12th | 34.9 | 2nd |
Shots Against | 35.5 | 29th | 22.8 | 2nd |
So uh...Minnesota is very good in everything.