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.


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