Game n°47 file notes: Sens' neat hockey shuts out Wild 3-0

Turns out watching an entire game filled with tape-to-tape passes and shot attempt after shot attempt all made by your home team is pretty tremendous fun.

Seriously, if there was one takeaway from last night’s game, it was the fact that the esoteric chemistry frequently cited as a reason to keep forward trios together exists. MacArthur, Turris and Ryan connected time and time again with beautiful passes through the neutral zone that led to near-perfect zone entries, moving straight through the oddly passive Minnesota Wild defence; their first goal was a result of a textbook-rush. And they were facing top competition, too; Ryan Suter faced no one Senator forward more than Kyle Turris. (Suter was also line-matched with the Cowen-Karlsson tandem almost exclusively.)

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Game n°29 file notes: Lightning out-Leafs Sens for 3-1 loss

It looks like the Pesky Sens are back in every way but goals and wins.

Taking a look at Extra Skater's game-by-game performance graphs, Ottawa's been over fifty percent in even-strength close Fenwick For % for the last five games — the longest stretch of games over 50% in FF% since the season's start. Yet we stumble through alternating wins and losses, unable to string together consistency in shooting and scrounge up enough points to get us over .500.

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Game n°25 file notes: Sens beat Caps in wonky 6-4 game

If we were looking for a turning point, maybe this game was it.

It was the type of game that made the Washington broadcasters remark of the Sens, “They look like they’re still on the power play.” It was the type of game where capitalizing on every chance helped them create their own luck, rather than letting the other team come to them. And if you thought that cliché was one cliché too many—it was the type of game with spirit. Team spirit. (But only from the second period on, though.)

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Game n°20 file notes: Blue Jackets add to the Sens' stack of 4-1 losses

I had the (mis)fortune of attending this game in-person. Thus, to avoid rehashing the painful experience twice, I will forgo looking up all the #fancystats and instead present a few brief optical notes on the matinee game.

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Game n°16 file notes: the Lehner show purloins the Sens a 4-1 win over Habs

For all the talk spewed by the Ottawa Senators’ organizational personnel regarding “finding our game” and “sticking to the plan” and “bringing it back to ABCs basics”, I’m just going to say now that I really hope last night’s game was not the epitome of the Sens’ performance.

Thank God for Robin Lehner.

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Game n°12 file notes: exciting hockey (nearly) makes up for the Sens’ 6-5 loss to Chicago

It was Colin Greening a season or two ago who, during a second-intermission interview with a CBC Hockey Night in Canada reporter, commented on the end-to-end nonstop pace of the game versus the Toronto Maple Leafs. “Yeah, it’s a track meet,” he said in his honeyed I-graduated-from-Cornell-University tone, and proceeded to comment on how they’d like to slow it down and get back to their game.

I don’t know… sometimes a track meet is a good thing.

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Game n°10 file notes: Ducks wear out their fingernails clinging on to a 2-1 win over Sens

Well, that wasn't fun.

For all of Paul MacLean’s “Don’t mess with a winning line-up” talk, we saw a bizarre trio at the beginning of what would be an arduously frustrating game: Conacher-Smith-Neil became the team’s Do You Even Lift (Your Teammate)? line while Colin Greening jockeyed about rather futilely on the questionable top line with Spezza and Michalek. That didn't really work out; Greening ended up with just 15.4% of his starts in the OZ, and Spezza's Corsi Rel %, while improved, is still only 2.6%. But even though all three players of the Ryan-Turris-MacArthur line were in the top 5 of number of shots registered, last night’s game saw the end of that Turris line’s possession domination.

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