Welcome back: do you recognize these Ottawa Senators?

"A break unintended is a break nonetheless." Who said these wise words? Probably no one but myself, attempting to apologize for an unintended four-month break in blogging. Fortunately, the object of your and my mutual affections has undergone quite a few changes during that course of time; there remains yet a heap-tonne of items to discuss in regards to the 2014-15 Ottawa Senators.

Take, for example, the Ottawa Senators of this past week. Is there capacity in our collective minds to grasp the sheer goodness of a team that shuts out the two better California teams on a back-to-back, one day after jet lagging their way from the East Coast, and then finishes off with a comeback win over the last California team? Take a moment to bask in the five-game winning streak that's hotter than that one day in March where almost all the snow melts and temperatures hit positive digits... because, like the day after that, the streak will likely turn cold soon. Let's look at some of the aspects that have been pushing the Sens along.

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Pondering the Sens as a special teams team.

Forget being a high-event team: meet your 2014-15 Ottawa Senators, a high-special teams-event team. ...Okay, I take that back, that makes the club sound too much like a group of scantily-clad faux-firemen available for hire to flaunt their parts at special occasions. But look, the Sens spent an average of 17 minutes per game over the month of October playing in situations other than 5-on-5 (as calculated from war-on-ice.com game logs). League-wide, they're 6th in terms of time with the man-advantage and 23rd (or, inversely, 8th) in terms of time spent down a man. These measurements aren't quite precise, since teams evidently haven't played the exact same number of games. But combine it with the eye test and it seems reasonably safe to conclude that the Sens have been relying quite heavily on special teams for these first nine games.

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Game n°3 preview: Sens stop by Sunrise, FLA for fall hockeying

Don't look now, but the Ottawa Senators are straddling a .500 average two games into a season that's presented them with yet another road trip to start (albeit one theoretically easier than last year's Opening Line-Up of Death). There's one last game to play down south before settling in for a two-week homestand, and it'll be one chez les Panthers.

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Ahh, the preseason: update n°2

source

Well. A lot of things happened in five days.

Let’s cover them reverse-chronologically:

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Ahh, the preseason: fantasies & fears.

Welcome back to the wild and wonderful world of NHL hockey, where fans rev up the hype machine right from the start of the preseason and other fans slam them on Twitter for being too excited. So much to discuss: all the possibilities of forward line combinations, the gray hole that is our defence, how Paul MacLean will perform relative to his Jack Adams-standard and whether this site will actually stick with its current theme for at least the first forty-one games. The preseason is built for speculation. What with training camp providing almost hourly fodder in regards to roster updates and line combinations, it's a breeding ground for a hockey fan's fervent fantasies and sprouting hopes that this next season will be the one to take their team to the top.

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To think about: the un/expected friendships within the team

The game day skate open to the public had been going on for a few minutes, and Paul MacLean called the entire team in to the centre to stretch. The Ottawa Senators arranged themselves in a haphazard circle facing centre ice; they stretched at their own pace, sometimes paying heed to MacLean, sometimes chatting to their neighbours.

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Back from the Olympics: an EK update.

As items on a how-to-have-a-good-time checklist, "Hang out with Daniel Alfredsson twenty-four-seven" and "Play with a defence partner who isn't Cowen-calibre" do very nicely. Erik Karlsson seemed entirely jubilant during the length of his Sochi sojourn, and even his eBay comment on his silver medal could be taken in a potentially joking interpretation. Almost in tandem with that, he was named best defenceman of the tournament. If there was ever a tangible way to measure whether predictions of EK soaring on the big ice came true, this would be good enough.

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Golden Linings/Crimson Bindings: the centres' faceoff prowess

A feature looking at the recent positives of the Sens' play.

A glance at the NHL's faceoff leaders shows that the Ottawa Senators are sitting snugly at 9th place. This has been evident over the season, and has perhaps been the duet partner in consistency to the Sens' surprising, and welcome, offence. (We're on pace to be shut out just once more in the season's last 25 games, for a season total of three blankings.) It's become just about commonplace to see >50% numbers from our main centres Jason Spezza, Kyle Turris, Mika Zibanejad and Zack Smith.

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Players, stats, coaches and we the fans: the relationship between the four

A somewhat tepid video was released by the Sens a few days ago, asking various members of the team to describe certain hockey terms in three words or less. This produced the expected awkward pauses as the poor players chosen to be questioned had to reframe the term chosen in the unfamiliar context (i.e. a three-word-or-under synonym), and there were also the usual tiny gems of insight into a hockey player's mind where they were least expected. For example, when Lehner was given the term "top cheese", he said, "High glove", providing an interesting glimpse at the way a goalie thinks about various types of shots — namely, how to save them, rather than how to deliver them.

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Playing the rookies and the Sens' line combos

Even though Ottawa’s been one of the luckiest teams this season in regards to injuries, it still feels as though we’re playing too many rookies every game. This is mostly true on the back end, where only two players out of six any game are older than twenty-five years of age; among the forwards, the invasion of Rookie Noobness varies widely depending on how high Paul MacLean has set his blender on, along with the degree of blindness to which he’s turned to certain With Or Without You statistics for certain forwards.

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The losing record and the afternoon games: a fairytale

That sounds rather nice as a storybook title, doesn’t it? Now, before I claim that the afternoon loss is a myth, it must be said upfront that I have no actual insight into the ways which the team gets ready differently for afternoon games; I don’t know who gets up late, who eats differently and who skips the team warm-up. Instead, I decided to take a look at the previous afternoon performances of the team and see how much of the story that 1-7-2 losing record tells.

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Game n°51 preview: Sens chill out & heat up to play Lightning

Well, this is a change from the Polar Vortex. The Tampa Bay Lightning have been doing unreasonably well in their sunshiney state, with 10 more points than Ottawa and entrenched (so far) at 3rd in the Eastern and in the 2nd Atlantic division playoff spot, somehow only two points behind the Boston Bruins. They're also flashing around a 14-6-3 win record at home, even though they lost their last five games at home; this isn't likely the easiest place to spiff up the Sens' road record of 11-8-4, but our cumulative close FF% graphs are looking pretty similar, and hey, we try to win every game, right? (#analysis)

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Let's worry about Anderson and the early goals.

Craig Anderson hasn't been the same rock-solid goaltender he was last season. That's fine; last season, he only played 24 games and it was over an abbreviated schedule besides. He was due to regress, anyway, from that league-leading 94.1% save percentage. This season, he's fallen to 90.2%, 41st league-wide. If we take a closer look at the shots which Anderson failed to save, however, something potentially troubling emerges: in 34 games so far, he has let in at least one goal in the first eleven shots in 24 games.

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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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The shutdown line: we need more Condra and less Neil.

If ever there was a real-life example of the sad fact that puck possession on a player level does not always translate to points, it would be Erik Condra. However, the very point that he isn’t a scoring machine testifies to another aspect of his game: his defensive value.

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To think about: are the Sens inconsistent, or just bad?

For perhaps the entirety of the 2013-14 season's first half, followers of Ottawa Senators hockey have tossed the word "inconsistency" and its derivatives around like lettuce in a Caesar salad, yours truly included. And just like overtossed salad, the catchphrase has become somewhat limp and dry, with less substance than the no-nonsense carrots and tomatoes garnishing the salad (which, in this analogy, represent the fancy stats). But it seemed relatively accurate; we've reached our first winning streak since November 9th, and somedays, it seems as if our beloved Sens simply don't show up to play.

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Game n°42 preview: Caps look to gain capital chez les Sens

Welcome back from the holidays! Fine, perhaps it's the Ottawa Senators who need to do some gaining, not Washington — the Caps currently sit 2nd in the Metropolitan Division, 5th in the Eastern Conference and 14th league-wide... right about the spot where a lot of bloggers, fans and experts picked Ottawa to settle in at comfortably, with two games in hand besides. Well, the second half of the season starts now. Our inconsistency continues, but the boundaries of our inconsistency have moved to the positive side of the spectrum, mostly.

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Losses are losses; are words just words?

Coaches don't say what they're thinking. Paul MacLean seems to have perfected the art of sounding sincere and earnest while also not giving away exactly what he means, using a blend of clichés, long, detailed sentences and well-placed I'm-a-fisherman-from-Antigonish-NS humour. It's almost a certain guarantee that what he says to the media is not precisely what he says to the team. Under this presumption, do the words he gives to the media even matter?

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Golden Linings/Crimson Bindings: the scoring monsoon

A feature looking at the recent positives of the Sens' play.

Last season, in 48 games, the Senators were shut out 4 times. This season, in 35 games, the Sens have been shut out once. This puts us on pace for approximately 2 to 3 blanks this year... in double the number of games. We have 5 players in top 50 league-wide scoring (well, MacArthur is #52); Erik Karlsson and Kyle Turris are 10th and 19th league-wide assists; and we're sitting nice and pretty at 2.80 goals per game, good for ninth in the league.

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Game n°33 preview: Sabres lumber in to Sens' snow playground

All right, so the Canadian Tire Centre hasn't exactly been our playground so far this season. But the snow's been here for three weeks, and so has the Sens' play; we've been above 50% in Fenwick For Close for the past eight games. Although it's hard to know exactly how much encouragement to take from this, given that we lost to Buffalo in a ridiculous game on Tuesday, Ottawa seems to be trending firmly upward. And this home game versus the (dead-last-by-seven-points) Sabres should be an easy on to take to help continue the trend.

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