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Game Day: Stars @ Senators - Who are the real Senators? |
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Suffering from a lack of identity and sending more mixed messages than perhaps any team in the league, the Ottawa Senators look to put a streak of relatively poor performances behind them and resume their winning ways against the Dallas Stars.
Mike Condon will resume his role in the net after getting the night off in the Sens 6-0 loss to the Blues on Tuesday, and after some speculation that Craig Anderson might dress as the backup, it will be Andrew Hammond.
However, after being shut out in consecutive games by Robin Lehner and Jake Allen, the focus will be at the other end of the ice to see if they can give their goalie any kind of goal support.
The Senators will put Freddie Claesson back in and go with seven defensemen, while Curtis Lazar and Chris Neil will both sit out.
The Senators are a tough team to figure out. One week they are beating two of the top teams in the league, and the next week they are losing to teams that are outside the playoffs looking in, and putting forth terrible efforts to go with it. We have seen the peaks and the valleys, but the problem is you never know what Senators team is going to show up on any given night. Guy Boucher is still looking for the consistency from the lineup that can beat anyone on any given night, but not necessarily on nights when it is needed, and they seem, for some inexplicable reason, to take certain games for granted and aren't ready to go for those games.
Enter the Dallas Stars, who despite having some of the more prolific offensive players in the league are currently sitting in 28th place, riding the back of a goaltending tandem that has the second worst GAA in the league and the Stars are giving up 3.17 goals per game.
The Stars have stumbled out of the All-Star break, have lost three straight games heading into this one. Having talked to a friend who is a Leafs fan, who just beat the Stars on Tuesday the Stars generate a lot of offense but don't play much defense at the moment, and their goaltending leaves a lot to be desired. They are also without former Senators centre Jason Spezza, who has been out for a week with an injury, which has hurt their depth down the middle. Cody Eakin is centering a line (call it 1A or 1B with Jamie Benn, while Tyler Seguin is centering the other top line as they have split their top two offensive players to try to spread out the offense. They did this against Toronto, but in the third period when they were trying to come from behind, Lindy Ruff re-united Benn and Seguin, but it wasn't enough to beat Curtis McElhinney and the Leafs.
Kari Lehtonen has been getting a bulk of the workload of late, and Antti Niemi played in Toronto so Lehtonen will play against the Senators. Neither one has been very good and the odds are actually pretty good that we might see both goalies in this one. Dallas has switched goalies 10 times in 54 games so far this season and neither one has been great or posted good numbers.
Dallas is a team that you can't take for granted, especially with the Senators struggling to score at the moment and their penchant for making opposing goalies look better than they are on many nights. It is, however, a chance for the Senators to break out and put up a big number on the scoreboard, as the Stars have allowed at least three goals in each of their last four games, and 9 of their last 11.
This is another one that is there for the taking, as long as they can keep Benn and Seguin in check. With Florida healthy and creeping up on them, Toronto keeping pace and the Wild Card bar being raised, the Senators have blown a couple of good opportunities to create some space for themselves. That opportunity presents itself again against a struggling Dallas team and they can't blow many more of these games that they should win, lest they get dragged into a dogfight where "should win" gets the added pressure of becoming "must win".
Ottawa Senators Blogger • 
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