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Lost It

December 27, 2013, 9:48 PM ET [28 Comments]
Travis Yost
Ottawa Senators Blogger • RSSArchiveCONTACT
I'll give the 2013 Ottawa Senators this much -- they always find a new way to surprise me.

Tonight, for example, was something fresh and original. Ottawa territorially dominated Boston for the first twenty minutes, but unfortunately headed into intermission tied at zeroes.

Then, unmitigated tire fire. This probably has as much to do with the opponent as it does with this year's Senators; the Bruins really are an elite hockey team, and it's actually impressive how they can just reverse course and basically delete a bad twenty minutes by just dominating the competition the rest of the way. But, the Senators of old -- the Senators from, say, October -- reared their heads. And every problem seemed to start in the defensive-third.

Ottawa's shot-attempts, which spiked so high in PD1, basically were non-existent the rest of the way. A lot of that is because getting through the neutral zone and into the offensive zone starts with clean exits on the back-end, and those were horrifyingly awful against Boston's tenacious forecheck.

Somewhere along the line, Paul MacLean made the conscious decision to reallocate his ice-time back to the gruesome deployment that's hampered this team so often this year, leaning heavily on the likes of Colin Greening, Zack Smith, and Chris Neil. This is obviously objectionable for so many reasons, namely that they're the single least-productive line in hockey this year when it comes to point-scoring, and they're worse than, say, the Turris line when it comes to keeping pucks out of the back of their net.

Colin Greening, who I'd argue has been the team's worst forward (running away with it, actually), played 17:35. Chris Neil, who really has no business skating important third-period minutes with a team down just one goal, skated 14:48. Zack Smith, one of Paul MacLean's favorites, grabbed 16:39.

This is important, because those numbers are far higher than the likes of the MacArthur-Turris-Ryan line; far higher than the Condra-Pageau-Zibanejad line, and comparable to the Conacher-Spezza-Michalek line. Again: they never, ever score. And they're, at best, average at goal-deterrence.

It's tough to even find a justifiable argument in support of that sort of deployment. What, exactly, did Greening do tonight to earn such heavy minutes? And, even in this parallel universe where Greening had a decent game and earned a bit extra of a work-load (it didn't happen), are the first thirty-nine games just totally irrelevant?

I'm yet to figure this team out. I'm yet to figure the player usage out. I will. I think I will. Maybe.

Boston rattled off four goals in the third (Krejci, Smith x 2, Marchand), with Tuukka Rask stopping all 33-shots he faced.

They meet again tomorrow in Ottawa.

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