The NHL season is a long marathon, and you can't put too much stock into what happens in any single six or seven game stretch.
But you can put some stock into it. The Ottawa Senators, since returning from Sweden, haven't played well. There hasn't been a sustained stretch of offensive dominance in any one game. The offense, which was among the league leaders through the first 15 games of the season has all but dried up to the point that they have fallen out of the top 10 and now sit 12th, at an even 3 goals per game.
Eight goals in six games isn't going to result in many wins.
Especially since their defensive game isn't up to where it was last season. Since returning from the Western Canadian road trip, the Senators have allowed 3 or more goals in 14 of 17 games. When the offense was rolling it wasn't as big an issue, but now that the Senators are struggling to find the back of the net, the resulting string of L's has them dropping in the standings.
Guy Boucher has been unable to bring any consistency to the lineup, sometimes due to injuries and more often his propensity to shuffle up the lines in-game more often than Donald Trump tweets something offensive.
Now with a potentially season-defining road trip set to kick off on Thursday (EDIT: Wednesday, apparently I can't read a calendar!) , do you think that this is just a normal downswing in a long season that they will recover from, or is there a legitimate cause for concern that is is a trend?