It might be too late for moral victories, but at this point in the Senators season, finding any bright spot is a positive.
On the second half of back to back games in the metro LA area, and following a couple of games where they weren't really in the game, the Senators picked a decent time to come up with their best performance in weeks, albeit a night they came out on the losing end.
Mike Condon was stellar for the most part, and the Senators fought back three times to tie the game, the last coming with under 10 seconds left to secure a desperately needed point.
While they were unable to seal the deal for the upset win in overtime, there were some positives. Matt Duchene had a goal and an assist, Erik Karlsson snapped his career long pointless streak with an assist and despite allowing one questionable goal on a long, unscreened shot, Condon put in the best goaltending effort the team has seen in some time.
It wasn't just the result, but the fact that the Senators seemed engaged for a majority of the game, and although glaring mistakes were made hopefully the attention to detail can come with the increased intensity.
Tyler Toffoli made Ben Harpur look silly and then caught Karlsson guessing in a play that led to the first goal, and a breakdown in coverage led to Alex Iafallo's partial breakaway off a nice stretch pass from Dustin Brown. Brown gave the Kings their third lead of the game, on a nice deflection off a point shot that Brown got a piece of and lobbed over the shoulder of the Ottawa netminder. It was really a shot that no goalie would have saved, the way it bounced up and over Condon.
Duchene tied it up in the first on a power play, Jean Gabriel Pageau evened the score in the second, both knocking rebounds into a relatively open net. With the Ottawa goalie on the bench for the extra attacker, Duchene showed nice patience to find Ryan Dzingel in front of the net and he put it past Darcy Kuemper on a couple of whacks from in close.
Drew Doughty ended it in overtime, on a counter-attack 2-on-1 that caught Duchene flat-footed and he slid it past Condon to give the Kings their 7th straight win.
The Senators wrap up the West-coast portion of their road trip on Saturday night in San Jose, where we will get an indication if there is a light at the end of the tunnel or if it was just a blip like the game in Brooklyn last week, the Senators' lone win since Remembrance Day.
Duchene had his most productive game since becoming a Senator, and if he can string together some more like that it would go a long way to helping his new team re-engage in some sort of playoff chase.
There is still lots of work to do to get out of this hole, and everyone needs to be better still, but given the games in Winnipeg and a lesser extent Anaheim, at least they are trending in the right direction for the moment.