After losing six straight games in the middle of March, the Ottawa Senators have now picked up five points over their last three games, one of which included a home-ice victory against the defending Stanley Cup champions.
Now, they'll go through perhaps the most taxing week of the season -- five games in seven nights, starting with a back-to-back on Sunday and Monday against Calgary and New York, respectively.
Though their playoff lives were decided quite a bit of time ago, it appears the players are still holding on to the extremely remote possibility of running the table. I sense it's more of a motivational thing than anything else, but you can't really knock guys for wanting to perform down the stretch, post-season berth or not.
Zack Smith added this after the win against Chicago (OS)
"It's there," said centre Zack Smith following Friday's 5-3 win over the defending Stanley Cup champions. "You can't look at it. That might have been what got us in trouble before: We were always so worried about the standings and losing one game and falling back."At this point, all you can do is win one game at a time and who knows until we're out and someone tells us it's mathematically impossible. Even then, you are still going to try and win games. There's a lot at stake, not just the standings, it's guy's jobs next year. If we like the guys in the room, and we want to keep it this way, it's in everybody's best interests to start winning."
Their opponent on Sunday afternoon is a team I've sort of been infatuated with this season in the Calgary Flames. While the Flames were one of only a couple of guaranteed blow-it-up/tank-it-out teams identified early in the season, they've actually been playing really respectable hockey of late.
Last Sunday, I wrote about how the team is playing to respectability at even-strength, perhaps more so than at any period during the Edmonton Oilers infinite-year-rebuild. Take a look at their last twenty-five game stretch below. They've moved from "team getting consistently drilled on the shot-clock" to "team trading shot for shot with the opposition". Pretty impressive, I think, all things considered.
Concerning the lineups today, there's not a lot out there, though I do suspect we'll see Karri Ramo for the Flames and Craig Anderson for the Senators.
Puck drops at 5:00 PM ET.
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