After beating the Toronto Maple Leafs on Saturday night, the Ottawa Senators packed up their bags and headed down to Pennsylvania, where they'll play the final game of a disappointing season in Pittsburgh.
Despite maybe playing some of their best hockey of the season down the stretch (7-2-1 last ten games), they ran out of runway to reach the post-season a long time ago, and they'll know have to deal with a gruelingly long summer to figure out just how and why a talented roster missed the playoffs in a wide open Eastern Conference.
Though Ottawa can still finish with a fairly respectable 88-points on the season with a win on Sunday, expectations were much, much higher after last year's success. Bryan Murray and the rest of the organization are going to have to figure out where it all fell apart, and my guess is that they'll really try to fix the defensive zone stuff before puck drop next October.
Next October. Kind of painful to say, isn't it? Five months without hockey is a long, long time.
Concerning tonight's lineups, I expect something similar to what Ottawa deployed last year against Toronto, but perhaps rolling with back-up Robin Lehner instead of Craig Anderson.
Pittsburgh, almost certainly, will rest a number of skaters. Right now, all of their focus is on an upcoming first-round match-up with Columbus, an upstart team that's really impressed this particular blogger since mid-November or so.
They've already announced Evgeni Malkin, Chris Connor, and Joe Vitale are all game time decisions according to Bylsma. Expect Jeff Zatkoff to start in goal.
Enjoy the final sixty minutes of the season.
Thanks for reading!