Senators piling up losses on self-inflicted mistakes

OTTAWA — The Ottawa Senators keep finding ways to lose.

The Senators are 2-6-0 in their last eight games, moving themselves six points out of a playoff spot.

A poor penalty kill and a botched clearing attempt by Tyler Kleven in the final minute of regulation prevented the Senators from earning a point in Saturday’s 3-2 loss to the Minnesota Wild.

“(I) like our team game right now,” said head coach Travis Green after the Senators outshot the Wild 36-25. “We played three strong games at home that we didn’t win, and the league’s tight right now. One little mistake here and there can cost you and tonight it did.”

Panic buttons are being hit in the nation’s capital, and this time it’s not the politicians.

Of those six losses, five have been by a single goal (discounting empty netters). The Senators lead the league with seven one-goal defeats in regulation, a trend that harks back to the D.J. Smith era of moral victories.

The Senators’ 11 one-goal losses so far this season are tied for second in the NHL behind the Blackhawks.

Every loss makes the journey back up the standings that much harder.

The season is far from over, but when teams are grabbing Ls from the jaws of victory, there are inevitably many reasons.

The biggest issue right now is the Senators’ inability to score at five-on-five. They are middle of the pack at 2.49 goals per game at five-on-five this season, which ranks them 16th in the league. But lately the Senators have not just made Vezina-winner Igor Shesterkin and league-beater Jesper Wallstedt look like prime Patrick Roy; they’ve even done it to Joel Hofer.

Some of that may just be bad luck. The team has a 6.7 shooting percentage in their eight-game funk, but that illuminates the biggest question mark with the Senators’ forward group.

Who’s their sniper?

No one on the current Senators roster has ever scored 40 goals. Tim Stutzle was the closest with 39 in 2022-23, and he’s on pace for 39 this season. Internally, the organization knows they do not have enough elite scorers who can turn games in their favour, even if they haven’t played particularly well.

“You can watch a guy, just trying to think of a name like Artemi Panarin the other night,” Green told Sportsnet.ca last week. “He does some things that quite honestly, we might not have a player that can do that as a winger and play that way. So you can’t just say, ‘Hey, we’re going to play like him.’ So you have to be mindful of all that as a coach and also understand that there’s a certain identity that you want to have within your team as well.”

The Senators are short offensively, despite acquiring Fabian Zetterlund and Dylan Cozens last season to improve their five-on-five offence. Neither player is going to score 40 goals, so the Senators are still missing a star sniper. And Brady Tkachuk has only one goal this season after missing 20 games with a wrist injury.

• 32 Thoughts: The Podcast

  Hockey fans already know the name, but this is not the blog. From Sportsnet, 32 Thoughts: The Podcast with NHL Insider Elliotte Friedman and Kyle Bukauskas is a weekly deep dive into the biggest news and interviews from the hockey world.

  Latest episode

The issue for GM Steve Staios is that it’s not easy to find and acquire a star goal-scorer.

The Senators lack their first-round pick in 2026 and have few elite prospects outside of Carter Yakemchuk and Logan Hensler. That makes a Quinn Hughes-esque trade harder to pull off.

To be fair, in the last eight games, the Senators have the best expected goals share in the league at five-on-five. Combine that with the ninth-worst shooting percentage and fourth-worst PDO (which is generally known in hockey circles as a measure of poor puck luck). In other words, eventually good process should lead to good results. But where the Senators are in the standings, they need great results. The Senators are a five-game winning streak away from being in a playoff spot, and a five-game losing streak away from being out of playoff contention.

Meanwhile, the Senators have the second-worst penalty kill in the league. How many times has the Senators’ penalty kill unit left the backdoor wide open? Allowing even one goal down the man-advantage sometimes means zero points on the standings table.

Look at Dmitri Voronkov and Ryan Hartman’s goals in successive games when Ottawa’s diamond formation was picked apart for easy tap-ins.

If the penalty kill doesn’t improve, the Senators’ pathway to the playoffs may be moot.

Mind you, goaltending hasn’t helped the penalty killing or the results.

The Senators have been “goalied” of late: Wallstedt made 33 saves on Saturday in Minnesota, saving 2.49 goals above expected. The Senators, by contrast, have the worst save percentage in the NHL at .871.

They’ve consistently had the second-best goalie on the ice, whether it’s Linus Ullmark or Leevi Merilainen. The Senators are fourth with an expected goals allowed rate of 2.87 per 60 minutes, yet they’ve allowed 3.24 goals per game.

Remember when the 2023-24 Ottawa Senators had the worst team save percentage in the league? How did they do?… Ottawa may be the ultimate goalie graveyard.

It also doesn’t help when a defensive pairing is struggling mightily. That’s been the case with Tyler Kleven and Jordan Spence, who have been drowning in an elevated second-pair role since Thomas Chabot has been out with an injury. Against New Jersey, three of the goals allowed were a direct result of a turnover by this pair. Then against the Wild, Kleven’s turnover led straight to Minnesota’s winning goal with 22 seconds to play. Analytically, both have been fine, but major mistakes have plagued them. They look overwhelmed playing against second-pair competition and it led to Green splitting the two up against Minnesota at times.

Chabot cannot return to the lineup soon enough.

The defensive prowess that allowed the Senators to be tied for the most shutouts in the league last season has evaporated due to poor penalty killing, poor performances, and poor goaltending. The Senators have allowed one or fewer goals this season three times through 31 games with no shutouts. Meanwhile, Ottawa has allowed the opening goal 19 times this season, tied for the third-worst in the league.

It’s too easy to ask what if? But if the Senators replayed the last eight games they’d probably have a record above .500 nine times out of 10. They outshot teams 245-211, had an advantage in high-danger chances of 114 to 81 and rank fifth in expected goals over that time period.

It’s not that the Senators have been brutal of late, but they are losing the narrow margins enough to lead to brutal outcomes. The Senators could easily go on a reverse 6-2-0 streak with a few adjustments but it’s up to them to turn moral victories into winning streaks. Otherwise, all the goodwill from last season’s playoff appearance will be lost with another season ending after 82 games.

Adams’ Apples

Senators owner Michael Andlauer spoke about the project at LeBreton Flats on the Coming in Hot Podcast Saturday.

“There’s no doubt I can’t fund this by myself,” Andlauer said. “We have one chance to do this right.

“We have to make sure that we cross the T’s and dot the I’s…At the end of the day, I want everybody in the same room. If we all want this, we will do what’s right.”

The owner said there is no timeline on the arena but he doesn’t expect it to open in the next three years. The Senators signed an agreement of purchase and sale for land parcels totalling approximately 11 acres at LeBreton Flats this summer with the National Capital Commission. The Senators have hired StrategyCorp. Inc. to lobby the provincial and federal governments to help fund the project. The questions that await a downtown arena are: Who will pay for the downtown arena? And how?

More from Sportsnet Joel Eriksson Ek’s late goal lifts Wild past Senators

Explaining how Senators have been better without Brady Tkachuk than with