Something has got to give Wednesday night when the Ottawa Senators visit the Anaheim Ducks to start a three-game California road trip.
Ottawa, last in the Atlantic Division with 53 points, has the worst road record in the Eastern Conference at 8-17-1. Meanwhile, Anaheim, which is seventh in the Pacific Division with 47 points, has the worst home mark in the NHL at 9-21-1.
It’s the second game of Ottawa’s four-game road trip, which started with a 4-2 loss at Philadelphia on Saturday. The NHL schedule-maker was kind enough to give the Senators a three-day break before playing the Ducks, which meant time to heal up and enjoy the warm, sunny southern California weather.
Ottawa, which has lost four in a row, did some dry training on Monday by the Pacific Ocean.
“Obviously nice to have a change every once in a while and do something different,” defenseman Jacob Bernard-Docker said. “It’s nice to hop in the ocean after the workout.”
The warm salt water obviously had some healing powers. Regular goalies Joonas Korpisalo (illness) and Anton Forsberg (lower-body) and captain Brady Tkachuk (upper-body), who all missed the loss to the Flyers, were back on the ice for practice at the Honda Center on Tuesday.
Tkachuk, a late scratch after taking part in the morning skate in Philadelphia, had his iron man streak of 219 consecutive games snapped, the eighth longest in franchise history.
“We have a lot of bumps and bruises,” defenseman Thomas Chabot told TSN 1200 radio after Saturday’s game. “We’re going to take advantage of the rest and fine-tune some of the details to have a good rest of the road trip.”
The game with Anaheim is the front end of back-to-back that concludes Thursday at Los Angeles. The Senators finish the trip up the coast at San Jose on Saturday.
“It’s probably a good time to recover,” Ottawa coach Jacques Martin said. “(Off) Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, then we have (a) back-to-back. It’s a welcome break, and we’ll have some practice time to focus on a couple of areas.”
It’s the third game of a five-game homestand for Anaheim, which is 4-5-1 over its last 10 games. The Ducks opened the homestand on Friday with a 4-3 victory over New Jersey then lost to Western Conference leader Vancouver 2-1 on Sunday night.
Anaheim managed just 18 shots on goal and a first-period score by Alex Killorn against the Canucks. With regular goalie John Gibson out because of illness, Lucas Dostal, who made an eye-popping 52 saves against the Devils, was back in net and stopped 29 more shots.
Conor Garland scored the game-winner for Vancouver in the second period with a redirection of a Nikita Zadorov feed 11 seconds after Anaheim had killed off a penalty.
“Those games hurt because you’re in the game,” Ducks coach Greg Cronin said. “At the same time, they had more chances than we did. I don’t think we generated enough.”
Garland’s game-winner came after Anaheim had killed back-to-back penalties.
“The second goal was unnecessary,” Cronin said. “We killed two penalties in a row and (Sam Carrick) comes out of the box and we’re in a five-on-five situation and it seemed like we didn’t react to it. It looked like we had lost our structure to give a tap-in goal like that, as a game-winner. That’s frustrating.”
–Field Level Media
