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SENShobo

New Look Sens Two Games In, Will It Last?

by SENShobo on 10/07/08 at 08:51 AM ET
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• Heatley quickly earning praise to go with his ‘A’.
• The Premiere Series shows Sens as a different team.
• Fisher eager to get back in the game, Emery a little farther behind.

• It’s amazing, all the little ways Heatley is adding to his game, and all it took was a long summer and a little ‘A’ on his jersey (ESPN).

Forget for a moment the three goals he scored this weekend as the Ottawa Senators took three points from their opening two games of the season with the Pittsburgh Penguins, capping their Swedish trip with a 3-1 win Sunday night.

“[He was] blocking shots!” said an enthusiastic Sens coach Craig Hartsburg.

And he went after Brooks Orpik when the Pittsburgh defenseman roughed up Ottawa captain Daniel Alfredsson at the end of the first period.

And he yelled while on the bench to pump up his teammates when the game was still scoreless.

Hockey fans, meet the new Dany Heatley. Not just a 50-goal man, but a leader and a more complete player. Two games into the 2008-09 season, it’s impressive.

While not nearly as subject to the offence-only criticisms leveled at Spezza, Heatley has had his fair share of one-dimensional labeling over the years. This season, at least from the start, he is looking more and more like the man who had a reason to want that ‘A’. Some might have suspected that it would only be Hartsburg caving to superstar power, giving the duty to a cannon, but as he sought to motivate and inspire the team in every way possible — on Alfie’s home turf no less — Heatley really is turning heads, showing us all that he wants to flesh out his game in every way possible.

• A new season, and already it looks like we might have a new team on our hands (Ottawa Sun, Sportsnet, Ottawa Citizen).

What was most impressive was how the Senators handled themselves late in Sunday’s game when the clearly agitated Penguins were feeling a little nasty. It all started when Alfredsson, who always plays with jam but was especially pumped playing before his hometown crowd, nailed Maxime Talbot with an open-ice hit.

A little later Matt Cooke, a newcomer to the Penguins and a physical force, tried to atone for Alfredsson’s hit by taking a shot at the local hero. Good hit; bad timing. Instantly Ottawa defenceman Chris Phillips stepped up and flattened Cooke.

Right then it was obvious this Ottawa Senators team was different.

It was hard to ignore the changes in the team during the Premiere Series in Stockholm. For a team that was chided for not hounding opposing guns enough, there was Smith, relentlessly following Crosby as he’d done in the Eastern Conference Finals this spring. Even as a team that was seen to be scoring too many pretty goals, all three on Sunday needed extra work: Heatley’s opener hit Fleury’s pad before he shoved it five-hole, Heatley’s second had him dropping to one knee to give his blast enough power to trickle in after Fleury got a piece of it, and Vermette’s goal was also blocked by Fleury’s pad, with Vermette sticking with it to shove it around between the pipe and Fleury’s skate.

It’s doubtful the Penguins were calling the Senators easy to play against after the two games in Stockholm, but on Sunday in particular. Bodies flying in front of the Ottawa net from defenders flinging Pittsburgh forwards, with Sidney Crosby getting slammed by former teammate Jarkko Ruutu, Ruutu thoughtfully washing the kid’s face like a parent to a child after a plate of spaghetti.

During their condensed training camp, this was the Senators’ mantra: be harder to play against. More physical. Tighter defensively, with the forwards helping out the defence. Defenceman pinning opposing forwards against the boards on the rush.

It was all so much theory until the group went to Stockholm and demonstrated the new playbook, a textbook example of how they want to play.

• Fisher getting antsy to play Saturday, and Emery is already getting his tires kicked (Ottawa Sun).

Senators centre Mike Fisher hopes the next few days will be the medicine he needs for his sore groin.

He wasn’t too happy after missing the first two games of the regular season against the Pittsburgh Penguins.

“I can go half-speed, but as soon as I try and do more than that I can feel it,” said Fisher in the hallway outside the Senators dressing room after the Senators 3-1 win Sunday over the Penguins. He tried skating Sunday morning.

The Sens put forth a brilliant effort in both games over the weekend without Fisher, but that was only against the depleted Stanley Cup Finalists. No doubt, against the restocked Cup Champion Red Wings, the Sens would appreciate the added grit and scoring capabilities of Fisher, but then again the last thing anyone wants is to have another season of nagging injuries to our top players.

Ray Emery could be a man in demand.

The word here is one NHL club has already put out feelers about getting the former Senators goaltender out of Russia and back in an NHL uniform.

But apparently Emery, ranked 24th among 48 KHL goalies listed by Russian Hockey Digest (2.65 GAA, .896 save percentage) is intent on playing out this season in Russia.

I’d have to think that it would be a heck of a lot of moving to suddenly run back to the NHL, and most likely a lot of salary to give up. Couple that with the fact that the NHL and KHL would likely look sternly on such a switch — already in a staring contest over Radulov’s defection to Russia — and odds are we won’t be seeing Emery for a while yet.

Filed in: NHL Teams, Ottawa Senators | SENShobo | Permalink
 Tags: Dany+Heatley, Mike+Fisher, Ray+Emery,

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