SENShobo
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Wings Beat Sens, Give Lesson In Team Play
by SENShobo on 10/12/08 at 09:30 AM ET
Comments (6)
This morning’s Ottawa Senators stories:
- Sens lose 3-2 heartbreaker to Wings.
- Alfie begins working out his knee today after Friday’s surgery.
- I bear firsthand witness, the Sens lost to Detroit, and justifiably so (NHL.com, Ottawa Sun, Ottawa Citizen, Ottawa Sun).
“If you don’t shoot, you don’t score,” Franzen said. “I saw it all the way and I saw that spin on it. It hit the top of his pad and kept that momentum and it went right by the post. It was a lucky one.”
“We had them where we wanted them. It was just a matter of hanging onto the puck and we didn’t do that,” said Foligno, who had split a pair of Wings for a spectacular goal late in the second for the Senators’ 2-1 lead. “They’re a great team. They didn’t win last year for no reason. They never throw the puck away and we can learn from that.”
“You definitely can’t blame that one on Gerbs,” Foligno said.
“I’m not questioning that it was a strange goal,” [Hartsburg] said of Franzen’s second. “It bounced and skipped up on him. You don’t see them bounce like that often.
“For 59 minutes he was the guy who kept us in. If he doesn’t play the way he did, at that point it probably doesn’t matter.
“He gave us a chance to be in the hockey game and he made a lot of great saves.”
Alfredsson watched the game on TV from the Senators’ dressing room, while icing his knee. He was one of many in the building feeling bad for goaltender Martin Gerber, who stopped 38 shots but couldn’t handle a bouncing puck on the winning Detroit goal by Johan Franzen. “It hit a stick, took one bounce, then another bounce,” Alfie said. “He (Gerber) played pretty good, though.”
Asked last night if Gerber still has the confidence of his fellow Senators, injured captain Daniel Alfredsson suddenly wore an incredulous look on his face.
“It’s been two games, of course he has,” Alfredsson, who watched the defeat from the confines of the Senators dressing room, said before he limped (slightly) from the building. “He played great (last night).”
Alfredsson called the 32-foot game-winning snap shot by Johan Franzen with 77 seconds left a “bad break,” saying it “hit a stick, took one bounce, then another.”
Acting captain Dany Heatley felt bad for Gerber, who faced 41 shots while Chris Osgood saw only 22 from Ottawa shooters.
“He played really well ... especially early on, he held us in the game,” said Heatley. “He had a lot of work tonight and he made some huge saves for us.”
Perhaps Gerber’s best was off Red Wings star Henrik Zetterberg with the Senators up by one in the third.
“Gerber played good, he made some key saves for them,” said Zetterberg. “But in the long run, the puck will go in if you keep putting it there. And (last night) it did.”
But none of that matters, right? They’re all wrong, idiots, liars, don’t you think? How else could it be that so many Sens fans today seem to have taken their photos of Gerber’s new mask and placed it on their dartboards? Clearly, he is the source of all our woes. Too bad for me that there’s no html code for dripping-with-sarcasm. The team lost the game.
Take a look at the performances you could have had last night, from goalies Ottawa fans have mentioned in their Christmas wish lists: Toskala, 6 goals on 23 shots (pulled), Biron, 4 goals on 14 shots (pulled), Lundqvist, 3 goals on 28 shots, Turco, 3 goals on 32 shots, Luongo, 4 goals on 29 shots, Kiprusoff, 5 goals on 34 shots. Not one on that list would have kept us in the game as long as Gerber, 3 goals on 41 shots, did. Only two goalies could have: Brodeur, 1 goal on 15 shots (though a mere four more saves would have put Gerber and Brodeur on par for last night), and Fleury, 2 goals on 49 shots, the lone goalie to face the pressure Gerber did, and still come out on top. And to think, some Sens fans wonder why Ottawa is known as a goalie graveyard, even as every season they start work as soon as they can, digging a new grave.
This game, Gerber looked better than he did against Pittsburgh a week ago. Instead of Malkin and Crosby (minus their injured puckmoving defencemen), you’re facing Hossa, Datsyuk, Franzen, and Zetterberg, along with Rafalski and Lidstrom. Instead of getting the 22 shot cakewalk Osgood was served up, Gerber gets a 41 shot feast, not to mention the pressure of seeing the puck on Detroit’s sticks for the vast majority of the game. Yet this game, he looked incredible on oh so many swallowed up shots and crazy sprawling acrobatics, and the two goals he let in that were questionable came from unfortunate luck: one just sneaking into the last inch of post after being aimed at the other post and getting deflected off an Ottawa stick, the other just having enough juice to keep going after Gerber’s pad got it, much as Heatley’s down-to-a-knee shot beat Fleury in the same way last weekend. I don’t like defending Gerber, because I really don’t think I should have to. If you truly believe that a goalie did a bad job letting in 3 goals on 41 shots facing the only-summer-improved Stanley Cup champs, you’re living in a fantasy world.
The Sens just weren’t up to Gerber’s level. Foligno had a must-see goal, where he was sandwiched between two Detroit players, and still got up right at the crease in time to score on Osgood, and newcomer Picard scored on a very nice shot, what must have been Ottawa’s first 5 on 3 goal in a season or more. Other than that though, we just weren’t clicking. Bad line changes eventually led to Franzen being left out with all the time and space he needed to tie the game.
On the powerplay, while we did score one of our goals on the 5 on 3, it looked puzzled elsewhere. On the penalty kill, usually our strong point, we looked just as bewildered, reliving the same nightmare as time after time the puck would get rimmed around the boards, and over and over again, Detroit would stop it at the blueline, half a dozen times and they still hadn’t noticed that repetitive gonna-get-you-soon result.
It was indeed the new players — rookies, signees, or trades — that looked the best. While Neil had been excellent in his role last weekend, he somehow managed to take an interference call on a 5 on 3. There is only one situation in which you take a penalty with a two-man advantage, and tonight Alfie was not playing. I’m still not sure whether Donovan did dive as he was called for, or just fell for some reason with nobody around him as my father kept insisting.
For all their hard work at times, it just wouldn’t come through. Phillips had 6 hits and the Sens outhit Detroit 27-18, but there were so few hits that got any kind of roar from the crowd. Heatley and Spezza had their chances to get shots in, put pressure on, but still couldn’t connect, and it wasn’t quite the same inspiring performance of last Sunday. The times I felt we were most likely to score were when Vermette got a few shorthanded breakaways, and that’s saying something.
But the team is still young in its current form, still without its key cog in Alfredsson, and still without a fully engrained new system from Hartsburg. When you play against the best, especially after they’ve been beaten in a most humiliating way, you can’t expect a win unless you pull out all the stops. It was far from the Senators’ worst effort, but we were not going to be the team to give Detroit its first 0-2 start to a season since 88-89.
- Alfie hopes to be back from surgery soon (Ottawa Sun, Ottawa Senators’ web).
“It’s a big disappointment. This was a game I really wanted to play in ... Playing Detroit, I really enjoy the way they play, and the type of players they have” said Alfredsson.
“Especially with them winning the Cup last year, this is a game (you want to play in). That’s why I thought of playing this game and then looking after (the knee) after the game, but with the Thanksgiving weekend, I would probably have to wait until Tuesday. I felt good about making the choice of doing it right away, but this is a tough game to miss.”
We missed him last night, no doubts there, but it had to happen. Not only is it a good break in the season to get it done and healed up, but it’s time that the Sens were reminded, early in the season, how much they need to be able to step up without Alfie in the lineup. Now a dismal 3-9-1 in the past two season without their captain, the Sens need to think long and hard about the meaning of ‘team’.
Filed in: NHL Teams, Ottawa Senators | SENShobo | Permalink
Tags: Daniel+Alfredsson,
Comments
I wouldn’t expect them to have goalie graves pre-dug at the start of the season like that.
Wouldn’t “pre-dug” be every patch of dirt on the planet. Pre-dug is not dug yet, right? So I would expect everyone to have a grave pre-dug at this point. What I wouldn’t expect is them to have actually started digging.
Posted by SenProf from in your kitchen on 10/12/08 at 06:18 PM ET
Definitely agree with you about Gerber. Ottawa’s not in that game unless he plays absolutely phenomenal for the rest of it. He made some great saves but when that puck went in all I could think of was “man, the Ottawa media is going to crucify him for this.”
He played a great game and what was really showcased is that our defence just isn’t up to par quite yet (and that Spezza still gives the puck away every time he gets possession).
Posted by Andy from Ottawa on 10/12/08 at 10:41 PM ET
Pre-dug = dug before necessary. Amazingly, words are used in contexts that give them meaning.
Agreed on Gerber. He played very well and was the only reason there was a game left to play at the end. I’d like to think the outcome would have been similar, but this team’s demeanor is completely different without Alfredsson in the lineup; I haven’t seen a team this dependent on a captain since my own Wings during Stevie Y’s first few cup years.
Solid writeup as usual Hobo. Well done.
Posted by Osrt on 10/13/08 at 03:33 AM ET
I did forgeyt to emphasizw the solid play of Winchester though, a good, simple smart play counteroint to Spezza on that top line.
Plus all Sens fans will know what I mean when I suggest he had Shaefer-like tenacity on the boards (so did Foligno as well).
Posted by SENShobo from Waterloo, ON on 10/13/08 at 11:54 AM ET
Pre-dug = dug before necessary. Amazingly, words are used in contexts that give them meaning.
Thanks for the lesson my friend, but I think you’ll find that my assertion was correct. EVERYTHING is pre-dug. There is no such word. I think you are looking for prematurely dug = dug before necessary. I could use burgfasdex in a context that would allow one to attribute meaning, but that doesn’t make it a word.
Cheers and good luck in Detroit.
Posted by SenProf from still here on 10/14/08 at 01:28 PM ET
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I thought Gerber was very good. Ottawa seems to be a relatively mellow city. I wouldn’t expect them to have goalie graves pre-dug at the start of the season like that.
Posted by Baroque from Michigan on 10/12/08 at 03:25 PM ET