The challenge: Don’t get cocky with Coyotes
Arizona’s win in Montreal has Ottawa’s full attention as team prepares for long road trip
The way Mark Stone sees it, the Ottawa Senators have to become stats-blind in preparing for the struggling Arizona Coyotes on Saturday afternoon.
“It shouldn’t happen, but I do think it does creep in there sometimes,” Stone said of teams having a tendency to take bottom-rung teams lightly.
“In our locker-room, I don’t think it does. Right now, the teams that we know we have to beat, we have been able to beat and (Saturday) is no different.”
Even after defeating the Montreal Canadiens 5-4 on Thursday — the Coyotes’ first regulation win of the season — Arizona comes into the Canadian Tire Centre with a record of 3-15-3, already 14 points behind the expansion Vegas Golden Knights and 11 points out of a playoff spot. The win over the Canadiens ended a five-game losing streak and the Coyotes have allowed a league-high 83 goals against.
Picking up from where Stone left off, Senators coach Guy Boucher says his squad has to become colour-blind.
“I don’t care what colour their jersey is,” said Boucher. “If it’s blue, yellow, black, green, I don’t care. It’s about ourselves. We’re not even looking right now at the opponent. We’re looking at keeping our game for 60 minutes.”
For the record, the Coyotes official team colours are brick red, desert sand, black and white.
Meanwhile, the Senators’ first 17 games have been coloured by inconsistency and they enter Saturday’s game on a low. After a decent start against the Pittsburgh Penguins on Thursday, they lost their attention to detail, allowing the Penguins to take the game away en route to a 3-1 defeat.
“Terrific first period, it could have been 2-0 or 3-0 for us at that point,” Boucher said of the loss to the Penguins. “But we didn’t sustain that and one big reason was we definitely overextended our shifts. They did not. We stopped doing what we did in the first period. Our work ethic diminished and our discipline diminished as the game went on.”
Boucher was harping on those messages over and over again at practice Friday.
There were changes on the forward lines, with Tom Pyatt and Mike Hoffman flipping spots. Pyatt skated on a line with Stone and Derick Brassard, while Hoffman was on a unit with Jean-Gabriel Pageau and Chris DiDomenico.
For the Senators, now with a 4-4-4 record at home, the game against Arizona has become as pivotal as any mid-November contest can be.
After the game, they will fly immediately to New York for Sunday’s game against the Rangers, which kicks off a stretch where the Senators play 10 of 11 games on the road.
Motivation shouldn’t be an issue. Brassard says there should also be no room for disrespecting any opponent in the NHL, suggesting the Coyotes are far better than their record would indicate.
“They’re a young, talented team and they added a few veteran guys,” said Brassard. “I wouldn’t say they’re fragile. They’re young and when you’re young, you have a lot of energy and you have a lot of skills. We’re not taking any team for granted in this league.
“They’re well-coached. That guy (Rick Tocchet) was in Pittsburgh for many years. He played the game for a long time. I think we’re excited to go back and play the same way we did in the first period (against the Penguins).”
With Chris Wideman lost “for weeks” due to a hamstring injury suffered against the Penguins, Belleville call-up Nick Paul lined up alongside Nate Thompson and Alex Burrows on a fourth line.
A defenceman, most likely Ben Harpur, is expected to be brought up from Belleville, and it’s possible Paul could again sit out while Boucher dresses seven defencemen.
Mike Condon, who allowed three goals on 10 shots before being pulled in last Saturday’s 4-3 victory over Colorado in Sweden, will start in goal.
Condon says the Coyotes are on a high.
“They put something together (against Montreal),” he said. “They put up five, in a tough building. That’s hard to do. They’re riding some momentum and we’re going to have to answer that.”
From a personal standpoint, Condon is looking to rebound after being yanked in favour of Anderson in Sweden.
“When was that, was that Saturday and what’s today?” he said. “Two days in the NHL seems like an eternity, so five days or whenever that game was, that game is long in the rear-view (mirror).”
He wasn’t, however, buying any excuses that he was the victim of bad luck and unlucky bounces against Colorado.
“As a goalie, you can’t really have that what-can-you-do attitude. You have a chance on every single shot and I want to make every single save. And I think I can. (Saturday) is going to be an exciting challenge.” kwarren@postmedia.com Twitter.com/ Citizenkwarren