Outshot Sens beat Blue Jackets
SENATORS 7, BLUE JACKETS 3
Ohio’s state motto: With God, all things are possible.
In today’s NHL, anything is possible on a given night, especially when teams play fast and loose and careless.
The Senators figured their second road trip of the season would bring challenges, if only because their opponents — Columbus and Pittsburgh — were both seeking their first victories of the season. What Ottawa didn’t expect was a 10-goal game here.
The Blue Jackets, nearly everyone’s pick to leap into a playoff position this season, were more than a little grumpy over their 0-3 start ahead of Ottawa’s arrival. So much so that head coach Todd Richards more or less threw his lines into a blender.
The result was a relentless Columbus attack for the first half of regulation, but a series of hit goalposts, Craig Anderson saves and missed chances by the home team kept the Senators in the game. Ottawa hung around in this one long enough to take it over in the third period.
“I don’t know if we played a good 60 minutes, but we got away with a win,” said Mika Zibanejad, who scored his first of the season, the game winner. “Our line got going tonight.”
A Jean- Gabriel Pageau goal, off a wrister in the third period, gave the Senators their first two-goal lead of the evening and they cashed in on a porous Columbus defence to raise their season record to 3-1-0 while the Jackets fell to 0-4.
By then, Jackets goalie Sergei Bobrovsky had given up five goals on 18 shots. A long wrist shot by Mike Hoffman turned this into a rout.
Bobby Ryan scored an emptynetter. Erik Karlsson had four assists.
Zibanejad flipped a pass to Ryan to set up the empty net chance.
“I got my first one so I might as well help him get him on the board, too.”
“A helluva shot,” Ryan deadpanned about his debut goal of 2015-16, outside of his shootout winner.
Columbus outshot Ottawa 4028.
The Blue Jackets biggest off-season acquisition scored the game’s first goal. Front-line winger Brandon Saad, who will be picking up his Chicago Blackhawks Stanley Cup ring on Saturday when the Jackets play the Hawks, found an open net on a power play to give Columbus an early lead.
Nick Foligno, standing near the goal crease, had scooped the puck to Saad, after a Ryan Johansen shot.
Strangely, Saad also directed the first puck past his own goalie, Bobrovsky. Marc Methot, the former Blue Jacket, took a pass from Zibanejad and delivered a routine shot toward the goal that hit Saad’s stick and deflected past Bobrovsky at 16:05 of the first.
Having been doubled on the shot clock, the visitors would have been thrilled to go to the dressing room tied at 1-1 after one period. Alas, Anderson went for a stroll behind his net and paid for it, when Johansen kicked a loose puck to Boone Jenner, who jammed it inside the post past Anderson as he scrambled to get back to his crease.
That goal came with just 1:02 left in the period. Columbus outshot the Senators 15-7 in the first and won 77 per cent of the faceoffs.
Columbus might have carried that momentum but goofed up by having six players on the ice early in the second period. On the ensuing power play, Milan Michalek scored his second goal of the season, shovelling a backhand past Bobrovsky off the rebound of a Ryan shot.
The Jackets got that one back three minutes later when Brandon Dubinsky converted on a two-onone.
Now the scorefest was on. The sixth goal of the night was the nicest, a reverse pass from behind the net by Mark Stone to Turris on the other side for the tap in. Turris’s fourth of the year made the score 3-3 with the game not yet half over.
Ryan said there were a lot of “great pass” comments on the bench over that one.
“An elite play by an elite player,” Ryan said of Stone.
Columbus dominated the later stages of the second and hit two posts (to go with one in the first) but the Senators seized the only lead they would need when Mika Zibanejad scored off a broken play.