Stone gears up for solid finish

Mark Stone had a date with the barber Friday afternoon.

Clearly, he wasn’t worried about suffering the fate of Samson, the biblical figure who lost his great strength when his hair was chopped off.

“Well, I haven’t had a whole lot of mojo lately, I’m not worried,” Stone said as the Senators prepare to face the red-hot New York Islanders on Saturday. “We got shut out there, two games in a row.”

Humbleness aside, it was Stone’s third period goal — his team-leading 19th — that gave the Senators their 3-2 win over Dallas on Thursday, allowing them to put behind them the ugly memories of the consecutive blankings by St. Louis and Buffalo.

In the bigger picture of the past six weeks, Stone has been as consistent as any Senators forward, delivering eight goals and four assists in 14 games since the New Year.

All of that is in keeping with the fact Stone appears to get stronger as the season goes along.

In February and March of last season, he scored 12 goals and 16 assists in 28 games, finishing on a tear while playing on a line with Jean-Gabriel Pageau and Zack Smith. A year earlier, he came alive alongside Kyle Turris during the Senators’ improbable run to the playoffs, scoring 11 goals and 14 assists in 22 games in February-March 2015.

Senators coach Guy Boucher says he can’t comment on what happened before he arrived. This season, though, he says Stone found his groove once he rebounded from missing training camp due to a concussion. He labelled Thursday’s goal a leadership moment for the Senators.

“Mark will make something out of nothing,” Boucher gushed. “When I coached (Sidney) Crosby, he was the same. They look this way and all of a sudden, the puck is on your stick.”