Five Thoughts for Black Friday: Giving Thanks

It's Thanksgiving for our friends to the south (and maybe even some of the readers of this blog), and several of the Sens' best players are American, so here's five thoughts themed around being thankful, or related to Thanksgiving, or... I attempted a theme anyway.

1. The Great Revers-Ull

We've had years when it seemed like the Sens desperately needed a goalie to hold them in games as they got shellacked on the shot clock. This year, we suddenly have a Sens team that holds their own, but a few times the goaltending has let them down, and it would be hard to point to a single game where the goalies won it for them. Until Wednesday (Thursday Ottawa time). And so I'm thankful for Linus Ullmark pulling off a goalie-ing after the Sens decided to throw it back to the worst of the rebuild and get outshot by a factor of 3.55.

Where does that leave us? I've never thought that we had a goalie controversy because we know that Anton Forsberg is at best a dependable 1B goalie. He's never seen more than 44 starts in a season. He's never been in the conversation for even top-30 goalie in the NHL. You want your backup to give you 30 solid starts a year, but he won't give you more than that. The problem is in figuring out if Linus Ullmark is in fact a goalie who can give you 55-60 starts, or if he's at his best in a tandem. He's being paid like an elite goalie for four more years, but he's only playing elitely a third of the time. So is having a strong backup enough, or do the Sens need four more years of an almost-starter?

Anyway, sometimes teams win games they have no business winning. Remember Dylan Ferguson made 49 saves on 50 shots against the Penguins in March 2023 and has played exactly 1 NHL game since then. So we should accept Wednesday's game as a weird outlier where the team didn't show up, the goalie really did, and the Sens got 2 points that nobody will care how they did it come March. I'm thankful that, for a couple days, the whispers about the goalies are quieter.

2. Thanksgiving Beef

I've got two complaints about how the NHL handles Thanksgiving. First, why were there zero games on Thursday? I get not scheduling the American teams, but there are seven (7) Canadian teams. It's not like Thursday Night Football didn't happen last week, so Canadian viewership would likely be as high. This league schedules Canadian teams' games on Canadian holidays, including Thanksgiving. Hell, they open free agency on Canada Day. It just feels weird to make today a day without hockey in Canada, where there's nothing going on.

The second beef is more personal. This will be the third time in four years that the Sens' Cali trip happens over Thanksgiving weekend. Why does the league so badly want Ottawa in LA for Thanksgiving? For those who don't know, I lived in LA for 4 years (though am back in Canada now). Thanksgiving is a sweet time as a Canadian because you get a four-day weekend but no family events, so you can road trip. But I also love to watch my team the once per year they come to my city. And the NHL kept making me choose (with my hockey-agnostic wife always hoping I'll skip the Sens game). I'm not saying they should plan around me, but why does it seem like they're deliberately ​targeting me?

3. Up and Adam

I'm thankful for the emergence of Adam Gaudette because it seems like everyone else on this team is struggling to finish. Sure, his 35% shooting percentage is unsustainable. But the Sens have needed goals, and they've got 11 in 21 games from a guy whose career high is 12. I was hoping he'd make the team after scoring a bunch in training camp because the Sens needed scoring depth; too often in recent years, it seemed the fourth line was about grit and energy and PK ability, and then the guys would average 1.6 goals each over the season. ​Instead having a guy whose specialty is scoring a goal for every 20 minutes he plays seems also very useful to me. So I'm thankful that his AHL scoring touch has translated to the NHL, that Travis Green's classic NHL coach bias toward former players was beneficial in this case, and that Gaudette's even being given time with skilled NHL players.

4. Leftover Pizza

I'm thankful for the announced return of the Pizza Line on Thursday. It's easy to forget, but the Sens were at one point among the NHL's best. In 2005-06, they had two players (Alfredsson and Heatley) finish top-five in league scoring. All three finished with 90+ points, the best season scoringwise in Sens history. The next year, Heatley got 105 and Alfie and Spez each got 87 points. Heatley scored 180 goals in four seasons with Ottawa. For comparison, Brady Tkachuk has almost caught him, currently at 173, in his seventh season. And those three led the Sens to their only Cup Finals appearance in modern history. For a youngish franchise with not much to celebrate recently, I love the more recent efforts to reconnect with former franchise stars. The nostalgia always pumps me up.

You know what they say about pizza, that good pizza is amazing and bad pizza is still pretty good. I'm thankful that for a couple years, these three gave us the best Pizza in Ottawa history.

5. ​​I'm till Standings

Maybe the biggest thing I'm thankful for is that the Sens are still treading water. It hasn't been a dominant start to the year, and the Sens are 7th in their division, but they're only 3 points out of a Wild Card spot and are a Saturday win away from finishing November at .500 on the season. If you'd said before the season that they could be .500 on November 30th, I think most of us would've taken it. It stings to think what could've been in a few close ones (the first Vegas game, Rangers, Flyers), but then there are games like Wednesday's that balance it out. We want meaningful hockey in April, and part of that is not having to make up a 10-point deficit over the next 3 months. I'm thankful that this season, though teetering at times, hasn't fallen off the wagon yet. Today's probably the least gloomy Black Friday the Sens have had since 2017.