Five Thoughts for Friday: Things to Keep in Mind this Season

Five thoughts for your reading pleasure, with a focus on things to keep in mind as we head into another hopeful season:

The Season is Long...So Long

It's easy to forget when you're in the midst of it, but 82 games is a lot. Last season, the Ottawa Senators started 3-1-0 and had just beaten the Washington Capitals 6-1. Things were looking great as if they had finally turned the corner. Then they would lose a few, win a few, lose a few, and kept going back and forth until they were 11-11-0, looking like an average team that had potential. Then they lost six in a row, which finally cost DJ Smith his job. Despite the season being over at that point, Ottawa still had good stretches including a 10-3-3 mark (which was immediately followed up by a seven-game losing streak), and an 8-3-0 period.

The point is that it's so easy to get caught up in winning and losing streaks of a few games that it can be hard to recognize the true talent of a team. If they start hot, let's not get ahead of ourselves and think they're winning the Cup. Be excited, of course! But there will be so many peaks and valleys for every season, and it seems fans always forget that. And on the flip side, if they start off slowly yet again, it'll be incredibly frustrating, but that won't necessarily define the rest of their season.

It's not as if they can play poorly all the way into January, but in an 82-game season, they're bound to look much better and much worse than they really are.

Making the Playoffs is Still Very Hard

With all of that in mind, although I think the Senators absolutely have the talent to make the playoffs for the first time in eight years, it's not as if there is an easy spot for the taking. The defending Stanley Cup champion Florida Panthers are a lock, as are the Toronto Maple Leafs. The Boston Bruins obviously lost one of their starters Linus Ullmark, but I think we've learned to never count them out—if anything, I'm counting on Joonas Korpisalo to have a huge bounceback season. The Tampa Bay Lightning aren't as good as their Cup-winning days either, but a team that still has Nikita Kucherov, Andrei Vasilevskiy, Brayden Point, Victor Hedman, and Jake Guentzel is not going down easy.

I think Ottawa could pass one of Boston or Tampa Bay this year, but that'll require a huge leap in play under new coach Travis Green and/or a drop in play from one of those teams. If they aren't better than the Bruins or Lightning, then they would have to battle for a Wildcard spot against teams in the Metropolitan like the Washington Capitals, Pittsburgh Penguins, New Jersey Devils, Philadelphia Flyers, and New York Islanders. That group seems more beatable, but it's a lot of teams in that mushy middle. Furthermore, that doesn't even count teams like the Detroit Red Wings who missed out on the playoffs due to a tiebreaker or the Buffalo Sabres who had six more points than the Senators.

Ottawa can have a much better season and improve by 15 points to get to 93 and still miss...It won't be easy getting in.

Injuries Happen

Hockey will always have injuries because of the physicality that is necessary every single game. It's remarkable that anyone plays all 82 games, especially if they play while hurt. Fans love to pull the "our team had so many injuries!" card, when in reality, every team is playing injured and/or has some important players on the IR. That varies from team to team of course, and sometimes you can legitimize that for some teams more than others.

Last season, Ottawa was 13th in Cap Hit of Injured Players (CHIP) and 8th in lost Wins Above Replacement (WAR), which is in the upper half, but it's not outrageously high to a point where they can use that as an excuse for their poor performance:

They used 31 skaters in 2023-24, 21 at forward and 10 on defense. So that's nine forwards getting inserted into the lineup and four on defense. A few of those are more performance-based, but a lot of that is due to injuries. They had three players play all 82 games, and only nine missed fewer than 10 games. There will be points in the season where they are missing a top-6 forward, a 4th liner, and a middle-pairing defenseman, and although that isn't ideal, they'll just have to play through it. The best teams have great depth and are able to hold the fort while players are down.

To note a specific player, Thomas Chabot has missed 31, 14, 23, and 7 games over the past four seasons, and I'd be shocked if he plays more than 70 games for just the third time in his career. It's sad, but these injuries are part of the game.

Penalties Will Be Plentiful

In 2023-24, the Senators were 6th in the NHL in penalties taken/60 at 4.05, yet they were surprisingly fourth in net penalties/60 at +0.40 because they drew the second most penalties in the league at 4.45 per 60. They have three players in Tim Stützle, Brady Tkachuk, and Claude Giroux who can draw so many penalties (in very different ways), and it's been shown that that can be a repeatable skill. I don't love how many minor penalties they take though, as that difference in penalties taken and drawn could be even larger.

The Senators added Nick Cousins (64 PIMs last year but a +8 in net penalties), David Perron (55 PIMs and an awful -11 in net penalties) who add to that physicality, although they did lose Mark Kastelic who had 63 PIMs, Mathieu Joseph (51), Jakob Chychrun (60), Erik Brännström (36), and Parker Kelly (30) who all took quite a number of penalties. Michael Amadio and Nick Jensen were +6 and +8, respectively, in net penalties last season, so the Senators might actually be better off this season in terms of drawing them. However, with Brady Tkachuk and Ridly Greig leading the charge, I can't imagine them being a Lady Byng-like team.

And remember: all NHL refereeing is inconsistent. I don't love how it's reffed either, but they're still the best ones around, and it's part of the game. I've noticed so many people whine about officiating every single game as if the previous game were any better, and it can be quite tiresome to talk about it all the time. Bad calls happen, and there will be plenty of penalties taken and drawn for Ottawa once again.

Goaltending Can Be the Difference

If there's one thing to be very optimistic about this season, it's the goaltending. Linus Ullmark could be the ultimate game-changer and the main reason they get back to the playoffs. I don't want to put that kind of pressure on him, but we've seen what excellent goaltending can do to a fine team. The Winnipeg Jets finished 5th in the league last season all thanks to Connor Hellebuyck's .921 SV% and Laurent Brossoit's .923 SV%. If the Jets as a team had a league-average SV% of .903%, they would have allowed 47 more goals and gone from a +61 goal differential to a +14 one. That's the difference between a league's top team and a Wildcard one, essentially.

The Bruins have done that for a few seasons as well with Ullmark and Jeremy Swayman. The Bruins had 3.03 xGA/60, which was 14th in the NHL, and the Senators had a...2.95 xGA/60, which ranked 11th. Yet despite the worse defensive numbers, Boston allowed 60 fewer goals because of their incredible goaltending. It's not as if the Bruins were awful, but that shows how goaltending made one team one of the worst in the league and the other one of the best.

Ottawa hasn't had a top goalie, let alone a reliable starter, since Craig Anderson, and it'll be such a breath of fresh air if Ullmark can replicate his success here. I'm not as sold on Anton Forsberg being a reliable backup again, but who knows? There's also the chance that Mads Søgaard can play some games instead of Forsberg. Sometimes we don't want to admit that teams can live and die by their goalies because it's such a simple answer, but I'll say this: if Ullmark has a .915 SV% (what he had last season) or better and plays at least 50 games, the Senators will make the playoffs.

And that's something to be excited about.