Game 22 Hub: Ottawa Senators @ San Jose Sharks

After snapping a five-game losing streak against the Calgary Flames on Monday, the Ottawa Senators begin their annual California road trip tonight against the San Jose Sharks.

The Sharks are still a bad team, but not as much as before, by virtue of strong rookie seasons from Macklin Celebrini and William Eklund. That said, they're not my primary concern.

Be it the Sharks, Carolina Hurricanes, heck, the Orlando Solar Bears, you won't win with an .881 save percentage like "Liinas Ullpisalo" has. And even with Yaroslav Askarov returned to the AHL after two strong games, this could be ugly even if the Sens only allow their trademark 27 shots against.

Donovan Sebrango has been called up in place of LTIR-bound Artem Zub but isn't expected to play tonight, while Noah Gregor is likely to take the place of Nick Cousins:

Game Notes:

• Leaving November with a .500 record is the best-case scenario, which is fine so long as the team doesn't embark on another five-game slide afterward. That's when the last season ended for the team.
• The second line seems to be contributing again, which is good – Claude Giroux has 4 points in his last 3 games after just 1 in 9. Aside from that, we're back to two fourth lines so hopefully, we can get a goal from one of them, plus one from the top line, and we should get at least one more point in the standings. As you can tell, my bar for them is lying on the sand.
• Whether he plays with Zub or Travis Hamonic, Jake Sanderson is hosed. With 191 shots on goal at 5-on-5 while he's on the ice, and only 8 goals to show for it (so his teammates are shooting 4.1% with him on the ice), that's the sickest kind of joke that can be played on us after the Thomas Chabot problem was finally solved. Poor Sanderson should be +0.29 based on expected goals at 5v5 (via Natural Stat Trick), but is -10 due to a combination of some not great goaltending and terrible teammate shooting.
• Win or lose, it may not be worth staying up for this one – 10:30 PM EST on RDS, TSN5, and TSN 1200.

Stats:

• from NHL.com and NaturalStatTrick.com

*Mikael Granlund, Fabian Zetterlund, Tyler Toffoli