Game 23 Preview and Open Thread: New York Rangers @ Ottawa Senators

The Senators head home coming off an overtime win in Montreal that had just about everything you could ask for according to the hater’s guide for Senators fandom. Montreal outshot Ottawa badly, Craig Anderson bailed the Sens out, Pageau scored against the Habs, and Brady did what he does best. The Rangers meanwhile took out the Washington Capitals at Mad Garden 4-1 on Wednesday.

The Sens and Rags have split the season series so far with the road team winning both of the first two meetings on October 5th and November 4th. We might miss out on a couple of players facing off against their old teams as Mika Zibanejad continues to recover from injury and Vladislav Namestnikov left Tuesday night’s game with an apparent injury and was placed on IR today.

The Sens recalled Max Lajoie, and J.C. Beaudin this morning, then Christian Jaros as well after Cody Goloubef left the morning skate. Erik Brannstrom in out for tonight, but possible for Monday. Nikita Zaitsev also missed this morning’s skate, and is in Russia for personal reasons. Here are the lines, with guesswork for the d pairings. DJ Smith said there may be a lot of mixing & matching with the D tonight.

Based on the Rangers lineup from Wednesday, expect something like:

Game Notes:

• The Sens have the statistical edge in this one as they (barely) rank above the Rangers in several five-on-five categories. New York, naturally, has a pronounced advantage on the powerplay, though.
• The Rangers look extremely top-heavy a la Stone-Karlsson Senators of yore. Suffice to say, if Ottawa can keep Artemi Panarin and Jacob Trouba off the score sheet, the home crowd will have plenty to cheer about.
• Jean-Gabriel Pageau gets to face another one of his favourite opponents tonight. In his career, Pageau has 13 regular season points against the Habs and 11 against the Rangers (with six playoff goals against New York to boot).
• The Rangers do not have veteran defender Marc Staal at their disposal as he recovers from surgery.
• The game starts at 7:30 and you can catch it on TSN5, RDS, and TSN1200/

Eat stats, nerds! (courtesy, as always, of naturalstattrick)

Player Stats

Team Stats