Game 24 Preview: Philadelphia Flyers @ Ottawa Senators

The Senators come into tonight's game fifth in the entire league, even after losing to the 27th-place Sabres on Tuesday. The Sens are banged up, with both Bobby Ryan and Marc Methot out. Also, Craig Anderson has taken a leave of absence as Nicholle starts cancer treatments, which means Mike Condon will make his first appearance in exactly two weeks.

Here are the expected lines and pairings from the Senators:

Dzingel - Turris - Lazar
Hoffman - Brassard - Stone
Smith - Pageau - Pyatt
McCormick - Kelly - Neil

Claesson - Karlsson
Phaneuf - Ceci
Borowiecki - Wideman

Condon (starter)
Hammond

Some notes for tonight:

• Andrew Hammond is back with the team. Seems pretty likely he'll get a chance to play at some point over the next couple weeks.
  
• Kyle Turris has 10 goals and is on pace for 36 goals, easily a career high. Of course, he only has four assists thus far, so probably that pace will balance itself out.
  
• Erik Karlsson has 19 points, putting him 25th in the league, and second among defencemen. He passed Shea Weber on Tuesday night.
  
• Karlsson has 70 blocks, which works out to 3.0 per game, both of which are first in the league. It's almost like all those arguments that "Drew Doughty could score Karlsson points if he wanted to stop playing defence" were actually the opposite of the truth. In fact, Karlsson can put up Doughty defensive numbers if he wants to, and hey guess what, he still scores points.
  
• Mark Borowiecki is second in the league in hits with 92.
  
• Ottawa has the two worst goalies in the league by save percentage so far this season: Chris Driedger (.733) and Andrew Hammond (.793)
  
• The Flyers have the second-worst goalie by save percentage among those to have played in at least four games: Michal Neuvrith (.859). Steve Mason is 11th-worst among the 50 goalies to meet that threshold with an .898.
• The Flyers have four defencemen averaging more than 20 minutes per game, and zero managing more than 21 minutes per game. That's a very even split among the top four.
  
• The Flyers, objectively, have the worst name in the NHL. They are literally called "the things that fly". It sounds like they were named by a three-year-old.
  

Here are some stats for the two teams tonight. All stats are from NHL.com except Corsi and Fenwick are from naturalstattrick.com. (Which is published by our own B_T, not Micah McCurdy, no matter what Elliotte Friedman told you.)