Three Stars of the Week: Week 3

The Senators are now on a three-game win streak, having dismantled the Stars 4-1 and the Canadiens 4-3 over the past week. Let’s get right to it.

Three stars

1. Mark Stone - The Sens’ best forward was their best forward this week, dominating play at both ends, pumping up the team and the crowd, and putting up a three-point night against the Habs including the gorgeous OT winner.
2. Matt Duchene - The Sens’ best centre was their best centre this week, including three assists and his elusive first goal of the season. The skill has been their all season, but the frustration has been palpable when he’s failed to score. Hopefully getting that first one out of the way lets him loosen up a bit.
3. Mikkel Boedker - The Sens caught a lot of flak for acquiring him instead of a lot of draft picks for Mike Hoffman, but he hasn’t looked out of place in this team’s top six and put up goals in both games this week to get to six points in seven games on the season.

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• Craig Anderson continues to turn back the clock, holding his team in games and sporting a top-10 save percentage among goalies with at least five games this season.
• With back-to-back games with assists, Bobby Ryan is now on a point streak
• Thomas Chabot got the most ice time against the Habs at 25:14, with Maxime Lajoie second at 23:00. To me, that looks like allocating ice time to the team’s best-performing defencemen, not necessarily the guys with the biggest contracts or reputations.
• The Sens actually outshot the Habs 34-27, which is the first game all season in which the Sens weren’t outshot I’m pretty sure./

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• The penalty kill hasn’t been good enough, at 76.9% on the season, which is 20th in the NHL, but let’s remember it’s early in the season and generally scoring is high this early in the year. The team was 75% on the kill against the Stars and 66% against the Habs, allowing a powerplay goal in each. At least if they’re not going to be great on the PK, they’re limiting their penalties.
• Mark Borowiecki got 17% of the 5v5 shot attempts in the game against the Habs. In other words, he was hemmed in his zone pretty much the entire time he was on the ice at even strength that game. His pairing with Christian Jaros was particularly bad, earning 20% of the 5v5 shot attempts in 9:34 of ice time. Hard to say who’s to blame there, since Jaros was 28% overall on the night, and was actually worse than Boro against the Stars when Boro played mostly with Ben Harpur./

Who to watch

With Matt Duchene finally getting the monkey of his back, look for him to have a multi-goal performance this week.