The Jackets fell to the Senators tonight by a brutal final score of 7-3. The CBJ managed to cough up three separate leads AND also give up four unanswered goals. Sergei Bobrovksy made only 20 saves in the loss, while his counterpart Craig Anderson stopped 38 of the 41 shots he faced.
Good: Powerplay
The powerplay “only” went 1 for 3 tonight, but it looked really good out there. The best part about this unit is it’s only going to get better. So far this season they have almost exclusively worked from Ryan Johansen’s side of the ice, and barely used Brandon Saad on powerplay entries. I still feel that Saad is their best player on entries, and the best option for the primary puckhandler. It makes sense they have mostly gone with other players so far, as the other four players on the top unit (Johansen, Scott Hartnell, Nick Foligno, and Ryan Murray) all have experience together. As the group continues to mesh over the course of the year, they will get more comfortable with Saad on entries and on his side of the ice, opening it up even further.
Bad: Defensive Zone Puck Movement
The defense has not been good to start this season. Hot take alert, I know. The biggest problem has been moving the puck out of the zone. Two things have been happening with alarming consistency: 1) the forwards are all deep assisting the defense, and therefore cannot get any odd-man rushes going the other way, and they are unable to get into the offensive zone with clean possession. Or 2) the forwards start to break out as most teams do, but the defense can’t get the puck to them cleanly, are “forced” to dump it out, or the defense turns it over (see Prout, Dalton on the third goal tonight).
Not Good: The New Lines
I don’t necessarily hate the new lines. I just hate that they are new lines. It messes up the lines for powerplay purposes (spreading them out over too many groupings), which means everything will be in disarray post powerplay, and you will rarely be able to have fully rested PP unit out there. It also may have led to a too many men on the ice penalty as well (a powerplay which the Senators scored on). But that isn’t even the biggest reason. I HATE the message it sends. It screams PANIC! In no other line of work would the remedy for poor performance be to just randomly change things up, put people with someone they have never worked with before, give people new responsibilities, etc. I would understand if there were specific messages being sent to certain underperforming players, but by all accounts this was not that. It was to “jumpstart” the team. What it does do is throw out all of the plans you spent the offseason and preseason planning and working on. After three games. Hopefully this loss was bad enough to go back to the previous lines. Or maybe we will see our fourth different set of forward lines in five games.
Ugly: This Goal
Not one single Jacket came out of that looking good.
Quote of the Night
“It’s execution – when you have the puck on your stick, want the puck, want to make the play, make the right play, make the easy play, the simple play. Sometimes the simple play not the pretty play, but sometimes it’s the right play.”
– Brandon Dubinsky
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