Ottawa’s Five-Step Plan for Playoff Success at BetLM

Ottawa’s Five-Step Plan for Playoff Success

OTTAWA – At the begin­ning of the sea­son, few could have pre­dicted that the Ottawa Sen­a­tors would be active in the play­offs. Now those same Sen­a­tors are on the brink of knock­ing out the New York Rangers – the No. 1 seed in the East­ern Con­fer­ence, and a club pegged by many to play long into the spring.

Here are five rea­sons why the Sen­a­tors have taken a 3–2 lead in their East­ern Con­fer­ence Quar­ter­fi­nals series:

1. Craig Ander­son

After com­ing off a three-week recov­ery for a hand lac­er­a­tion sus­tained at home, Ander­son has been huge for the Sen­a­tors in the post­sea­son. The goal­tender has faced 157 shots, and has only allowed five goals in the past four games of the series, includ­ing a shutout on Sat­ur­day. Ander­son cur­rently boasts a 1.79 goals-against aver­age and .943 save percentage.

“I think the word is con­fi­dence,” coach Paul MacLean said. “I think [Ander­son] gives his team­mates con­fi­dence to play, and gives them the abil­ity to go on the ice and just be able to play – not wor­ried that they can’t do things offen­sively and make mis­takes and that he won’t be there to help bail them out. I think he’s also shown lead­er­ship – in this round he’s really stepped up, ele­vated his play and helped a lot of his team­mates with the pres­sures of being in the play­offs. In my opin­ion, he’s prob­a­bly been our best player.”

2. Pow­er­ful penalty kill

Going hand-in-hand with Anderson’s play has been the per­for­mance of the Sens’ penalty kill, hold­ing the Rangers to only three power-play goals in 22 attempts. Vet­eran Chris Phillips has once again demon­strated his abil­ity to step up in the post­sea­son, bear­ing down on the Rangers’ offense when­ever it attempts to enter the zone. Young play­ers like Zack Smith and Erik Con­dra have con­tributed calm heads and fast skates to ensure that the puck remains out of the hands of the oppo­si­tion when the Sen­a­tors are down a man.

3. Coach Paul MacLean

MacLean became the ninth head coach in Sen­a­tors’ mod­ern his­tory last June and since his hir­ing, the leader set the club on a course des­tined for suc­cess. MacLean’s stel­lar com­mu­ni­ca­tion skills with both vet­er­ans and rook­ies has allowed Ottawa to bond tightly as a team.

“We have a very good rela­tion­ship,” Jason Spezza said. “Some­times I don’t agree with him, and he doesn’t always agree with me. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t going to lis­ten to each other.”

4. Face­off dominance

Win­ning the bat­tles at the face­off dot has always been a stick­ing point for the Sens, par­tic­u­larly in the post­sea­son. How­ever, these play­offs have seen the Sen­a­tors dom­i­nate on the puck drop. Zenon Konopka is cur­rently first over­all in face­off wins, with a 72.3 per­cent aver­age. Ottawa also has two more play­ers in the top 20 – Zack Smith and Jason Spezza are No. 15 and No. 19, respec­tively. The Rangers do not have a sin­gle player in the top 20 – their best man at the dot is Brad Richards, who cur­rently sits No. 25 over­all with an aver­age of 51 percent.

5. Sur­pris­ing faces step­ping up

Whether it was Matt Carkner’s alter­ca­tIon with Brian Boyle in Game 2 or his set-up pass in Game 4, Jim O’Brien’s pass to Milan Michalek for the over­time win in Game 4 or play­off debu­tante Matt Stone’s helper on Sat­ur­day for Spezza’s first goal of the series, con­tri­bu­tions have been com­ing from every­where for the Senators.

“That’s the thing about the play­offs,” Carkner said. “You never know what’s going to hap­pen, and basi­cally on any given night, any­one can be a hero.”

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