GAME DAY: Ottawa Senators @ Atlanta Thrashers - 7:00pm ET - Sat. March 28th, 2009

Ottawa at Atlanta

7:00 PM ET, March 28, 2009
Philips Arena, Atlanta, Georgia

Senators-Thrashers Preview

ESPN.com/Stats LLC

The Ottawa Senators know they can't afford many more losses as they try to remain in the hunt for a playoff spot in the Eastern Conference. Already eliminated from postseason contention, the Atlanta Thrashers have settled for a spoiler role.

Ottawa looks to pick up some much-needed points Saturday night when it visits an Atlanta team that's played its best hockey of the season this month.

The Senators (32-31-10) have made the playoffs every season since 1996-97, including an appearance in the Stanley Cup finals against Anaheim two years ago.

This season, though, Ottawa has struggled.

Craig Hartsburg lasted only 48 games in his first season as coach, getting fired Feb. 2 as the Senators owned the NHL's third-worst record at the time (17-24-7).
Cory Clouston took over and has led Ottawa to a 15-7-3 mark, but it appears to be too little, too late.

The Senators are in 12th place in the East, 11 points behind Montreal for the final playoff spot with just nine games left.

They opened a six-game road trip Sunday with their season high-tying fifth straight win, 2-1 over the New York Rangers, before having that run come to an end with a 2-1 loss to Carolina on Wednesday.

Ottawa had won nine of its previous 10.

"We're pretty desperate," general manager Bryan Murray told the Senators' official Web site. "Now you have to win pretty much every game and hope that the other teams ahead of us don't win. And when they play each other, that's almost impossible. But you hope it balances out, that you can still have the idea and the players have the idea that they're playing for something."

Atlanta (31-38-6) isn't playing for anything but pride.

The Thrashers have shown signs of improvement in March, going 8-4-0 with four of those wins coming against teams that are currently in playoff position. They defeated one of those clubs Thursday night, overcoming a three-goal deficit to beat the seventh-place Rangers 5-4 in a shootout.

After New York built a 4-1 lead late in the second period, Ilya Kovalchuk scored and assisted on two goals as Atlanta tied it with 6:50 remaining in regulation.

Todd White scored the only goal in the shootout to give Atlanta its sixth win in eight home games.

"To hang in there and hang in there and hang around and not quit in the third ... we haven't got a lot to play for, but I think we owe our fans and even ourselves a solid effort no matter what happens," coach John Anderson said. "And that's what happened. We went out and played as hard as we could and got a couple of goals."

Kovalchuk scored for the third straight game to give him 39 goals on the season -- fourth-most in the NHL. He has 18 goals and 17 assists in his last 19 games.

The 25-year-old left wing has just one assist in three games this season against Ottawa, which has won two of those matchups. Kovalchuk scored seven goals in four meetings with the Senators last season, but Atlanta won only once.

This has got to be the earliest GDT? But you left a lot of room for this record to be broken

We finally play a team that takes more penalties than we do. I don't know where we sit w.r.t. the rest of the league, but I've been noticing that most of our opponents take fewer than our 14 minutes per game average. Imagine if we only took 10. Assuming your marginal PK rate* is 80% we are talking about 30 fewer PP goals scored against you. That's a 0.4 drop in GAA and that's huge! Plus Alfie, Fisher and your top shut down D pairing will shave 2 minutes of PK ice time from their total, leaving them more in the tank for offense and fresher for the post season.

* Marginal PK rate: The more penalties you take, the more tired your PK specialists are. Even though 80% is not all that great, I would not be surprised if that's what a great PK avereages for penalties taken after the first five. Nothing scientific about it, but it makes sense. To me.

NHL.com says this game is being shown on SPSO, whatever the heck that is. Possible streaming locations aren't up yet, but i will try to keep everybody informed on them.

According to goaliepost.com:

Atlanta: Hedberg has a firm chance of starting
Ottawa: Elliott is probable to start.

wprager wrote:This has got to be the earliest GDT? But you left a lot of room for this record to be broken

We finally play a team that takes more penalties than we do. I don't know where we sit w.r.t. the rest of the league, but I've been noticing that most of our opponents take fewer than our 14 minutes per game average. Imagine if we only took 10. Assuming your marginal PK rate* is 80% we are talking about 30 fewer PP goals scored against you. That's a 0.4 drop in GAA and that's huge! Plus Alfie, Fisher and your top shut down D pairing will shave 2 minutes of PK ice time from their total, leaving them more in the tank for offense and fresher for the post season.

* Marginal PK rate: The more penalties you take, the more tired your PK specialists are. Even though 80% is not all that great, I would not be surprised if that's what a great PK avereages for penalties taken after the first five. Nothing scientific about it, but it makes sense. To me.

As a footnote to your observation...taking fewer penalties means, in principle, you can get your scorers on the ice more often...unless of course you're Columbus and you put Rick Nash--who has 5 shorthanded goals this year--out to play the PK heh heh...

Where's Shabbs with the dreaded 1-2 punch with Dave? Always love your gamedays Dave and Shabbs - thanks a lot again!

Tonight's tilt can apparently be seen online on Yahoo Sports at this address: http://sports.yahoo.com/nhl/scoreboard ...

You will however need a US proxy. There are programs that will 'hide' your IP address, thus hiding your location. I have one, it is called Hotspot Shield, and it also allows you to watch tv shows and what not on Hulu, as well as access sites that don't normally allow you access because you are living in Canada, such as Pandora.

The one downside to the program, for me at least, is there is an annoying advertisement that shows up everytime you go to a new page. I have yet to figure out how to disable it, but you can close it manually everytime. This advert is only on when you have the program running.

You can download the program for free here: http://www.hotspotshield.com/

You can also type "free proxy" in the Google search box and go from there. All you need to do is configure the proxy setting (in FF Tools->Options->Advanced->Network->Settings) to the IP address of a US-based proxy server. If one doesn't work you might have to try another.

atdhe.net

Is it back? I thought Buttman had it shut down?

504Heater wrote:Where's Shabbs with the dreaded 1-2 punch with Dave? Always love your gamedays Dave and Shabbs - thanks a lot again!

Thx 504H, and yes, where is Brother Shabbs?

Should be a good one 2nite.
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Dash wrote:atdhe.net

You are correct, they are showing two NHL games tonight: The Sens Atlanta tilt, and the Rangers-Penguins game.

Let's do it! Crush them! Heatley - 4 goals and 2 assists.

504Heater wrote:Let's do it! Crush them! Heatley - 4 goals and 2 assists.

Elliott hattrick! 8)

ATDHE working for anyone else? I'm not getting a feed.

asq2 wrote:ATDHE working for anyone else? I'm not getting a feed.

It's working fine for me... For me it opens up in a new window... You could always try yahoo.com... they have the game too, but you need a US proxy.