Can the Senators trust their goaltending?
It’s been a difficult week for the Ottawa Senators. Following Tuesday’s 6-3 loss to the Florida Panthers, the Senators have gone 0-2-1 over their last three games, and have fallen back out of the playoff picture in the Eastern Conference. It hasn’t been hard to identify Ottawa’s problem, either. Over those three games, they gave up a total of 13 regulation goals against 94 shots, which comes out to a paltry .862 save percentage.
Linus Ullmark, the Senators number-one goaltender that took a leave of absence earlier in the season for mental health reasons and sat out of Saturday’s 4-2 loss to the Tampa Bay Lightning, returned to Ottawa’s crease on Tuesday and looked woefully unprepared. Ullmark gave up five goals on 16 shots before getting pulled, effectively sinking any chance his team had to win the game. As the Senators enter the final eight-game segment of their season, it’s hard to have confidence they’ll get the requisite goaltending to climb back into a playoff spot.
On Wednesday’s episode of Daily Faceoff LIVE, hosts Tyler Yaremchuk and former NHL goaltender Carter Hutton discussed whether Ottawa can trust Ullmark down the stretch.
Tyler Yaremchuk: If Linus Ullmark needs days off and games off to deal with what he’s dealing with, or because everything just kind of gets to be too much for him, and he’s kind of in front of it with the team and says “Hey, every couple weeks I need to take a couple of days off to kind of go through a reset,” I have no problem with someone putting their mental health first. My issue with it is, if you’re going to play, you’ve got to be ready to play. I watch that game last night and I go “That was a guy who wasn’t ready to play and battle with his team in a massive, pivotal game.”
Carter Hutton: It cost their team. They weren’t ready right out of the gate. I do think there is a lack of trust that you need between a team in general, forwards and defensemen, and your goalie. There’s kind of this weird standard, and I understand we all play for the jersey, but there’s a game within the game and the goalie is playing a completely different game than the players. You’re there the whole game, you need to be focused, you need to be engaged. And then that trust it lost, and I feel like that is what we’re seeing right now with Linus Ullmark and with the Ottawa Senators. This game kind of snowballs right away and they lose that trust.
You can catch the full discussion and the rest of Wednesday’s episode here…