After a 9-1 loss to the New Jersey Devils prospects on Friday, the Senators showed some big improvements Saturday, despite falling 4-2 to the Pittsburgh Penguins.
Halloween seemed to come early for the Ottawa Senators. Their date with the Devils on Friday the 13th was an absolute horror show.
After a 9-1 loss, the Sens were just happy to turn the page on Saturday at the Prospects Challenge in Buffalo. They put in a much better performance that came up short in a 4-2 loss to the Pittsburgh Penguins.
After a scoreless first period, the Sens made a dog's breakfast out of a simple Pittsburgh dump in. They turned the puck over behind their own net on a poor reverse attempt, and then had three men down below their own goal line. So no one was within 20 feet of Pittsburgh's Jack Beck when he got the pass out in front and scored.
On Beck's follow through, he was cleaned out by a big hit from Sens prospect Jackson Stewart. If it were regular season, it was the kind of hit that the department of player safety would have at least reviewed. That set the tone for a scrappy, scrum-filled afternoon.
“Today, the game probably doesn’t look like it was a game. It was more of a fight,” Pittsburgh forward Vasily Ponomarev told the Penguins website. "(The Senators) tried to show their game, but we played the game how it should look like.”
The Beck goal broke the dam, though, as teams combined for 5 goals in the second period. The best was this top shelf laser from Stephen Halliday, who now has two of the Sens' three goals in the first two games.
The goal was set up by Ryan Humphrey, who has obviously impressed head coach David Bell enough to line up alongside Halliday and Oskar Pettersson, two of the Sens better prospects.
The Penguins took a 3-2 lead into the third period and despite a late push by Ottawa, Pittsburgh hung on to win 4-2, icing things with an empty net goal.
"Yeah, significant improvement," head coach David Bell said. "So that was what the message was. The result wasn't what we wanted, but from where we were yesterday, to rebound to have a game that we still have a chance to win in the last minute of a hockey game is significant improvement. "
The challenge for Bell is to get players to understand team tactics with almost no dress rehearsal or linemate familiarity.
"It is tough because they've taken a lot of information in the last 48 hours and then you get them out there and they all want to impress the scouts and the management and they probably try to do a little bit too much," Bell said.
"So I think that was the product and the result of the first game was just trying to do too much. They reeled it back (against Pitttsburgh), they did their own jobs, they did a better job of that and played more within what their own individual skill sets were."
For the second straight game, the Sens dressed their two amateur tryout goalies in Michael Simpson and David Egorov. Simpson's save on a cross-ice pass to Pens' top prospect Rutger McGroarty will go down as one of the saves of the tournament.
Full highlights here:
The Senators close out the prospects challenge on Monday against Columbus. With no game on Sunday in Buffalo, the Sens prospects are probably wishing the Bills were in town. No such luck. They played on Thursday night in Miami this week.