OTTAWA — Ottawa Senators captain Brady Tkachuk has seen too many losing Novembers.
The Senators fell to 1-3-0 to start the month after a 4-2 loss to the visiting New York Islanders on Thursday.
The Senators (6-7-0) haven’t put together a winning record in November during Tkachuk’s six previous seasons in Ottawa.
"This stretch of hockey is really big for us," Tkachuk said. "Big for us to start showing what we’re all about and it’s just frustrating that we’re not doing it on a consistent basis.”
Ottawa has 10 more games this month, including five on the road.
The Senators are a dismal 1-5-0 away from Canadian Tire Centre to start this season and could find themselves in a precarious position without improvement.
But the Senators lacked urgency in Thursday's first period and were lucky to not trail the hard-working Islanders (6-6-2) heading into the second.
Ottawa's play improved in the second, but the Islanders jumped out to a 2-0 lead on goals by Anders Lee and Jean-Gabriel Pageau.
Oliver Wahlstrom’s first of the year early in the third made it 3-0 for the visitors before Ottawa pushed back with a pair of goals.
Nick Jensen scored his first of the season and Drake Batherson’s power-play goal pulled the Senators within a goal with just over five minutes remaining.
But Bo Horvat's empty-net goal with 10 seconds left foiled Ottawa's bid for a comeback.
"Watch our team and we’re stringing together some good games, but we’re not really getting the results we want," Jensen said.
“It’s hard to keep coming in after every game, every time you play a pretty good game where you could have won, but you don’t and we keep saying that if we play like that we’re going to win more games than we lose, but right now. we’re losing more than we win so something’s gotta . . . we’ve got to somehow push a little bit harder to tip it over the edge a little bit.”
The Islanders played a solid, smart road game backstopped by Semyon Varlamov's 28 saves.
“With all the injuries we have, we’re going to need great goaltending,” Islanders coach Patrick Roy said.
"Goaltending is an important part of our team and tonight we had another solid performance.”
Anton Forsberg also provided solid goaltending for the Senators with 21 saves, but didn’t have enough support at times.
"I didn’t think we were good enough at the beginning of the game to gain any traction," said Senators coach Travis Green.
"Our execution was off and some of our decision making with the puck wasn’t good enough. When we figured that out, our game picked up. Made a couple mistakes on some goals that we’d like to have back, but thought we pushed.”
Jensen said that there’s no need to panic.
"I’m looking around the room and on the ice and we’ve got guys that are playing some really good hockey," he said.
"I just think we’ve got to take a shift-by-shift mindset of winning every shift because we’re playing really good, and then we’re maybe taking one shift off and it’s kind of biting us.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 7, 2024.
Lisa Wallace, The Canadian Press