Daily Faceoff Live: Will the sliding Ottawa Senators rebound?

On Friday’s edition of Daily Faceoff Live, Matt Larkin and Tyler Yaremchuk took a look at the problems currently ailing the 4–6–0 Ottawa Senators.

The Sens entered the 2022–23 season riding a high after acquiring Claude Giroux, Alex DeBrincat, and Cam Talbot over the summer. They started strong with wins in four of their first six games.

Since then, Ottawa has lost its last four games in regulation, most recently battling back from a 5–1 deficit to fall 5-4 at the hands of the Vegas Golden Knights on Thursday.

Here’s an excerpt from the DFO crew’s conversation about the Senators.

Matt Larkin: I’m not super confident, and it sort of goes back to what I said in the summer, and I think this team is mostly what I thought it was, which is a very exciting, improved offensive team that didn’t really do a whole lot to address its defensive woes. If you look at the stats right now, Ottawa’s fifth in goals per game, 24th in goals against. Expected goals (5-on-5, per 60), seventh, and 20th in expected goals against.

So that’s pretty much exactly what the profile of this team looked like to me, on paper. You get your new additions, of course: Claude Giroux, Alex DeBrincat. And, for the most part, I know DeBrincat’s not finding the score sheet much yet, but we know this top six is vastly improved — and they are scoring. But they’re just not defending, and we know, of course, the Senators, they were linked in trade rumors to Jakob Chychrun, and that was for a reason. I think that [general manager] Pierre Dorion understood that he needs to make this team better defensively.

And then you factor in the injuries, as well. Josh Norris is missing from the top nine, Alex Formenton has not signed yet, of course, and then you have Cam Talbot who’s been out, and it kind of makes sense to me: I think this is roughly what we should expect from the Ottawa Senators so far.

Tyler Yaremchuk: Yeah, and the only reason I’ll say I have a little bit of confidence that they can stay in the playoff hunt throughout the year is just the Cam Talbot thing. They’re missing a guy who was an All-Star-calibre goaltender last season, and if he is 100% healthy right away and he can come in, maybe he makes those defensive numbers look a little bit better, maybe he helps with that team goals against per game. […]

They know they’re not getting Josh Norris back. I don’t think, if you’re a Sens fan, you can sit there and be like, ‘we just gotta make that big trade for Jakob Chychrun and that’ll solve all our problems.” But Talbot’s the one thing, we’ve seen him in the past be a guy who can steal games on a consistent basis. Maybe he can be that light at the end of this four-game losing streak tunnel for the Sens.

Check out the full episode here …