Ottawa Senators need quick recovery from unacceptable loss in Chicago

The Ottawa Senators took a wrong turn in their trip through meaningful March Monday night.

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Now, they have to reset, regroup and get off the mat.

The Senators didn’t even give themselves a chance for a victory in a 5-0 loss to the lowly Chicago Blackhawks to open a difficult five-game road trip at the United Center.

A frustrated captain Brady Tkachuk told reporters in the Windy City the Senators deserved exactly what they got from the Hawks because the effort wasn’t nearly good enough for a team that’s fighting for a playoff spot.

“Not good. Unacceptable,” Tkachuk said. “I guess we took them lightly. I guess we forgot that’s where we were at not too long ago. Nobody was good tonight, including myself, I wasn’t ready. It can’t happen at this point of the season when we’re trying to make this push.

“I think we were just cheating everywhere. We were looking for offence, looking for points and we’ll never win with that mindset.”

Trailing the Pittsburgh Penguins by three points for the final wildcard spot in the East heading into Tuesday night’s action, the Senators could see the gap widen by the time the club resumes this trip Thursday night at Climate Pledge Arena against the Seattle Kraken.

With 19 games left, the Senators need to go 13-5-1 to get to 95 points. GM Pierre Dorion speculated Friday that would be the cutoff point to make the post-season. It’s a daunting task, and the club can’t afford to give up points to one of the NHL’s worst teams.

According to MoneyPuck.com data updated Tuesday afternoon, the odds of the Senators making the playoffs are 24.1%.

The Senators went into the game with five straight wins _ their longest streak since 2017 _ and weren’t good from the start. They gave up odd-man rushes, didn’t get nearly enough traffic on Chicago goalie Alex Stalock and failed to make his life difficult at all.

Coach D.J. Smith was shocked his club lacked respect for Chicago. The Senators were ranked No. 31 in the league when they faced the Anaheim Ducks Nov. 25th and it’s been a long battle back to respectability. To have the kind of effort the club did against the Hawks is disappointing.

“We’ve said this over and over, it’s hard to believe we would take someone lightly, considering where we’re coming from and where we are,” Smith said. “But there’s a lot of games left, and a lot of tough games left, and we’ve just got to get right back to our game.

“There’s probably some games we won that we shouldn’t have won and this one here we’re certainly going to have to flush it. But it can’t happen again.”

The best bet for the Senators is to remain on an even keel through this process. Maybe they’d read their press clippings and started believing they were unstoppable. If nothing else, this loss to the Hawks can serve as a reminder that winning is about playing with consistency.

The effort just wasn’t what Smith expected in any way, shape or form.

“Right from the get-go,” Smith said. “Attention to detail, odd-man rushes that we gave up … Everything that we hadn’t done in the previous five games, we did tonight.

“It’s tough to explain with how well we’ve played, to come out and do this. But you’ve got to turn the page quickly. We were feeling so good playing at home and then to come out here with no rhythm, no feel … The team wasn’t prepared, and that’s on me because my job is to get them prepared and push them every day, and we weren’t ready.”

It’s nice of Smith to accept the blame, but this was on the players. It didn’t help matters that rookie goalie Mads Sogaard was informed late in the day that he was going to make the start because veteran Cam Talbot tweaked something at Monday’s morning skate.

The hope is Talbot won’t be out long with a lower body injury he originally suffered during the club’s 5-2 win Saturday over the Columbus. The expectation was he would play in Chicago, but Sogaard was called into action and Kevin Mandolese was brought up from Belleville.

Sogaard allowed five goals on 21 shots but this wasn’t his fault.

“I told him throughout the game, ‘None of this is your fault, we just completely screwed you’,” Tkachuk said. “Right from the start, we just completely left him out to dry. That’s never what we want to do as a team (to) all the goalies we have. They’ve stood on their head, made the big saves and stole us games throughout this whole year.

“It’s unacceptable that we’d just leave him out to dry like that.”

The Senators took a late-night flight to Seattle and had Tuesday off.

“We know what we did wrong, we all know the mistakes we made and we’re all aware of it,” said alternate captain Thomas Chabot. “We’re a great hockey team in here, we’ve got a great group of guys, we’re going to stick together and we’re going to move on to the next game.”