To punch a ticket to postseason play next spring, the Ottawa Senators will need to do a lot of things differently. One of them is to get off to a good start – something that has eluded them the last few years.
Schedules can sometimes have a big influence on whether a team can get a leg up early in the season. So how difficult is the schedule facing the Senators in October and November in the upcoming campaign?
Senators Must Avoid Repeat of Start to 2023-24 Season
That the Senators can’t see a repeat of their start to the 2023-24 season goes without saying. By American Thanksgiving last year, they had played themselves out of playoff contention winning just eight of the 17 games they played in October and November for a disappointing .471 points percentage (PTS%).
In response, the team seemed to take a page from the playbook of Mad Magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman asking, “What, me worry? After all, it was only November and there was plenty of time to make up lost ground to secure a playoff berth.
The problem was that the hole they had dug for themselves by that point was a deep one and meant they’d have to win an average of better than six of every 10 games remaining in their schedule to have a shot at a wild card spot. Despite all the hype at the start of last season, the Senators were nowhere near being a .600 hockey club.
Related: Why the Ottawa Senators’ 2023-24 Season Was a Failure
Nobody is going to place the blame for the Senators’ dismal showing last season on the schedule NHL planners saddled them with during the first two months of last season. Yet it certainly didn’t help.
The Senators complained that there was no steady rhythm to the schedule at the start of last season. In the 48 days from Oct. 11 to Nov. 27, they played just 17 games averaging roughly a game every three days – well short of the preferred pace for most teams of a game every other day.
Yet what made it worse was that there were stretches in the early part of last season when the team went four or five days between games taking away any chance of developing a tempo to their season. Not only that, but the Senators spent a week in Sweden playing two games as part of the NHL’s 2023 Global Series. Those were the only two games the team played in the almost two weeks between Nov. 12 and Nov. 23.
The Global Series was fun, but it was a distraction. When the team returned to action in North America they dropped seven of…
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