Fedor Svechkov scored the lone goal for the visitors as the Nashville Predators fell to the Ottawa Senators by a 3-1 final on Saturday night at Canadian Tire Centre. The result sees the Preds finish their three-game trip without a victory as their winless skid hits seven games.
“It's obviously frustrating,” Preds defenseman Luke Schenn said. “The topic is scoring goals. We're just not able to convert many, and we had more shots on goal, which I guess is a positive, but I don't know. I guess you have to see high-danger, high-quality chances… For whatever reason, we’re having a hard time putting the puck in the back of the net. And every guy in there is obviously frustrated.”
“It's tough,” Preds Head Coach Andrew Brunette said. “I thought the effort was there, a couple of mistakes there in the second period, and when you're not scoring, goals are hard to recover from. And so a little bit of the redundancy, the same old song and dance here, a little bit. But you appreciate the effort. The effort’s there, and we’ll break free at some point… I know we chased the game a little bit, but we did a lot of pretty good things, and it's not going in for us right now.”
Neither team found the back of the net in the opening 20 minutes, but in the second stanza, Jacob Bernard-Docker and Claude Giroux both beat Juuse Saros and tallied for Ottawa to give the Senators a 2-0 lead after two periods.
Former Preds forward Nick Cousins made it 3-0 Ottawa in the third, and although Svechkov scored the second goal of his NHL career with less than two minutes in regulation, that was as close as Nashville got before the final horn sounded.
“I can't speak for everyone, but personally, you just try to focus on the next game,” Schenn said. “You obviously can't change the past, and it seems like a crazy mountain to climb if you start looking at the big picture, so one day at a time, and just try to focus on what you can do to control the outcome and try to play as good as you can individually. And I've been through stretches like this in my career…different stretches in terms of losing, or, some tough stretches. But it's always a challenge. And at the end of the day, whenever we do get through it, we'll learn a lot about ourselves.”
“That's all we can really do [is move forward],” Brunette said. “We can't really look behind us. We’ve got to look forward, and let's just try to win the next game.”
Notes:
Tommy Novak was back in the Nashville lineup on Saturday after being scratched on Thursday in Montreal. Juuso Parssinen came out of the lineup in his place, while defenseman Marc Del Gaizo and forward Ryan O’Reilly (week-to-week, lower-body) were also scratched.
Nashville will now return home to host Calgary on Tuesday night at Bridgestone Arena before another road trip, this time to Dallas and Colorado, later next week.
