After a 2-1 trip through California, the Ottawa Senators' travelling road show makes a stop in Las Vegas on Wednesday night. Historically, the Senators' performances have gone over very well in Vegas, with the Knights holding a lifetime record against the Sens of 12-1-1.
In fairness, for most of the Knights' young history, the Senators were spinning their wheels in a perpetual rebuild that's now a distant memory – a dark, brutal, distant memory.
The Senators are 11-7-4 on the season, good for third in the Atlantic (two points out of first) and coming off a 2-1 loss in Los Angeles on Monday night. This is the fourth game of Ottawa's seven-game road trip, while the Golden Knights (10-5-7) are kicking off a four-game homestand. Vegas is coming off losses to Anaheim on Saturday (4-3 OT) and Utah (5-1) on Monday.
The Golden Knights won both matchups against the Senators last season. The first happened in Vegas, and the Sens wouldn't have minded it if stayed in Vegas. They gave up three unanswered goals in the final five minutes of the game to lose, 6-4. A month later, the Knights won 3-2 in Ottawa.
On the day that Brady Tkachuk announced he'd be returning from injury this Friday, his former Ottawa landlord, Mark Stone, is returning from injury. Like Tkachuk, Stone hurt his hand early in the season. The former Senators favourite was playing out of his mind last month with 13 points in his first six games before going down with a wrist injury.
It will be interesting to see if Stone has anything going with current Senator Hayden Hodgson, a player he thought he'd never face again. In a preseason game two years ago, when Hodgson was playing for the LA Kings, Hodgson crushed Stone into the end boards with a big hit that the Knights captain didn't appreciate, particularly in a nothing game.
“That’s probably the last time I’ll ever play against that guy,” Stone said after the game.
Hodgson is more than happy to be proving Stone wrong on Wednesday night.
The best Senators-Knights rivalry might be the two teams' management groups. In 2022, the Knights went to NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman to demand that the Senators be punished for the poorly communicated details of their Evgenii Dadonov trade. The Senators traded Dadonov to Vegas in July 2021 and failed to supply the Knights with the player’s 10-team no-trade list.
Vegas then attempted to send Dadonov to the Anaheim Ducks in 2022, but the deal was denied by the NHL because he had not waived his no-trade clause. The Sens lost their 2026 first-round pick as punishment, and there's probably no love lost between the two ownership and management teams.
Here's how the Senators will line it up on Wednesday:
Perron-Stutzle-Batherson
Eller-Cozens-Zetterlund
Amadio-Pinto-Giroux
Cousins-Halliday-Hodgson
Sanderson-Zub
Kleven-Spence
Matinpalo-Jensen
Ullmark
Merilainen
By Steve Warne
The Hockey News Ottawa