We all have ups and downs, but the Senators Kaspars Daugavins had a unique peak and valley this week.
On Sunday: Daugavins scores his first career NHL goal, the game-winner against the rival Toronto Maple Leafs.
On Monday: he gets sent down to AHL Binghamton for the purposes of keeping a dental appointment: to wit – getting four impacted wisdom teeth removed on Tuesday.
Oddly, as the Senators try to sink their own teeth into some serious penalty killing issues, Daugavin’s pain could be the Senators gain.
On Friday, the 23-year-old winger from Riga, Latvia was back in the Senators lineup against the Montreal Canadiens, trying to help rescue an Ottawa penalty kill unit that entered the night’s action ranked 27th of 30 teams with a 73.4 per cent success rate. For a comparison, good and bad, the Pittsburgh Penguins were No. 1 at 92.5 per cent (Nerds!) while the Leafs were last at 71.7, although they went four for four in kills against Columbus on Thursday.
What does head coach Paul MacLean think the Senators should do to improve it’s penalty killing, the flip side of Ottawa’s prodigious power play? For starters, stop getting so many PK “opportunities.”
“I would like us not to be taking six or seven penalties a game, which leads the National Hockey League in penalties taken,” said MacLean. “If we could cut that number in half, we could maybe have a chance to kill off some penalties.”
The man clearly has done his homework on the subject.
“When you take six or seven – two or three each period – we’ve taken 22 in the first (period), 21 in the second and 21 in the third, we’re pretty consistent at taking penalties.”
The numbers add up – to the league-leading 64 times the Senators were shorthanded prior to Montreal’s arrival. Particularly galling to the coaching staff are the hooking penalties – 13 of the 64.
“That’s parallel sticks, not using your feet,” MacLean says.
Are they lazy penalties, Hall of Fame defenceman Denis Potvin, an Ottawa broadcaster, asked MacLean when the coach’s media address was over?
“I hesitate to call them that,” MacLean said, then smirked. “But they’ve been called that.”
It’s also true that the rebuilding Senators have a bounty of young trainees doing work that veterans like Chris Kelly and Mike Fisher used to do.
“The penalty killing isn’t very good because a lot of the people we have doing it (Zack Smith, Erik Condra and Daugavins) are really learning how to do it in the NHL,” MacLean told Sports Illustrated’s Michael Farber in an interview this week. “If you’re killing off the first minute of the power play in the AHL, you’ve probably killed off the penalty because the second unit that comes out isn’t as good as the first. Here in the NHL, you have to kill the whole two minutes because the second power-play unit could be better than the first and it’s definitely better than the first unit in the American league. So all the things about penalty killing at this level, our guys are learning. And this is a hard league to learn in.”
Daugavins was back learning Friday night, three days after the dreaded oral surgery.
“I’m feeling pretty good, I didn’t have any pain and swelling so the recovery was pretty quick,” Daugavins said. “I was skating the next day.”
Daugavins admits it was a little strange, playing the hero’s role one day and then having to report to the minors the next day for dental surgery booked weeks ago. He was supposed to get his teeth done early in the summer, but Binghamton went on that long Calder Cup run and afterward Daugavins went home to Latvia.
“But I’m happy to be back, happy to be playing again,” especially at the NHL level, he says.
On a line with Zack Smith and Chris Neil, Daugavins was part of that group’s dump it and pound-a-Hab strategy. He also helped kill off Ottawa’s first penalty, a delay of game to Erik Karlsson for knocking the net off during a first period melee. Hey coach, only one call against in the first 20 minutes.
“He’s done a good job as a penalty killer, which we need some help at,” MacLean says, “and I think he plays the game right.”
Goaltender Craig Anderson gets a good look at Ottawa’s PK in action, if not always a great look at pucks getting behind him from opposing power plays. His take? The Senators often kill most of a penalty, but get dinged toward the end of the two minutes.
“The main thing, as with any team, is 200-foot clears,” Anderson says. “When you get the puck on your stick, the puck’s got to be out.
“So many times when you watch highlights of the power play/penalty kill, the guy has the puck on his stick, shoots it off the glass, the guy keeps the puck in and the puck ends up in the net. That’s pretty much the Achilles heel of any PK around the league.”
Contact Wayne Scanlan at wscanlan@ottawacitizen.com. Follow him on twitter @HockeyScanner.

Tags: Kaspars Daugavins, Ottawa Senators