Special teams, Hammond lead Senators past Canadiens

OTTAWA -- The Ottawa Senators scored three shorthanded goals and Andrew Hammond made 30 saves for his first shutout of the season in a 5-0 win against the Montreal Canadiens at Canadian Tire Centre on Saturday.
The Senators lead the NHL with 15 shorthanded goals. Jean-Gabriel Pageau, with his League-leading sixth, Curtis Lazar and Alex Chiasson scored shorthanded for the Senators (34-31-8).
It was the first time the Canadiens had three shorthanded goals scored against them in a game (they had two scored against them in a game 18 times).

Defenseman Marc Methot got his fifth goal of the season and Mika Zibanejad scored his 17th of the season for the Senators.

Ben Scrivens made 39 saves for the Canadiens (33-33-6), who played without three of their injured defensemen, including P.K. Subban.
It was the fourth time in team history the Senators scored three shorthanded goals in a game.
The Senators lead the League in shorthanded goals, but they are 29th in penalty-killing efficiency.
"Our No. 1 thing is to make sure we kill the penalty off, and we've struggled this year," Ottawa coach Dave Cameron said. "Probably the upside of that, or the positive you can take out of it, is we have scored some shorthanded goals. But over the course of the year, our penalty kill hasn't been good enough. It's been good lately, but over the course of the year it hasn't.

"Any time you get one shorthanded goal, you look at it as a bonus. To get three is kind of the exception."
The Senators bounced back from a 3-1 loss to the Buffalo Sabres on Friday; they are 3-9 in the second game of back-to-back situations.
"I'm happy I contributed tonight, but I think it all started with Hammond," Pageau, who has six goals in 10 regular-season games against Montreal, said. "He stopped all of their shots. I think we can be proud of ourselves tonight. We played the way we wanted."
The Senators are seven points out of the second wild card into the Stanley Cup Playoffs from the Eastern Conference. The Canadiens are 11 points out.

"Regardless of where we are in the standings right now, I think we're a high-character group," Hammond said. "When you take a game like [Friday] night, the way we did, you know you need to respond the next night. Fortunately for us, we were able to play back-to-back and not have to sit on that effort from [Friday] night too long. We really responded with a good one."
Lazar, finishing off a breakaway down the left wing, gave the Senators a 2-0 lead with their second shorthanded goal of the game at 7:01 of the second period with Ottawa serving a too many men on the ice penalty.
After Methot scored during a 4-on-4 situation at 2:05 of the third period, Chiasson made it 4-0 at 3:18 on another breakaway. Scrivens got a piece of his shot, but the puck trickled into the net for Chiasson's second goal in as many nights.
"First of all, I think that's the first time that I see that (three shorthanded goals in a game). It's matter of execution, concentration. Pretty simple," Canadiens coach Michel Therrien said.

Pageau scored shorthanded to give the Senators a 1-0 lead at 12:02 of the first period. With Senators captain Erik Karlsson in the penalty box, Ottawa's Mark Stone carried the puck over the Montreal blue line and slipped a pass under the stick of Canadiens defenseman Andrei Markov's to Pageau, who was charging for the net
"Just watch the goals," Montreal captain Max Pacioretty said. "I don't know what you want me to say. Just watch it. We gave them three goals.
"To be honest, we had some chances and some good zone time and then three errors like that … I don't know what to say. You give them two breakaways and a 2-on-1, that can't happen and they made us pay for it."
Pacioretty said the Canadiens let Scrivens down.

"I'm embarrassed the way we left him hanging," he said. "The whole team should be."
With all the injuries to their defensemen, Therrien used four forwards on the power play, and that alignment was victimized twice.
"You've got to coach the personnel that you've got," he said. "We're missing a lot of defensemen as we all know. We try with four forwards and one D. Obviously that was not the right thing to do."