Travis Green had multiple messages for his players following their double-overtime loss in Raleigh on Monday night.
“I thought we played a hell of a game, and not going to hide the fact that those are hard games to lose, and that’s okay, that’s part of it,” Green told the media on Tuesday afternoon in Ottawa.
“When you’re playing for something prestigious as a Stanley Cup, when you lose a game like that, it hurts, and it should hurt. We’ve got a couple of days to regroup, not just physically, but mentally, as well. After losing a game like that, I think that’s going to be important. And I think we played better the second game than the first game and we’ve got to play better again.”
Eleven Senators skaters set new career high time on ice marks in the loss: Jake Sanderson (43:06), Thomas Chabot (40:50), Jordan Spence (39:01), Nikolas Matinpalo (31:03), Tim Stützle (29:05), Brady Tkachuk (28:17), Shane Pinto (28:17), Drake Batherson (27:33), Dylan Cozens (27:25), Ridly Greig (27:09), Michael Amadio (24:43).
“You can’t just play four defencemen, and I didn’t want to look at the minutes to see where [Chabot and Sanderson] were. I still really haven’t. You’ve got to get some minutes in for [the bottom pair] guys and I thought [Nolan Baumgartner] did a good job of handling it,” said Green.
“It’s a lot. A guy like Chabby, feels he can skate forever, Sandy too. They’re both great skaters, but you get into playoff hockey, it’s physical, it’s a grind, hats off to them.”
Green also reiterated some of his points from Monday night postgame around areas of improvement for the team as the series shifts to Ottawa.
“Both teams are making mistakes; it’s a game of mistakes. You’re not going to play perfect, but you can impose the other team to make mistakes with your own game. That doesn’t mean that it’s a hole in their game, doesn’t mean that it’s a hole in our game,” said Green.
“It means one of the teams is doing some good things, and you’ve usually got to do two three, four good things to get a scoring chance, or someone’s made a big mistake, which happens a lot. And then you’ve got to capitalize on it.”
The Senators will be hoping for some better puck luck in Canadian Tire Centre. Though they’ve scored just twice through over 150 minutes of hockey so far in the series, they’ve had numerous chances that got past Hurricanes netminder Frederik Andersen and either got swept out of the crease or clanged off a post.
“When you lose, you lose, we’ve done a good job all year of moving on from wins or losses, and this is just another one that we’re going to have to move on from,” said Green.
“At the moment, you never feel good about much when you lose a game like that, but as the hours go by, you start to realize that you did a lot of good things, could have easily won that game, it could have gone either way. And when you play two games on the road you do get excited about coming home and playing at home.”
