Ottawa Clinched. The Close Games Said They Shouldn't Have.
Seventeen wins in 39 one-goal decisions. That's the number that keeps nagging at me as I watch Ottawa celebrate a playoff berth that, by the surface read, looks like a success story. The Senators finished 45-42, held together through a defensive injury crisis that would have buried lesser rosters, and found enough secondary scoring to survive. None of that is wrong. But a 44% win rate in one-goal games — a gap that held steady all season, through healthy stretches and depleted ones alike — tells you something the standings column cannot: this team does not know how to win the game within the game.
The frustrating part is what exists on the other side of that execution failure. Tim Stutzle posted 50 points in 50 games this season, a pace that would be the offensive engine of a genuine contender. Claude Giroux, at plus-13, gave Ottawa the kind of veteran stabilizing force they've needed for years. Jake Sanderson averaged 24.5 minutes a night across 49 games — a number I've been writing about since September, because it represents both the ceiling of Ottawa's defensive competence and its single greatest fragility. The talent is real. The results, in tight games, consistently weren't.
What makes the one-goal record so damning is its consistency. This wasn't a function of the September defensive collapse, when Sanderson, Zub, and others cycled through the injury report and the team opened 0-3 with a blowout loss to Toronto. It wasn't a product of the late-April swoon that turned into a seven-game losing streak. The close-game failure was structural — present in the good months and the bad ones, in the blowout wins that padded the record and the narrow losses that defined the margin. Ottawa went 9-6 in March with a strong goal differential, yet the one-goal problem persisted. That's not bad luck. That's a roster that cannot consistently execute when the margin for error disappears.
The depth chart explains some of it. Behind Stutzle at center, the production falls off a cliff — the backup options have contributed almost nothing at the NHL level this season. At left wing, the situation is even starker: the position has been a functional void for most of the year, and the William Eklund acquisition hasn't yet closed that gap. When a team cannot generate offense from its secondary positions in close games, the burden falls entirely on the top line to manufacture something — and even a point-per-game player cannot carry that weight in a 1-0 third period on the road. Ottawa's 3-6 away record over the last 20 games is the symptom; the depth problem is the disease.
Entering the playoffs as an eighth seed with Artem Zub expected to miss time and Andre Burakovsky unavailable for the opener, Ottawa is carrying the same structural fragility that defined its regular season. My read is that the one-goal record isn't going to magically reverse itself in a postseason where every game trends toward exactly those margins. The Senators clinched, and that matters — it's a better outcome than the September trajectory suggested was possible. But the box score that will define their playoff run isn't the final standings. It's the one they've been losing all year, one goal at a time.