The Ottawa Senators will be in danger of elimination when they host the Carolina Hurricanes in Game 4 of their best-of-seven first-round playoff series on Saturday afternoon.
The Hurricanes, the top seed in the Eastern Conference, went up 3-0 in the series with a 2-1 win over the host Senators on Thursday night.
“Just going to keep believing, keep playing our game,” Ottawa forward Tim Stutzle said. “I mean, we scored three goals in three games, so it’s tough to win like that, and we just got to find a way.”
Carolina will be trying to win at least one round in the Stanley Cup Playoffs for the sixth consecutive season.
“We’re feeling good about ourselves, but you know, the hardest to win is always that fourth win,” said Hurricanes forward Taylor Hall.
Carolina’s Logan Stankoven has scored the first goal of the contest in all three games. It is only the second time in NHL history that a player has scored the opening goal in the first three games of the postseason since George Armstrong did it for the Toronto Maple Leafs in 1956.
Stankoven is also one short of the all-time playoff opening-goal streak of four, set by Michel Goulet of the Quebec Nordiques in 1985.
“Good feeling to start the game and takes a little bit of pressure off of us,” Stankoven said. “They were going to be excited to come out and try to steal this one, so it was nice just to settle things down.”
He opened the scoring in Game 3 at the 5:13 mark.
Drake Batherson tied it for the Senators with 3:54 left in the second period but Jackson Blake untied it just 1:23 later.
“They scored one, the building erupted a little bit there, and I don’t know if they got a little momentum there, and then just to get that one quick answer right away, I think that was really big for us as a group,” Blake said.
The line of Stankoven (three goals and an assist), Hall (one goal, four assists) and Blake (one goal, three assists) has dominated the series.
Ottawa will have to try and stay alive without top defenseman Jake Sanderson, who is out with a concussion. He left Game 3 in the second period after getting hit in the head by Hall, who received a two-minute minor penalty for an illegal check. Sanderson played two shifts after the hit before departing.
“Not fun,” fellow Ottawa defenseman Thomas Chabot said of Sanderson’s injury. “That’s the biggest piece of our team, probably. So seeing him going down the tunnel is not good. He plays such big minutes. The way he plays, it’s like I’ve said earlier this year when we lost him, there’s no other Jake Sanderson, so it’s a big loss for us, for sure.”
Sanderson played a game-high 43:06 with two assists and was plus-2 in the Senators’ 3-2 double-overtime loss in Game 2 on Monday night.
Ottawa is already without defenseman Artem Zub, who suffered an undisclosed injury in Game 1. He and Sanderson made up the team’s top defense pairing.
Defenseman Tyler Kleven returned on Thursday after missing nine games with an upper-body injury.
