Hours after acquiring Anders Nilsson from their opponent for the night, Marcus Högberg showed that he won’t be giving up the net in Ottawa that easily.
The rookie goalie, playing in only his third NHL game, stopped 41 of 45 shots on Wednesday against the Vancouver Canucks.
After being outshot 17-5 in the first period, the Senators’ bid for a comeback fell just short as they lost 4-3 in overtime.
The loss was the sixth in a row for the Senators and coach Guy Boucher wasn’t impressed with his team’s effort in the first.
“The first period just wasn’t good enough at all,” he told reporters after the game. “That’s a bad period, allowing that many shots. A lot of them were outside shots but we were not good enough in that first period.”
He said he thought the team played better through the rest of the game but that the effort wasn’t there in the opening period.
Boucher has been impressed with Högberg’s play through his first few NHL games though.
“He looks like a goaltender; he’s solid, he’s calm. I think it instills confidence,” he said. “You look at the last three games, you’re hoping that you get the win because I thought he certainly played well enough from the beginning to give us something and we got a point out of it.”
Mark Stone tied the game with 50 seconds left in the third off a slick pass from Ryan Dzingel but Elias Pettersson absolutely sniped his third of the game to both cap off the hat trick and seal the game for the Canucks.
Petterson had three glorious chances in the extra frame, hitting the crossbar once before finally ripping one past Högberg for the win.
Stone and Matt Duchene had a goal and an assist each and Dzingel had two assists.
Pettersson’s hat trick was the first of his career. Sven Baertschi scored the other goal for Vancouver and added an assist, Alex Edler had three helpers and Brock Boeser had two assists. Jacob Markstrom made 30 saves for his 17th win of the season.
Pettersson’s second goal of the game put the Canucks up 3-1 midway through the third. Christian Wolanin sniped his first goal of the season low glove side on Markstrom later in the period to make it 3-2.
Late in the second, minutes after Matt Duchene tied the game at 1-1 on the powerplay, Pettersson scored his 20th of the season off a feed from Brock Boeser to regain the lead for Vancouver.
After a scoreless first period, Baertschi banged in a rebound on the powerplay in the second to give the Canucks 1-0 lead on their 27th shot on goal.
The Senators acquired Nilsson and forward Josh Archibald from the Canucks earlier in the day in exchange for goalie Mike McKenna, forward Tom Pyatt and a sixth-round pick in the 2019 draft.
This was the first game of a three-game homestead for the Senators, who face the Minnesota Wild and Carolina Hurricanes in a pair of afternoon games on Saturday and Sunday.
