To win at the casino, you cash out, you don’t continue playing. In Las Vegas, the world’s casino hub, on Nevada Day, the Ottawa Senators played high-risk, low-reward hockey. It was a shadow of a team that has often struggled to maintain its lead in recent years.

For most of Friday night’s game, the Senators outshot, outshot and outshot the Vegas Golden Knights 39-28. However, when the Senators took the lead, they failed to calm down their game. In the NHL, good teams find ways to get points and wins; the Senators blew three leads, losing 6-4.

“It was a hard-fought game,” Senators coach Travis Green said. “We probably deserve better than no points in this game.”

The Merit to Win meter does not correspond to two points on the leaderboard. The senators only had themselves to blame. It was their best players who let them down with stupid turnovers, mistakes and costly penalties. For a team that wants to go to the “next level,” their lack of game management was glaring.

The Senators started the game strong, taking a 2-0 lead, but lost it in 21 seconds. It all started when their two stars, Brady Tkachuk and Tim Stützle, jumped to their own blue line to cheat on offense, leaving Vegas’ Nicolas Roy all alone to score. Seconds later, after a Nicolas Hague slap shot took a bad bounce off Jake Sanderson’s leg, the score was 2-2. Lost momentum.

The Sens regained the lead 3-2. But this time, Sanderson, who was Ottawa’s best player for six games, threw a poorly guided outlet pass directly to the league’s leading puck stealer, Mark Stone, hoping to spark a fast break . The turnover was punished by a point shot from Ivan Barbashev to tie the match 3-3.

Midway through the game, Green decided to demote Michael Amadio to the third line in his first return to Vegas, where he won the Stanley Cup in 2023. Nick Cousins ​​moved to the first line with Stützle and Tkachuk and all three were dynamite, outscoring Vegas 7-1.

Nonetheless, Cousins ​​was the catalyst for the late game collapse with a nervous breakdown after the Senators regained the lead for the third time, 4-3. He took an ill-advised interference penalty with 5:05 remaining at a time when the Senators had limited Vegas to just six shots in the period. This is a penalty that simply cannot happen when a team is trying to maintain a lead late.

Vegas took advantage of the power play to tie the game 4-4. A minute later, instead of throwing the puck into the Vegas zone to try to score a point, youngster Ridly Greig decided to take the puck to the net, leading to a turnover. Vegas raced down the ice to score on an odd-man run, completed by Keegan Kolesar, to give the Knights a 5-4 lead with 2:11 left, securing the victory.

“We made a few mistakes that we’d probably like to repeat,” Green said.

It’s not just one leak, but several small leaks that can sink a ship. The Senators played consistently and were sloppy when taking the lead.

This is the story of their season. Against the Los Angeles Kings, they let a 7-6 lead slip away late in the third. The same thing happened against the Tampa Bay Lightning when they let leads of 2-0 and 3-2 slip away, although they ultimately came away with a narrow 5-4 victory. Ultimately, good teams don’t systematically waste leads; the Senators will have to become game managers rather than gunslingers.

The return of Linus Ullmark

It was a much-anticipated return to the field for star goalkeeper Linus Ullmark, who had missed the previous four games due to strain. He allowed five goals on 27 shots. It wasn’t his best performance, and the goalkeeper made that clear.

“If (the Senators) had a competent goaltender today, they would have won 4-3, I would say,” Ullmark said.

On the surface, Ullmark’s opinion of his piece seems hyper-critical. He allowed a goal on a loose puck that hit a defender to find the back of the net, while another goal came on a deflected shot. The goals he allowed were Grade A opportunities that were capitalized by Vegas.

“Way too sloppy,” UIlmark said of his performance. “And in this league, in this type of match, you have to rely on the goalkeeper to close the door. And not letting these two at the end make us lose the game, I take it upon myself.

Interestingly, when you look at the numbers, you can see where Ullmark is coming from. According to MoneyPuck.com, he recorded a target of -3.05 recorded above expectations. According to naturalstattrick.com, he saved only three high-danger chances out of six, while allowing one medium-chance goal and one low-chance goal.

But his coach disagreed with Ullmark’s assessment.

“Yeah, I don’t know,” Green said. “You want your goalie to feel like he can win the game for you. I don’t think he needed to win the game for us.

For the first time in a long time, the Senators’ goaltending wasn’t the root cause of their failure.

Bravo to the fourth row

As disappointing as the result was, there were positives against the Golden Knights, mainly from the fourth line. A next man up mentality is starting to take shape within this Senators team. Cole Reinhardt replaced the injured Shane Pinto, who was scratched with an undisclosed injury, and in the first two minutes of the game he made a behind-the-back one-on-one pass to Adam Gaudette. When Gaudette beat lost Vegas goaltender Adin Hill, it gave rookie Reinhardt his first career point in his second NHL game.

The Reinhard-Gaudette-MacEwen trio dominated Vegas 9-4 while playing the third-fastest time among all the Senators’ forward lines.

“You want to feel confident with your fourth line,” Green said. “And tonight, with Reinhardt standing, I wanted to see how he fit into the match. And I thought he gave us some good minutes as well.

Later, Gaudette – who scored 44 goals last season in the American Hockey League – raced onto the ice on the power play to rocket past Hill and give the Senators a 4-3 lead. For a while, it seemed like it was the winning play. Gaudette’s two goals were his first since the 2021-22 season, which, oddly enough, were scored for the same team: the Ottawa Senators.