Brady Tkachuk tallied two goals and Connor Brown scored in his eighth straight game as the Ottawa Senators came back from an early two-goal deficit to beat the Winnipeg Jets 4-2 on Monday night.
By Chris Faria
The game got off to a rocky start for the Sens as Kyle Connor got the icebreaker for the Jets just five minutes in, scoring a top corner blast on the power play to give Winnipeg an early lead.
Nikolaj Ehlers added to Winnipeg’s lead less than four minutes later as he cut across the Senators’ zone and fired a wrist shot under the arm of Anton Forsberg for his 18th goal of the season.
Mere seconds after the Ehlers goal, Senators defenceman Josh Brown dropped the gloves with Jets defender Logan Stanley in an attempt to wake his team up. The attempted momentum shift apparently worked.
A couple minutes later the Sens drew a power play of their own and Brady Tkachuk capitalized to bring the score to 2-1. Tim Stutzle fed the puck back to Thomas Chabot at the point who tapped it over to Josh Norris on the right flank. Norris funnelled the puck to the net and it deflected off of Tkachuk’s leg to beat Connor Hellebuyck and cut the Jets’ lead in half.
The Senators weren’t done there, though. With under two minutes to play in the first, Connor Brown carried the puck deep into Winnipeg territory. Chris Tierney eventually picked up a loose puck on the left-hand boards and fed it back to Brown, who whipped a shot on net from the high slot. The puck ricocheted off Hellebuyck’s glove and into the net to give Brown his eighth goal in eight games and tie the game at 2-2.
Adding to his record!! #GoSensGo pic.twitter.com/UYifIU0RlV
— Ottawa Senators (@Senators) April 12, 2021
The two teams played to a scoreless stalemate in the second after Forsberg made a big save on Mark Scheifele and Connor Brown failed to convert on a breakaway chance.
Halfway through the third period, Ottawa finally completed the comeback to take their first lead of the night. Chabot flipped a puck from centre that awkwardly bounced on net, putting Hellebuyck in a tough spot. The goaltender was unable to settle the puck as the rebound squirted out to Evgenii Dadonov who pulled it to his backhand and lifted it over Hellebuyck’s pad to make it 3-2.
Tkachuk added his second goal of the night with under four minutes to play after stealing the puck from Neal Pionk and going in on a breakaway. He snapped the puck into the top right corner for his 14th goal of the season to put the Sens up 4-2 and seal the win.
The win snapped Ottawa’s three-game losing skid as they’ll look to double up on the Jets in their rematch on Wednesday at 7:00 PM EST.
