NEW YORK — James Reimer kept expecting the New York Rangers to put shots on net.
They rarely did.
And by the end of the game Monday night, the Ottawa Senators had allowed just nine shots on goal in a 2-1 victory at Madison Square Garden. It was the fewest shots against in franchise history, the Rangers’ lowest output since 1955 — and the worst by any NHL team in more than two decades, predating the salary cap.
“The boys played great,” said Reimer, the Ottawa goalie.
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Even more impressive, they did so after losing two more players to injury and playing more than half the game with just four defensemen. Thomas Chabot left in the final seconds of the first period after taking a stick to the right arm from Rangers captain J.T. Miller, and Lassi Thomson exited his first game in the league since Nov. 25, 2022, with an undisclosed lower-body injury in the second.
“Whenever you get down to four D-men and you find a way to win, it’s a gutsy effort,” said Warren Foegele, who scored his fifth goal in nine games since joining Ottawa ahead of the trade deadline in a deal from Los Angeles. “The whole group stepped up when those guys went down.”
Chabot and Thomson will “both be out for a while,” according to coach Travis Green, who expects the team to call up two reinforcements Tuesday before playing at Detroit in a key matchup of teams fighting to make the Eastern Conference playoffs.
Ottawa was already without two of its top four defensemen, with Jake Sanderson possibly out another week and Nick Jensen recovering from knee surgery.
In their absence, Jordan Spence skated a career-high 26 minutes, 44 seconds. Tyler Kleven played 24:30, Artem Zub 23:44 and Nikolas Matinpalo 18:19.
“With two defensemen going down, guys have to step up, play a lot more minutes than they’re used to,” Green said. “Give them all credit. They played a hell of a game back there.”
Spence did not realize just how much ice time he was logging and was more focused on Chabot’s departure.
“Chabby just doing how well he was doing and seeing that, it’s unfortunate,” Spence said. “We’re trying to win a game, so we kind of had to forget about that and try and do the best we can.”
The Senators became the first team since the salary-cap era began in 2005-06 to hold an opponent under 10 shots. New Jersey allowed Washington to put only nine on net on Dec. 4, 2003.
Shots on goal did not become an official statistic tracked by the league until 1959-60. The Rangers’ record book listed their single-game lowest total as nine in a loss at Detroit on Dec. 11, 1955.
“They were better than us,” Miller said, lamenting the performance after celebrating teammate Mika Zibanejad’s 1,000th regular-season game. “We just didn’t have it. I don’t know what to say. We got outplayed, got outcompeted — things that we’re just not OK with as a group.”
Since starting a run back into the playoff race on Jan. 25, the Senators have allowed the fewest shots against in the NHL at just over 21 per game. They gave up only 14 while beating rival Toronto on Saturday and 19 on Thursday against the New York Islanders.
“That’s part of our structure,” Spence said. “That’s part of our identity, so we have to keep that going in order to win games.”
Reimer had to make just eight saves to pick up the win but acknowledged it wasn’t exactly a comfortable night seeing such little action.
“These games are a lot harder than a 30- or a 40-shot night,” he said. “You’re not in a rhythm. You’re not feeling it. It’s not just happening, so you’ve just got to trust it and trust that your body knows what it has to do when the time comes. It’s a difficult game as a goalie to play mentally, but you just trust it.”
