The St. Louis Blues opened a three-game road trip against the Ottawa Senators on October 13, 2026, with a 6:30 p.m. meeting at Canadian Tire Center in Kanata, Ontario. St. Louis arrived at 2-2-1, while Ottawa came in at 5-1-0.
That made this Blues Vs Senators matchup more than a simple early-season stop. The Blues were coming off a 5-3 comeback win over the Columbus Blue Jackets, and the Senators had just beaten the New Jersey Devils 4-1 on Monday, so both clubs entered with momentum and a reason to believe their start was real.
The numbers underneath the records tell the sharper story. St. Louis began the night with a penalty kill that was 14-for-15, good for 93.3 percent and fourth in the NHL. The power play, though, was 1-for-11, 9.3 percent and 29th in the league. The split has defined the Blues early: they were allowing 3.20 goals per game, but their defensive structure was doing far more work than their attack.
Jim Montgomery pointed directly to that divide. He said he was “incredibly happy” with the Blues’ D-zone coverage, tracking and aggressiveness, and added that the team’s defensive sticks were “vastly improved.” He also said St. Louis was causing more turnovers in the forecheck, in the defensive zone and through the neutral zone. On the other side of the puck, he called the club’s offensive habits too inconsistent, especially around net presence and inside support.
That is why the special teams still mattered so much even with a win in hand. Montgomery said the penalty kill was “very good” while the power play was “not good enough,” and he noted that the Blues were getting less offensive-zone time because their reloads had been uneven. He also said the last power-play look was better because the puck movement improved, and Monday’s units reflected a willingness to adjust, with Adam Jiricek at the point on one group, Cam Fowler on the other, and Robert Thomas and Dylan Holloway on one flank pair.
There was also a different kind of momentum hanging over the group. Ross Johnston fought Mathieu Olivier in the first minute of the second period on Monday while the Blues were down 2-0, a moment that showed how quickly the game can turn. Johnston said he is not a premeditated player, but admitted he was thinking about it and described Olivier as tough. It was the sort of sequence that can change the tone of a night, even if it does not change the standings.
The Senators also carried a wrinkle into the game: Brady Tkachuk was absent, yet Ottawa was still 5-1-0. That made the opening of the road trip a real test for St. Louis, not just a warm-up. With all 32 teams in action on NHL’s Frozen Frenzy, the Blues had one of the night’s cleaner storylines: a team trying to prove that a strong penalty kill can keep buying time for a power play that has not caught up yet.
The next thing that mattered was simple enough. The Blues were on the ice against a Senators team that had started fast, and the result would say whether St. Louis could keep leaning on structure while the offense searched for traction.
