Ottawa’s depth survived long enough to make Detroit uncomfortable. Its defensive structure did not survive long enough to win.
The question entering Tuesday was whether a depleted Senators team could hold its shape for one more road game after winning in Toronto and Boston. Ottawa had already survived without Jake Sanderson and Artem Zub once. Detroit got the same weakened defense less than 24 hours later, with Dylan Larkin returning to a lineup that badly needed somebody capable of attacking through the middle.
The Red Wings found the pressure point quickly. Tim Stützle gave Ottawa an early lead, but Detroit answered 32 seconds later, Larkin scored before the first period ended and the Red Wings added two more goals in the opening 4:30 of the second. A game Ottawa needed to keep organized had become 4-1 before it was halfway over.
The Senators still made Detroit finish the night. Drake Batherson scored on the power play, William Eklund pulled Ottawa within one midway through the third and Samuel Ersson stopped 31 shots behind a group that spent too much of the game defending. Alex DeBrincat’s empty-net power-play goal finally ended the comeback at 5-3.
Ottawa’s first loss did not expose the 2-0 start as fake. It showed exactly where the margin had become too thin.
Stützle Gave Ottawa the Start It Needed
There was nothing tired about Ottawa’s first goal. Stützle collected the puck in his own end, carried it through the neutral zone, beat Axel Sandin-Pellikka and used Ben Chiarot as a screen before snapping the puck past John Gibson 2:44 into the game.
It was almost the ideal opening for a team playing its third road game in four nights. Ottawa did not need to grind through a long offensive-zone shift or wait for its power play. Its best transition player created a goal almost by himself and gave the Senators a chance to make Detroit chase the game.
The advantage lasted 32 seconds. Nate Danielson found DeBrincat from the right side of the crease, and DeBrincat beat Ersson from the bottom of the left circle to tie the game. Ottawa never had time to turn its early goal into control. Detroit’s immediate response forced the Senators right back into the kind of game they were trying to avoid.
Larkin Changed Detroit’s Center of Gravity Immediately
Larkin’s return was never going to repair every injury in Detroit’s lineup. Marco Kasper, Mason Appleton and J.T. Compher were still unavailable. What Larkin could change was where the Red Wings were able to attack.
He did that in his first game. With 6:46 remaining in the first period, DeBrincat moved the puck to Viktor Arvidsson below the goal line and Arvidsson found Larkin alone near the top of the crease. The finish gave Detroit its first lead of the season and forced Ottawa’s depleted defense to begin chasing the game instead of managing it.
Larkin then helped create the next goal early in the second. His initial shot produced the rebound Arvidsson finished on the power play, stretching the lead to 3-1. In less than 25 minutes of game time, Detroit’s returning center had already supplied a goal, an assist and the kind of interior pressure Ottawa had spent the previous night preventing Boston from creating.
The Red Wings did not suddenly become healthy when Larkin returned. They became much easier to organize around.
Detroit Made Ottawa’s Missing Defensemen Visible
Boston never made Sanderson and Zub the organizing story of Monday’s game. Detroit did.
The Red Wings attacked the areas Ottawa’s replacement structure was being asked to protect, particularly around the crease and through the middle. DeBrincat scored from close range. Larkin found open space at the top of the crease. Arvidsson converted a rebound. Then Justin Faulk stepped into open ice and beat Ersson from the high slot after William Wallinder caught Ottawa with a stretch pass.
Faulk’s goal at 4:30 of the second made it 4-1 and captured the difference between the Boston and Detroit games. Ottawa had been able to keep the Bruins’ attacks in front of it and move out of danger before pressure accumulated. Against Detroit, the Senators repeatedly found themselves defending the next layer of the play after the first one had already broken their shape.
That is what a shortened blue line eventually costs. The individual replacements do not all have to play poorly. Enough difficult minutes, repeated retrievals and broken sequences can create spaces that Sanderson or Zub normally erase before they become scoring chances.
Ersson Was Asked to Solve Too Much
The concern around Ersson was never whether he could make routine saves. It was whether Ottawa could keep his first start from becoming a test of how many defensive breakdowns a backup goalie could erase.
He ended up making 31 saves and still allowed four goals before Detroit’s empty-netter. That workload tells the story better than simply assigning the loss to the crease. The Red Wings forced him to deal with rebounds, net-front plays and rush chances while Ottawa struggled to reduce the quality of what was reaching him.
Detroit put 36 shots on goal in the game, with the final one going into the empty net. Gibson faced far less sustained pressure at the other end, stopping 22 of Ottawa’s 25 shots. The Senators still generated enough offense to threaten a comeback, but the game was being played with a much larger defensive burden on their goalie.
Ersson did not need to be spectacular for Ottawa’s plan to work. Once the Senators allowed Detroit to build a three-goal lead, spectacular became the requirement anyway.
Ottawa’s Forward Depth Still Did Its Job
The loss should not erase what the Senators continued to get from the front of the lineup. Stützle followed his three-point night in Boston with another goal and assist. Batherson scored for the second consecutive game and added an assist. Eklund produced a goal and assist of his own, giving Ottawa three different forwards with multi-point nights despite the difficult schedule and Detroit’s early control.
Batherson’s second-period power-play goal cut the deficit to 4-2 and kept the game from completely escaping. Eklund then scored from a difficult angle at 10:30 of the third after Fabian Zetterlund’s shot came off the end boards, reducing the lead to 4-3 and forcing Detroit to defend the final nine-plus minutes rather than coast through them.
That comeback is evidence of why Ottawa started 2-0 in the first place. The Senators have enough offensive layers to keep producing after the game stops following their preferred script. Their problem Tuesday was that the forwards were trying to repair damage faster than the defense was creating it.
Detroit Finally Looked Like a Team With Multiple Ways to Score
The Red Wings entered the night with two goals through their first two games. Against Ottawa, five different players recorded multiple points and Detroit finally looked less dependent on one line manufacturing everything.
DeBrincat finished with two goals and an assist. Lucas Raymond had three assists. Arvidsson and Faulk each produced a goal and an assist, while Larkin added his own goal and helper in his season debut. Detroit’s first four goals came through four different scorers and several different mechanisms: a close-range finish, a net-front play, a power-play rebound and a rush attack through the middle.
That variety mattered against an Ottawa team already trying to redistribute defensive responsibility. The Senators could not identify one Detroit threat and devote the night to shutting it down. Larkin’s return made the top of the lineup more coherent, but the damage spread beyond Larkin himself.
For one night, Detroit’s injury list stopped defining the offense because the available players finally created enough together.
Special Teams Kept Pulling Ottawa in Both Directions
Ottawa’s special teams had been one of the strengths of the opening road trip. The Senators killed all four Boston power plays Monday and even turned one of them into a Stützle shorthanded goal.
Detroit made the Senators pay Tuesday. Arvidsson’s power-play goal opened the second-period burst, and DeBrincat eventually finished the game with an empty-net power-play goal after Ottawa had made it 4-3. The Red Wings went 2-for-5 with the extra skater.
Ottawa’s own power play kept the game alive, with Batherson scoring on one of five chances. The special teams did not decide the entire night, but they magnified the same underlying problem: the Senators were spending too much time in situations where their shortened defense had to absorb another layer of pressure.
A tired team missing two major defensemen rarely benefits from adding penalty-kill minutes to the workload.
The First Ten Minutes Did Not Decide the Game. The Next Twenty Did.
The concern was that Detroit would use fresh legs and home ice to bury Ottawa immediately. The Senators actually handled the opening minutes well enough to score first. What they could not do was sustain that level once Detroit answered.
DeBrincat’s tying goal only 32 seconds after Stützle scored prevented Ottawa from slowing the pace. Larkin then gave Detroit the lead before intermission, and the Red Wings carried that pressure straight into the second period with two goals in the opening 4:30.
Fatigue is not always visible as a team looking slow from puck drop. It can appear when the recovery between difficult shifts disappears, when the next defensive read arrives slightly late or when one broken sequence becomes three because nobody gets the clean reset required to end it.
Ottawa was competitive enough to score first and resilient enough to rally later. The middle of the game was where the schedule and missing personnel finally became impossible to separate from the result.
The Prediction Missed. The Warning Did Not.
Ottawa was picked to survive this game 3-2 if it could keep the night organized long enough for its forward depth to create the decisive moments. The Senators did create those moments. They scored three times, got another strong night from Stützle and pushed Detroit into a one-goal game in the third.
They failed at the condition attached to the prediction. The game did not remain organized. Detroit scored four times before the midpoint of the second period, generated significantly more pressure on Ersson and forced Ottawa’s depleted defense to defend the exact interior areas the Senators needed to protect.
The result was therefore less a rejection of Ottawa’s offensive depth than a measurement of how far that depth can compensate for missing defensemen, a back-to-back and a different starting goalie. Tuesday found the limit.
Ottawa Leaves the Trip With a Better Answer Than 2-1 Suggests
The Senators did not complete a perfect opening road trip. They still leave Toronto, Boston and Detroit with two wins from three games while playing the final two without Sanderson and Zub and finishing the trip with uncertainty around Linus Ullmark.
That makes the loss useful without making it harmless. Ottawa now has clear evidence that its forward group can generate enough offense through adversity, but also that the reconstructed defense cannot be asked to absorb unlimited pressure without consequences.
The next step is not to decide whether a 2-1 start proves the Senators are good or whether one loss exposes something permanent. It is to get healthier and determine how much of the structure that worked in Boston can survive when opponents attack it the way Detroit did.
Detroit finally found its first win because Larkin’s return gave the Red Wings a center around which the offense could organize, and the rest of the lineup followed him into the game. Ottawa found something too: the exact point where depth stopped being enough.
Sources
NHL, October 7, 2026 — Red Wings 5, Senators 3 game recap | Detroit Red Wings, October 7, 2026 — postgame recap and special-teams notes | NHL, October 6, 2026 — projected lineups and injury status | Ottawa Senators, October 6, 2026 — road-trip and goaltending updates