Ottawa Senators Got Unexpected Season from Zack Smith

Zack Smith is coming off the best season of his NHL career, and the Ottawa Senators have high hopes that he can follow it up with another fantastic campaign.

Smith has the versatility to line up as a left winger or a center. In order to utilize his skills among other top forwards on this Senators’ roster, he might be seeing most of his ice time come at left wing next season.

Part of his great performance from last year was attributed to being moved to the first line to play as a left winger, and he responded with 25 goals. Smith had never before had more than 14 in a season.

Kyle Turris is returning from injury, Mike Zibanejad had another impressive season last year, and Jean-Gabriel Pageau’s strong offensive performance makes the center position abundant with formidable options. If Smith wants ice time with other top forwards on this team, left wing might be the easier niche for him to fill.

Clarke MacArthur returning from injury makes the line configurations a little more unpredictable, especially when taking into account Mike Hoffman returning to the club after his arbitration hearing.

It’s a great problem for the Senators to have, though, as impressive forward depth like this is something that other teams would long for.

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Smith lead the NHL in shooting percentage at 20.7%. In previous seasons where he had played in at least 40 games, he never had a higher percentage than 10.4%.

It was a remarkable turnaround based more on opportunity than anything else. The empirical evidence didn’t even remotely hint that Smith would take this leap after more than 300 games of NHL experience.

Among players who took over 100 faceoffs for the Senators, only Pageau had a higher winning percentage than Smith, who won 52.1% of his faceoffs.

Smith has good size and displays an aggressive attitude on the ice. He ranked 3rd on the team with 175 hits at even strength. That tied his career high achieved during the 2013-2014 season, but this time he did it in 1 less game.

His two-way abilities allowed him to rank 2nd on the team in plus/minus with a plus 16, which also served as a career high.

Coming into last season, he had 1 power play goal in his entire career. He logged more opportunities on the unit and netted 4 power play goals last season alone.

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Smith is now going to go into next season with much higher expectations attached to him. The Senators are hoping that he can continue his newfound role as a physical scorer. Combined with his positive contributions on defense, Smith is an important piece to this team’s success.