Senators 6, Red Wings 3

DETROIT — The Ottawa Senators shifted the drive to get back into the playoff picture into high gear Saturday in the Motor City.

The Senators scored three times on the power play and also had two short-handed goals as they extended their winning streak to four straight with a 6-3 victory against the Detroit Red Wings at Little Caesar’s Arena.

Alex DeBrincat had three assists, while Drake Batherson scored twice. Claude Giroux, Tyler Motte, Thomas Chabot and Austin Watson also chipped in with goals, while Cam Talbot made the necessary stops in net.

Ottawa is now back to .500 with a 14-14-2 record.

“It’s big. We can’t let off the gas. We’ve got to keep going. Everybody is feeling more comfortable with their game now and we’re all comfortable with the way we play now,” DeBrincat said. “If we keep doing the same thing, we’re going to win some games.”

For a while, this was a back-and-forth battle that could have gone either way.

The Senators came into this game four points behind the Red Wings in the National Hockey League’s Atlantic Division and seven points back of the New York Islanders for the final wildcard playoff spot in the Eastern Conference, but with a chance to make up ground in the first of three games against Detroit in a stretch of 14 days.

Motte put this one away with his third goal of the season at 12:48 of the third, with the Senators playing shorthanded, and Watson added an insurance goal with another shortie into an empty net.

Giroux had scored his 13th of the season on the power play at 8:14 of the third period to give the Senators the lead at 4-3. After the Senators did a good job keeping the puck in the zone, he fired a blast that Red Wings goalie Ville Husso had no chance of stopping.

The Senators will close out 2022 with a matchup here again on New Year’s Eve, while the Red Wings will also be in Ottawa next Friday.

Still, Ottawa head coach D.J. Smith noted, the Red Wings aren’t the only target as the Senators try to get back into the playoff picture.

The Senators went 3-0-0 against the Red Wings last season, but this Detroit team has undergone changes and spent the off-season making improvements, just like Ottawa did.

“Our power play continues to be hot,” Smith said. “At the end of the day, you’ve got to get every point that you can. We’re grinding. We know the way we have to play. We got away from it in the second period, but we got back to it in the third.”

The decision to go with Talbot as the starter in net was hardly surprising. He had won three straight and the Senators needed every point they could get.

The game knotted at 3-3 through 40 minutes. The two teams exchanged goals in the second period, both on the power play.

Detroit blueliner Filip Hronek tied it up with 7:46 left in the second, after the Senators were penalized for too many men, putting them down two men. Hronek took a pass at the point, skated toward the net and fired the puck by Talbot high on the glove side.

Batherson scored the only even strength goal of the gam, with his second of the game being Ottawa’s 14th goal with the man-advantage in December. He was able to get a handle on the puck in front of the net and fire it past Husso into the wide-open cage at 1:40, giving his club a 3-2 lead.

It had also been tied 2-2 after the first period. Chabot scored his fifth of the season on a power play, firing a shot from the point that found its way through traffic after changing direction and beating Husso with 1:18 left in the period.

That came after the Wings had take a 2-1 lead on Adam Erne’s fifth of the season at 14:56. He tipped a shot past Talbot, who had no chance of stopping it.

Give Batherson a lot of credit for his first goal. He fired a shot from below the left faceoff circle that bounced off the back of Husso’s head and into the net to tie it up 1-1 at 12:47.

“I kind of caught the goalie by surprise, and I’ll take it,” Batherson said.

The Senators didn’t start this one the way they wanted. They were down 1-0 only 2:32 into the game after a turnover in Ottawa’s zone allowed Detroit’s Joe Veleno to open the scoring with a shot that beat Talbot through the five-hole.

“I don’t think we played too well the first two periods. The power play did a good job of getting the goals to stay in the games but the third period was probably our best period,” Giroux said. “Early in the season we weren’t winning these games, and now we’re learning how to play in the third period.”

The Senators are back in action on Sunday at 2 p.m. against the Minnesota Wild at the XCel Energy Center in St. Paul.

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