Photo: Jamie Sabau
Can they make it three? To beat the Columbus Blue Jackets on Tuesday, the Washington Capitals might want to try playing the full sixty minutes of the hockey game.
Then again, the Blue Jackets are pretty bad. We shall see at 7 PM tonight– either from your seats on Verizon Center or via the good people at CSN Washington.
| Team | Record | Possession | PDO | Power Play | Penalty Kill |
| Washington Capitals | 6-5-3 | 53.2% | 99.1 | 28.9% | 77.1% |
| Columbus Blue Jackets | 4-9-1 | 47.9% | 96.8 | 22.4% | 76.9% |
Programming note: I might be on the road, so you might get a very special, very русский recap tonight.
Projected Lineup
Via Alex Prewitt, Tom Wilson and Brooks Laich will not play tonight due to injury. Here are the Caps’ lines:
Ovechkin – Backstrom – Beagle
Johansson – Burakovsky – Brouwer
Chimera – Fehr – Ward
O’Brien – Kuznetsov – Latta
Orpik – Carlson
Alzner – Niskanen
Schmidt – Green
Holtby
Columbus is Bad
As tabulated by your boy Rob Vollman, Hockey pundits chose Columbus to win third place in the Metropolitan Division– above the Capitals. Right now, Columbus are 29th out of 30 teams in both standings points and goal differential. Only Buffalo has fared worse.
And before you chalk that up to their second-worst-in-the-league PDO, please also consider that they’re getting outshot during 52.4 to 47.6 during 5v5 (adjusted for score). They are bleeding shots against (22nd in the league at suppressing shot attempts), which might be good news for Ovi and company tonight.
I don’t know what it is exactly, but it seems clear that something has gone wrong in Lumbus.
Best Thing on the Internet Today
Storylines
- Top-line Beagle. It’s just a horrid idea. The first sentence in any story about this team’s last coach mentions top-line Beagle as one his chief mistakes.
- Great piece by Greg Wyshynski on goalie coach/odd duck Mitch Korn.
- Eric Fehr is great, right? The only people who disagree are Puck Daddy’s Ryan Lambert and Barry Trotz.
- Washington’s PK doesn’t look great yet, but Pat assures you they are much improved from last year.
- I’m sure I can find something in Japers Rink’s ups and downs to get upset about. Give me a minute.
What You’re Missing on TV Tonight
It doesn’t matter. Today is Veterans Day.
America has two holidays for its servicemen and women. There’s Memorial Day, which is supposed to be a somber remembrance of those who gave what Lincoln called “the last full measure of devotion,” but instead ends up a beer-drenched inauguration for summer. And then there’s Veterans Day, which always seems too solemn to me, when really it should be a celebration of the vets who are still with us.
Got three dollars and fifty cents in your pocket? Buy a vet a beer. Got a recipe for a kick-ass casserole in your head? Make dinner for a returned service member. Don’t got three dollars and fifty cents in your pocket or a recipe for a kick-ass casserole in your head? Write your congressman a letter to ask him or her to do more to help the 50 thousand veterans who will be homeless tonight and find jobs for the 10 percent of vets who are unemployed.
Veterans Day is supposed to be a party, but I keep thinking of all the people whom I admired and whom I’ve lost to the second and third longest wars in US history. I keep thinking of my friends who have lost even more. I wish like hell those guys were still around. If they were still here, I wonder what I would say– some grossly insufficient thank you probably. I’d rather just shut up and listen. I’d rather just hear them talk again and laugh again. That’d be nice.
Full RMNB Coverage of Caps vs Blue Jackets
