Photo: 365 days of april
Listen up, you ignorant lemmings! You think the Caps are good just because they’re on a 103-point pace and haven’t lost a game since the late 80s? Well, you gotta be better than good to beat the Philadelphia Flyers. You think, just ’cause they’re 24th in puck possession, the Capitals are gonna run roughshod over ’em?
Yeah, probably.
But the Caps are on the back half of a road back-to-back, and the Flyers are gonna do nasty stuff after the whistle, so really anything can happen.
7 PM on CSN. Crash the net.
| Team | Record | Possession | PDO | Power Play | Penalty Kill |
| Washington Capitals | 21-11-7 | 52.0% | 100.2 | 23.1% | 79.2% |
| Philadelphia Flyers | 15-18-7 | 48.1% | 101.7 | 22.0% | 75.0% |
Projected Lineup
Here’s how they lined up last night. We won’t know who’s in net until later, but I’m gonna put in Peters because that’s my bet.
Ovechkin – Backstrom – Burakovsky
Johansson – Kuznetsov – Brouwer
Laich– Fehr – Ward
Chimera – Beagle – Wilson
Orpik – Carlson
Alzner – Niskanen
Hillen – Green
Peters
Best Thing on the Internet Today
Boop.
Storylines
- I want to start here:
Hextall came into media room looking rather glum. "We're in 25th place in the league and I'm supposed to come in all fricking cheery…"
— Tim Panaccio (@tpanotchRET) January 7, 2015
- Looks like Steve Mason (92.81 Sv% during 5v5, about the same as Holtby) will start for Philly. We won’t know about Braden Holtby until 5 PM at the earliest. If Holtby does start, he’ll take the franchise record for most consecutive starts.
- Background: It’s almost always a bad idea to play a goalie in back-to-back games.
- The Flyers are having a bad season, but I don’t think they’re that bad of a team. They have been known to bring the gristle though, which is exactly what the Capitals expect tonight.
- Tom Wilson doesn’t have a concussion, or at least he didn’t last night. I’m still worried, but I’m a worrier by nature.
- Alex Prewitt has a great item on scoring-enhancer Brooks Laich, who’s been going to the net– and getting ’em from the perimeter as well. (Driving scoring chances isn’t really a repeatable skill, or at least not a common one, but retrospectively at least this is awesome.)
- This is a story about Alex Ovechkin messing with Evgeny Kuznetsov, but I’m having a hard time getting past Kuzy’s unibrow. I know this an ethnocentric thing, and I’m not proud, but I just can’t get past it.
- Ovi to Phil: Don’t talk to the media. Good advice. Wait, am I media? I always considered myself a dude on a couch, but maybe I’m media. Chris Gordon– he’s definitely media. Igor too. Fedor is respectable enough to be media. Me and Ian– again, mostly just dudes on couches who want to make jokes. Rachel is an artist, but sometimes she’s a mixed-media artist, so I think that makes her kinda media. Maybe we’re like 44-percent media. Don’t talk to us?
What You’re Missing on TV Tonight
The worst show on television! (8:00 PM on CBS)
While someone named Raj eagerly awaits data from a space probe in which he was involved, someone named Howard keeps distracting him. Later, dress shopping with someone named Penny and someone named Amy doesn’t exactly prove to be a good fit for someone named Leonard and someone named Sheldon.
