Did you see that?! Did you even see Friday night’s glorious mess of a hockey game between the Washington Capitals and Edmonton Oilers?
No, really, did you see it? A track meet. A barn burner. A game with a lot of goals. Too much happened for a comprehensive recap. In short: everyone scored and then the road team won.
Caps beat Oilers 7 to 4. Perfect road trip!
- Exactly 74 goals, 263 penalties, 649 stretch passes, and one more crucial road win for the Caps. At the center of it all: Evgeny Kuznetsov, with 3 goals and 2 assists, plus a quartet of penalty minutes. Except for maybe that last part, this was the finest game of his young career.
- Philipp Grubauer was busy in his own end. He seemed to be the Caps’ only player who had to suffer for this game’s chaos. In his first game of the season, Grubi surrendered 4 goals, all of them scored or assisted by a recent early draft pick. Jeez, Edmonton. Get your act together.
- That first line continues to look great, combining for a textbook tic-tac-toe goal to open the scoring. But the Caps saw scoring from, well, basically everyone tonight. Good team effort.
- The team of Brooks Orpik (slashing and tripping) and Kuzy (hooking and interference) combined to win Penalty Bingo, in addition to one each for Tom Wilson (hooking) and Jay Beagle (tripping). But the Oilers only converted once, so no harm no foul.
- The Caps’ third defensive pairing of Tim (?) Chorney and Dmitry Orlov should be well rested, having only skated 13:40 and 12:07, respectively. That was least on the team except for the fourth line of Chandler Stephenson (who got outworked and shouldn’t get a shirt if he’s only playing 6 minutes a night), Brooks Laich (who was maybe being punished for a minus-2 because of fluke goals on Grubi), and Andre Burakovsky (who had 2 points, come on).
So ends Washington’s highly successful road trip. The Caps outscored their opponents 16 to 8 on their journey through Canada. Now they’ve got four days off to contemplate how stupid good they look right now. Have at it.
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