Photo: Drew Hallowell
The Caps haven’t won a game since January 19 when they beat the Columbus Blue Jackets 6-3. There’s a lot of talk about the Caps as the favorite to win the East this season, but I’m not really sure how a team can be considered good, let alone a contender, when they’ve gone 15 days without a win.
The Caps need to end this prolonged slump and prove they actually have the skills it takes to win a hockey game. After all, I bet most of us on a beer league team have had more wins than the Caps over the past 15 days. To end the drought, the Caps will need to beat the Florida Panthers. The Panthers sit atop the Atlantic Division with 62 points and a 6-3-1 record in their last 10 contests.
Team | Record | Possession | PDO | Power Play | Penalty Kill |
Washington Capitals | 35-8-4 | 52% | 102.2 | 26.8% | 84.6% |
Florida Panthers | 29-15-5 | 48% | 102.2 | 16.2% | 83.1% |
The lines look a little different today because Ovechkin is suspended and Johansson is hurt. Per Katie Brown:
Galiev – Backstrom – Oshie
Burakovsky – Kuznetsov – Williams
Chimera – Richards – Wilson
Laich – Sill – Latta
Alzner – Niskanen
Schmidt – Carlson
Orlov – Chorney
Grubauer
Over the break, TSN updated their top 50 player list. Even the most well-done and carefully thought out list is going to be criticized. Even reasonable opinions differ enough that two very good lists are going to have a large amount of disagreement.
But oh my gosh, this list is silly at times. This thing is drenched in far too much recency bias. How does a player, in this case Ryan Getzlaf, go from being ranked the eighth best player to not being ranked in the top 50 in just half a season? Regardless of whether ranking Getzlaf at eighth before the season was too high or how disappointing his first half was, there’s no way I can be convinced a player’s ranking can change that much over just one half of a season.
Sidney Crosby at 14? Come on, there are not 13 players in the league better than Crosby.
Leon Draisaitl was an AHL afterthought before the season, but 40 games later he’s ranked as the 47th best player in the league? Ehhhhh.
Here are a few thoughts on the Caps who are ranked:
Lists are a fun exercise that are made to be disagreed with. Let’s hear from all of you in the comments on what you think of the list.
The first significant Orpik update we’ve had since the Carter administration.
Brooks Orpik said he was told he had to rest 8 weeks so a bone could heal. Conditioning is now the main issue.
— Katie Brown (@katiebhockey) February 2, 2016
Here’s Florida’s own Against Me! with “Don’t Lose Touch” from their 2005 album Searching for a Former Clarity. The audio on this one isn’t top notch but this is exactly what it feels like to be in the front at one of their shows. This band kills it live.
Russian Machine Never Breaks is not associated with the Washington Capitals; Monumental Sports, the NHL, or its properties. Not even a little bit.
All original content on russianmachineneverbreaks.com is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)– unless otherwise stated or superseded by another license. You are free to share, copy, and remix this content so long as it is attributed, done for noncommercial purposes, and done so under a license similar to this one.
Share On