The Canucks come to town for a game the Caps need to take advantage of. For starters, the Canucks just aren’t a very good team. Furthermore, they played last night in Florida and are in the midst of a five game road trip that has seen them away from home since Tuesday. When the schedule does you favors like this, you need to take advantage. If the Caps don’t take two points this evening, it will be a missed opportunity.

Puck drop is at 5:00 pm on CSN.

Projected Lines

Matt Niskanen might return to the lineup this evening but we won’t know until closer to game time. Barry Trotz will speak to reporters at 3.

Johansson – Backstrom – Oshie
Ovechkin – Kuznetsov – Williams
Burakovsky – Eller – Vrana
Winnik – Beagle – Wilson

Alzner – Carlson
Orpik – Orlov
Schmidt – Chorney

Holtby

What is Vancouver doing?

Just going on a hunch here, but maybe the Canucks shouldn’t have the Sedin’s spend the majority of their 5-on-5 minutes with Brandon Sutter. After all, the twins possession numbers drop around 10 percentage points when they play with Sutter.

Storylines

• Patrice Bergeron texted Matt Niskanen about the hit that injured the Caps defender. No word on whether the text included a “u up?”
• Zach Sanford scored another goal in Hershey.
• Tom Wilson thinks Jakub Vrana is tough.
• Daniel Winnik is feeling fine and scoring goals.
• The Caps PP has started to find its groove, which is good because special teams have been the main problem.

Mascots schooling kids

Apparently this is a thing? A funny, beautiful thing

Here's a compilation of mascots destroying kids in football pic.twitter.com/CTCoa9cFiN

— Romeo 🎮👑 (@PapiChuIo) December 10, 2016

Full Coverage of Caps vs Canucks

Headline photo: Bill Wippert