Caps beat the Flyers in legit rivalry night: numbers for the morning after

February 23, 2017 9:35 am

On Wednesday night the Capitals beat the Flyers 4-1 in a tough, tight, bruising affair. There were multiple skirmishes and Matt Niskanen left the ice with a lower-body injury, but the Capitals played a controlled brand of hockey and kept a desperate Flyers team in check, getting back in the W column after falling to the bye week curse with back-to-back losses. Evgeny Kuznetsov scored twice, and Nicklas Backstrom continued to be red hot with a two-point night.

This game was neck-and-neck through 40 minutes, with five-on-five shot attempts tied at 35 a piece to start the third period. The Caps held back after their fourth goal, and shot attempts ended up at 54 to 46 in favor of the Flyers. Washington did a good job getting in lanes and blocking shots, as unblocked shot attempts were almost even at 36 to 35 for the Flyers.

Key Stats

If you thought the Caps’ fourth line looked really good, it’s because they were really good. Daniel Winnik, Tom Wilson, and Jay Beagle were a plus-eight in five-on-five shot attempts tonight. The next best line was the Ovechkin line at minus-two. The fourth line saw six scoring chances for and two against, and that is despite only one of twelve starts in the offensive zone. Even crazier is that their most common opponents included Claude Giroux, Wayne Simmonds, and Braden Schenn. It was enough of a problem for the Flyers that they specifically avoided that matchup in the second half of the game.
This was a genuinely physical game. The Caps laid 31 hits on the Flyers, far above their average of 21 per game. The Flyers hit the Capitals 35 times, also well above their average of 25 hits per game. Rivalry night, indeed.
Despite Kuznetsov’s solid night on the scoreboard, the second line was caved in. Justin Williams, Evgeny Kuznetsov and Marcus Johansson saw a lot of pucks fly past them and ended the night minus-12 in shot attempts at five-on-five. A lot of that damage happened in just a couple of minutes of ice time against Giroux and Simmonds.

Unsung Hero of the Game

We already mentioned the fourth line and could easily give this to all three of them, but tonight this award goes to Braden Holtby. In such a tightly played game it’s easy to overlook Holtby’s 33-save performance. His .970 save percentage (all situations) was his best non-shutout performance of the season to-date. We just recently wrote that Holtby is a very serious Vezina frontrunner, and tonight’s solid performance (and borderline highlight-reel saves) only bolsters that case.

Trend to Watch

Earlier tonight we wrote about how tonight’s broadcast mentioned that Nicklas Backstrom leads the league in points scoring since January 1. That’s not a very small sample size. And after last night’s game, Backy sits fourth in points in the NHL at 63, five back from wunderkind Connor McDavid in two fewer games. Tonight’s broadcast mentioned that he could be in Hart contention, and we certainly wouldn’t disagree. That said, some of his underlying stats have actually been on the mediocre side in 2017 to-date, but in the end what counts the most is the scoreboard. And here is Backstrom’s rate of scoring in the season so far (all situations), courtesy of Corsica: