Friday morning, Washington Capitals head coach Barry Trotz debuted new forward lines. The Capitals trail the Pittsburgh Penguins 3-1 in their second round series and face their first of a potential three-straight must-win elimination games in Game Five on Saturday.
After a subpar Game Four in which Alex Ovechkin described his decisions as “stupid,” the Russian machine has been moved to the team’s third line with Lars Eller and Tom Wilson.
Here are Trotz’s new forward lines from the AP’s Stephen Whyno.
#caps practice lines
Burakovsky-Backstrom-Oshie
Johansson-Kuznetsov-Williams
Ovechkin-Eller-Wilson
Winnik-Beagle-Connolly— Stephen Whyno (@SWhyno) May 5, 2017
While the Capitals’ second line, arguably the team’s strongest in the postseason, stays together, everyone else gets new linemates.
According to Puckalytics Super Wowy, the third line – consisting of Ovechkin, Eller, and Wilson — skated only three minutes and one second together during the regular season. They were out-attempted in that meaningless, super-duper small sample three to one.
The Caps new first line of Burakovsky, Backstrom, and Oshie only skated 5:47 together during the regular season.
While this may seem like a demotion for Ovechkin, this also could be Barry Trotz attempting to ice three scoring lines, advocated by such analytics trailblazers as Tyler Dellow.
Spitballing here a little bit but I think if I was the Capitals, I might split up Ovi/Backstrom and try to make the third line scarier.
— dellowhockey (@dellowhockey) April 30, 2017
Say, for the sake of discussion, they went Ovi/Eller/Wilson, Burakovsky/Backstrom/Oshie and Johansson/Kuznetzov/Williams.
— dellowhockey (@dellowhockey) April 30, 2017
Doesn’t that make that third line more of a headache for PIT and mean that someone is going to get big minutes v. PIT third pair?
— dellowhockey (@dellowhockey) April 30, 2017
This muddies the water for matchups, forcing Penguins head coach Mike Sullivan to figure out which is the most dangerous scoring line on the Capitals. Ovechkin may see time against the Penguins third pairing defensemen.
If you put it that way, maybe this isn’t so crazy after all.
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