October 14, 2017 10:30 am

The Capitals went to the garden state to play the undefeated New Jersey Devils and came away with a convincing 5-2 victory. Led by a dominant two-way performance from Nicklas Backstrom, the Caps put together an organized and efficient performance that we hadn’t really seen yet this season.

They out-attempted the Devils 43 to 37 at five-on-five and outshot them 28 to 23. When you adjust those numbers for score and venue, the possession gets even more lopsided in favor of the team from DC.

Normally I’d highlight an unsung hero from a game, but I’ll deviate here because Nicklas Backstrom put on a show. He went from being a rumored scratch due to injury prior to the game to putting up a four-point effort one hour of play later. His line once again dominated shot attempts and I thought how disruptive he was in the defensive zone was noticeable purely from an eye-test (boo, hiss) perspective. He still is a machine. Get this man a Selke.

With a goal and an assist from Alex Ovechkin, two assists from Evgeny Kuznetsov, and a goal and three assists from Backstrom, the Capitals’ top three offensive gunners now share the league wide lead in points with ten. Lets try and keep that up for as long as humanly possible.
Those two assists from Kuznetsov give him a total of ten on the season, with six of those being of the primary variety. With those ten assists Kuznetsov ties Sergei Makarov’s 1989-90 season for most assists by a Russian through the first 5 games and is also the first Capitals player in history to record ten assists within the first five games of a season.
Now all of those numbers are flashy and fun to look at, but for some reason even in a game like this one, the first line was not able to stay out of negative shot attempt differential: Ovechkin (minus-5), Kuznetsov (minus-4), and Jakub Vrana (minus-3). Time will tell for this line because if they go through a shooting slump or get a bad stretch of goaltending, they may get split up.
John Carlson played 27:26 of this game and had almost 20 of those minutes come at five-on-five. This was due to the injury to Matt Niskanen and Barry Trotz’s unwillingness to fully trust Aaron Ness (13:38) and young Christian Djoos (16:47). Carlson absolutely owned those minutes. He finished with a shot-attempt percentage nearing 70 percent five-on-five and seemed to thrive with the added workload. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the numbers look so good given that he was playing a lot of minutes away from Brooks Orpik.
Speaking of Djoos. After two games, I already think he should stay in the lineup. He hasn’t looked over-matched, is quick, intelligent, and offensively savvy. Trotz seemed to be mixing and matching the defensive pairs even before Niskanen went down, so he saw a jump in minutes to the point where he ended up finishing fourth on the team in time played five-on-five. He, like Carlson, also dominated those minutes, finishing with 58.3 percent of the shot attempts when he was skating five-on-five.
For some reason that is really not that noticeable, at least to me, Alex Chiasson always seems to rise to the top when it comes to possession statistics. His most regular linemates, Tom Wilson (plus-1) and Lars Eller (plus-1) finished with positive shot attempt differentials, but Chiasson finished at a (plus-6). This has now happened on more than two occasions.
Two: This is the number of professional fights that Andre Burakovsky has under his belt. I think most of us would prefer it stay at that number.
The power play went three for four for a nice big 75 percent success rate. The added wrinkle of Ovechkin swapping places with Carlson at the point and Kuznetsov moving to the other side of the net below the goal line really opens things up for Backstrom and TJ Oshie. Adam Henrique cheating towards Ovechkin at the point was what enabled Oshie to get so open for his fifth goal of the season.