The Washington Capitals traveled to the great white north to challenge the Western Conference’s Winnipeg Jets to a game of hit puck with stick. Matty P and the Jets would show the league how to turn a sure loss into a shocking win as they downed the Caps 4-3 in overtime.
The Jets out-shot the Caps 44 to 27 and out-attempted them at five-on-five 56 to 40.
- In their journey to look more like Franklin, Rafael, Squirtle, Gamera, etc. than a hockey team, the Capitals went thirteen minutes with just one solitary shot attempt after John Carlson‘s goal made the game 3 to 1. Come on dudes, that’s definitely turtley enough for the turtle club.
- Alex Chiasson got an assist on Andre Burakovsky‘s goal which gives him six points in eight games in Winnipeg. Barry Trotz said he scratched Jakub Vrana because of this Winnipegian hot streak. I don’t buy that reasoning, but hey it kinda worked. I guess.
- Mark Scheifele is probably the best player in the league that no one knows about and one of my favorites to watch. There’s no real number attached to this other than his two goals and one assist.
- Caps second line center Evgeny Kuznetsov is now riding an eight game point streak as well as an eight game assist streak.
- The Caps are getting consistently out-shot (44 to 27) and out-attempted (56 to 40) game in and game out at this point. I personally do not believe in this “shot quality” narrative that has been dispelled many times by Peter on RMNB, I personally think it’s a mixture of some bad things. Bad coaching, bad system play, and bad players playing bigger roles than they should. I don’t know the fix, but hey the Caps are still in first in the Metro.
- Braden Holtby made 40 saves, including one particularly memorable one in overtime. He also played his 20,000th minute in a Caps jersey, becoming only the second goaltender in Caps history to do so, the first being Ollie Kolzig.
- In non-hockey news, Chloe Kim and Shaun White dominated the snowboarding halfpipe for Team USA at the Olympics. If you want to take a breather from some Caps after this sore loss, White’s gold medal was the 100th for the US in Winter Olympics history so go and watch his historic run, it’s great.
Numbers thanks to Hockey-reference.com, Hockeystats.ca, NaturalStatTrick.com, and Corsica.hockey.
Full RMNB Coverage of Caps vs Blue Jackets
Headline photo: Jonathan Kozub
