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Cancel the season: Penguins beat Caps 7-6

By Chris Cerullo

 3 Comments

October 4, 2018 9:58 pm

Everyone talks about a Cup winning hangover, but what about a 7-0 banner raising, home opener shellacking hangover in a back-to-back? The Caps would look to keep proving that neither exist as they traveled to Pittsburgh to face off against their heated rivals, the Penguins.

Almost everyone in the world scored a goal in the first period. Jamie Oleksiak broke through first, Jakub Vrana responded, vaunted sniper Brooks Orpik followed him, Jake Guentzel tied things back up, and then Alex Ovechkin put the good guys in front heading into the break. Now, breathe.

Kris Letang would quickly open scoring up in the second, but John Carlson once again put the Caps ahead with a laser to the top shelf. Patric Hornqvist and Derick Brassard tallied in succession to give the Pens their first lead since opening the game 1-0. Evgeni Malkin added a power play marker and then made a great pass leading to TJ Oshie’s late goal. TJ would tally again soon after to tie things up.

Letang ended it with an OT power play strike.

Penguins beat Caps 7-6.

  • First way too early observation from me this season. I’m already not a fan of the first line Brett Connolly experiment. He’s just not fleet of foot enough or quick enough with his hands to play with Kuzy and Ovi. If it were me, I would go with what the head bench boss did late in the third and get Andre Burakovsky out there or maybe Dmitrij Jaskin is due for a debut?
  • Matt Murray got Bronx cheered in the first period of his team’s first game of the season. Pens fans really making their mark during their team’s home opener.
  • Watching Evgeny Kuznetsov kill penalties is like listening to some smooth jazz or maybe doing some water color painting. He’s just so damn smooth. In my opinion, only Connor McDavid rivals him in making very difficult things look so very easy.
  • Can we talk about the save Braden Holtby made on Guentzel? Holy cannoli, Braden that’s grand larceny. There really aren’t words to describe some of the magic this dude has pulled off in the last six months.
  • Caps power play was super potent against the Bruins. They went scoreless in their two opportunities Thursday night.
  • Alex Ovechkin tallied his second goal in as many games and this one pushed him into sole possession of 18th place on the all-time goal scoring list. He is five goals behind his season pace from last season though. Scrub.

  • Brooks Orpik scored a goal in the regular season. Lol.
  • Whoever thought it was clever to start chanting goalie’s names during games needs to be brought to justice by some sort of hockey vigilante. I bet Gritty would be down.
  • The Caps took far too many penalties against the Pens and a couple were of the very dumb variety, looking at you Jake. But alas, that’s early season stuff that should get cut out soon.
  • Hockey games are a lot more fun without human trash cans licking people and sucker punching unsuspecting victims.

Really glad to be back and recapping a hockey game! This was always going to be a tough one on zero rest against one of the best teams in the league and I wouldn’t even say the boys played “bad” per se. They definitely did look leggy so lets just chalk this loss up to some dude in the league office and his calendar.

Full Coverage of Caps at Penguins

Headline photo: NBC Sports Washington

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