Floundering Flyers: numbers for the morning after

January 9, 2019 6:56 am

The Washington Capitals beat up on the bottom feeding Philadelphia Flyers and kept pace with an overall surging Metropolitan Division. The Caps extended the Flyers losing streak to eight games as they downed the Philadelphians by a score of 5-3.

The Flyers out-shot the Caps 40-26 and out-attempted them at five-on-five 43 to 38.

The Caps were pretty lifeless in the first period, but they didn’t really give up much in terms of truly dangerous offense against. After escaping that period tied at one apiece, they dominated the Flyers for the next forty minutes. Don’t be alarmed by those shot and shot attempt numbers above as the Flyers were behind pretty much the entire game and the quality of their shots was really quite terrible as you can see by the heat map.
The Flyers were so bad in this game that their fans visiting Capital One Arena decided to start cheering for the Eagles during the third period because Philly sports fans crave attention like that Sasquatch in those commercials craves beef jerky. No one cares about Nick Foles you ignoramuses.

The Capitals have improved to 15-1-0 in their last 16 games against Eastern Conference opponents.

— CapitalsPR (@CapitalsPR) January 9, 2019

Jakub Vrana and Tom Wilson are the promising, young scoring talent behind old man Ovi this season and they both had success finding the back of the net in this one. V has now set a new career high in goals (14) and Willy is now only one shy of his career high (14).
John Carlson recorded his 11th multi-assist game of the season which leads all NHL defensemen and is fifth among all players. First all star nod for John is well deserved.
Big round number equal bullet time. Tyrannosaurus JohnJacobJingleheimer Oshie tallied his 199th and 200th career NHL goals in the fixture. Congrats to you, Teej.
Anyone else really like what they saw from Lars Eller‘s trio? I wouldn’t be opposed to trying him with Vrana and Oshie for a little while longer. Your next question should be who exactly should center the third line in that scenario, Nicklas Backstrom or Evgeny Kuznetsov? And, is all star Todd Reirden just crazy enough to try that? Probably not.
Almost forgot to mention that Pheonix Copley was good in this game. The eventual scoreline was unfair to him.