The Washington Capitals continued their semi-better play of late by taking down the Colorado Avalanche 4-3 in overtime. The win was the Caps second of the season over the Avs, giving the good guys a season series sweep.

The Caps out-shot the Avs 42 to 37.

• This was a pretty great overall effort from the Caps against a severely struggling Colorado Avalanche team. As you can tell by the heat map, the Caps were getting to high danger areas more often at five-on-five and without a few goalkeeping errors, should have won this one in regulation.
• Congrats to Andre Burakovsky on playing his 300th career NHL game (congrats to Brett Connolly on his 400th as well) and I thought he was one of the best Caps players on the night. Andre led all Caps in five-on-five scoring chance for percentage (87.5-percent) and high danger chance for percentage (80-percent). Good response to his mini promotion.
• The Metro Divsion race is still so tight as the team on top right now, the New York Islanders, and the team in fifth, the Carolina Hurricanes, are only separated by eight points. The Pittsburgh Penguins recent play has seen them slip down into the second wild card spot where they’ll have to fend off those Hurricanes and the Buffalo Sabres.

The "race" for the two wild cards in the Western Conference is something. pic.twitter.com/1ILFNkAom5

— Tom Gulitti (@TomGulittiNHL) February 8, 2019

• Peter talked about a lot of great stuff in his recent post about changes this season that could make the Caps better and I think we saw two of his points for sure outlined in this game. Madison Bowey and Brooks Orpik are not going to cut it and the fourth line needs a drastic, permanent overhaul that can be done with purely in house pieces.
• Really good to see Evgeny Kuznetsov return to the ice for overtime, play 2:37 of the 4:12 of the extra frame, and score the eventual game winner on a breakaway. Kuzy seems to be picking up the pace here recently and surrounding him with players that could ease his defensive zone work, another of Peter’s points in his post, is something that would bolster him further.
• The Caps had a whole lot of power play time and that can be seen by Alex Ovechkin playing 11:09 of five-on-four time alone. They only ended up with one official goal during that time and one unofficial goal due to a blown call, but overall I liked what I saw in terms of creating chances.

Numbers thanks to Hockey-reference.com, NaturalStatTrick.com, and Corsica.hockey.

Full RMNB Coverage of Caps vs Avalanche

Headline photo: Patrick McDermott