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Fantastic four years: numbers for the morning after

By Chris Cerullo

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April 5, 2019 6:56 am

The Washington Capitals took down the Montreal Canadiens 2-1 in the penultimate game of the regular season. That victory sealed the team’s fourth straight win of the NHL’s Metropolitan Division.

The Habs out-shot the Caps 34 to 31.

  • Look, the overall game from a stats point of view looks very ugly for the Caps. Just take a look at the heat map where we can see on top of Braden Holtby what looks like the wet bumprint that you leave on a wooden bench when you jump out of a pool and sit down. But hey, the Canadiens were playing for their lives, I didn’t really expect anything else.
  • The Caps have won the Metropolitan Division for the fourth consecutive season. They become only the third reigning Stanley Cup Champion to win their division since 2003-04. The Detroit Red Wings did so in 2009 (lost in the 2009 Cup Final to the Pittsburgh Penguins) and the Boston Bruins did so in 2012 (lost to the Caps in the first round).
  • The game and division winning goal was scored by Nic Dowd, his eighth of the season and 22nd point which ties his career high. Fantastic puck pursuit and assist from Andre Burakovsky on the goal.

  • Lars Eller scored his 13th of the season and fifth in nine career games against his former team, the Habs.
  • The third line of Eller, Carl Hagelin, and Brett Connolly was easily the Caps best at five-on-five on the night. They led the team with a 77.8-percent shot attempt percentage, 71.4-percent scoring chance for percentage, and out high danger chanced the Habs two to zero.
  • On the flip side, I don’t really remember seeing a worse game from a line numbers wise than this one from Evgeny Kuznetsov, Jakub Vrana, and TJ Oshie. In 14:28 as a unit at five-on-five, with 10 of their 11 draws coming in either neutral or the offensive zone, the trio was out-attempted 30 to 4, out-shot 14 to 3, out-scoring chanced 17 to 1, and out high danger chanced 12 to 0. Big ole yikeys.

Numbers thanks to Hockey-reference.com and NaturalStatTrick.com.

Full RMNB Coverage of Caps vs Canadiens

Headline photo: Patrick McDermott

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